Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (review)

In Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds, Anne Donadey sets out to shift the emphasis of most postcolonial criticism from its preoccupation with male, largely Anglophone writing to feminist writing in French in a postcolonial Algerian mode. Moreover, her critical model rejects the tendency of many studies to collapse diverse cultures and discourses by eliding them into undifferentiated, monolithic categories. Her analysis of the works of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar in a literary, social, and political context involves us in the significant issues of cultural hybridity, counter-hegemonic strategies, cultural pluralism, and intertextuality, which serve to refocus postcolonial theory in crucial ways.

In her preface Donadey seeks to locate her own perspective. The "liminal position" of Djebar and Sebbar between two different worlds in which they were unable fully to find a place initially attracted her. Her own "personal positioning," formed by differences of class and gender, though situationally different from those of Djebar and Sebbar, has sensitized her to the narratives of displacement of these writers. She confronts the problem of how someone brought up in Western culture can find a critical narrative that can serve as an alternative to Orientalism, a narrative that studies other peoples and cultures from "a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective," as Edward Said terms it (cited, p. xiv).

In her introduction Donadey sees a move from anti-colonialist writing, characterized by binary thinking (us/them), to postcolonial literature that manifests a blurring of dualistic divisions through the foregrounding of a more fluid, contextual critique. As postcolonial theory evolves, Donadey foresees its insights and attention to gender as recasting Francophone studies. The writings of Djebar and Sebbar reflect the mixing of various linguistic and cultural contexts (French, Arabic, Berber). They are ambivalent by the very fact of serving as intersection points for several discourses (linguistic, feminist, national, etc.). Homi K. Bhabha has indeed shown, in The Location of Culture, that colonial discourse in general is ambivalent in its structure, which "contradicts, subverts, and undermines the discourse from within its point of enunciation" (cited, p. xvii).

Donadey agrees with many critics that women are represented as the ground on which issues of national identity are argued. While males are seen as having a metonymic relationship with nation, women are usually seen as allegories of nation. (Even such early postcolonial writing as that of KatebYacine in Nedjma portrays the woman protagonist as a symbol of the nation.)

Chapter one, "Historical Amnesia and National Identity," sketches the historical background framing her study, in particular the National War of Liberation and its aftermath. She usefully borrows Henry Rousso's division of World War II into four phases in Le Syndrome de Vichy as a model to view what she calls the "Algerian syndrome": the French phase of mourning over the loss of Algeria, the repression of the painful trauma and shame in losing the war, and the subsequent return of the repressed leading to a phase of obsession. Donadey's designation of the fourth phase is somewhat unclear and the stages seem at times confused, in the otherwise coherent and lucid postulates of her analyses.

The amnesia induced by the war as the French repressed its memory resulted in an increased incidence of racist rhetoric and actions in the 1980s. Colonial racism came to be transferred onto Maghrebian immigrants (a fact often ignored in commentary on immigration). Ben Jelloun, Adrienne Rich and others criticized the idea of amnesia-induced national identity predicated on the "erasure" of minorities and/or women (15). Donadey sees the return of the repressed memory of the war, some thirty years after its ostensible end, in several French films and books, notably Bernard Tavernier and Patrick Rotman's 1992 documentary La Guerre sans nom.

The following two chapters examine Sebbar's and Djebar's rewritings (double overwritings) of the history of the French-Algerian encounter, their resistance to the palimpsestic overwriting of the colonial past by the French, and the effacement of the Algerian women by the French as well...