Place, Position, and Postcolonial Haunting in Assia Djebar's La femme sans sepulture

Place, Position, and Postcolonial Haunting in Assia Djebar's La femme sans sépulture

Assia Djebar's most recent text, La femme sans sepulture, returns to the site of colonial history to represent the voice of resistance hero Zoulikha, a haunting figure of the author's own personal history represented only nominally in her corpus until now. Representing Zoulikha's return in Algeria as a spectral revisitation, Djebar's text examines both the potential and the vicissitudes of representing colonial violence and resistance through the spectral domain and thus engages critically with tendencies of postcolonial theory to promote haunting as a mode of historical reinscription. Djebar's text explores how haunting relates to cultural and postcolonial memory through an investigation of the issues surrounding the inscription of Zoulikha's story of resistance and torture within the colonial context, and thereby queries the relation between the haunting memories of colonial violence and contemporary civil warfare in Algeria. This article explores, in particular, how Djebar's work engages critically with the spectral aura that haunts both postcolonial place and theory.