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This chapter focuses on Assia Djebar's Ces voix qui m'assiègent (1999), a collection of her critical essays, pieces that had, until then, not been readily accessible. The collection is the most conceptually challenging record to date as to the elaboration of her poetics. As such, it deserves translation into the many languages in which her fiction has already been translated.

‘Feminism and Women’s Identity’ discusses Djebar’s representation of womanhood and femininity in her work. It attempts to locate her position on feminism by comparing the writer’s disassociation from women’s writing movements with the re-telling of the history of women in Algeria. The chapter also notes Djebar’s transcendence of conventional gender distinctions and labels, as well as her depiction of the political position of women in Algeria.

This case study looks at French-Algerian author Assia Djebar, who made two little-known films. This chapter is an exploration of the limited but highly complex and challenging work of an important pioneering North African woman. Algeria’s particularly complex historical and political experience of independence from France, its relationship with Islam and its war-torn historical reality, have determined the lacunae in creative production. As some of the only films to ever have been made by an Algerian woman, La Nouba (1978) and La Zerda (1982) are masterpieces of feminist and anti-colonialist filmmaking. La Nouba is an explicitly feminist work, a documentary interlaced with experimental, symbolic fragments referring to international trends in feminist filmmaking in the seventies. As scholars of Algerian cinema have stated, cinema in the country is steeped in amnesia, consisting of fictional efforts that look away from reality. This chapter frames Djebar’s films differently from previous readings, and draws more challenging conclusions with regard to her transnational identity and her approach to women. More than feminist films, they reveal the filmmaker’s struggle with her own diasporic identity.

In this first chapter, Hiddleston comments on the significance of expatriation and the memory of native lands in Djebar’s work. The chapter also introduces the recurring themes present in the text, including discussion of colonialism, Islamism, and the attempt at tracing sense of identity.

‘War, Memory and Postcoloniality’ explores Djebar’s process of reflection that gave rise to alternative modes of writing and describes this course of withdrawal and renewal as a movement that went on to influence the form of many of her works.

‘Violence, Mourning and Singular Testimony’ explores the political influence in Djebar’s work from the 1990s. The chapter assesses the writer’s use of religious and political discourse in light of feminist discussion and the upsurge of Islamist terrorism.

This chapter presents a reading of the travel writings of the nineteenth-century French painter Eugène Fromentin (1820–76), whose work is seen as having inaugurated French Algerian literature; and the work of the Algerian writer and trained historian, Assia Djebar (b. 1937), who, with the publication of L'Amour, la fantasia, began a quartet of novels that sought to represent Algeria in ways distinct from French and nationalist Algerian forms. It addresses the following questions: What kinds of relationship can exist between the postcolonial writer and the organon of ‘universal’ models that has been bequeathed? And what kind of nation is at stake? In asking these questions, the chapter focuses on the letter — the ‘form’ adopted by Fromentin to organize his travel narrative, his representation of Algeria; and it is a leitmotif within Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia.

Chapter 4 examines Assia Djebar’s (1936–2015) celebrated 1985 novel L’amour, la fantasia [translated as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade]. The work is a palimpsest of texts that weaves together: French archival records and eyewitness accounts of the occupation of Algeria in the 1830s, oral histories recorded in Algerian dialect and Tamazight by women involved in the war of independence from 1954 through 1962, as well as Djebar’s personal memories and reflections. The chapter argues that Djebar models a practice of ethical reading [ijtihād] in her re-narration of official histories and archives—colonial, national, as well as Islamic. It resituates L’amour, la fantasia, outside of the postcolonial, feminist, and Francophone critical paradigms that dominate the copious scholarship on her work. However, rather than reading gender and language as external to Qurʾanic intertextuality, the chapter emphasizes how they inform and shape Djebar’s narrative ethics—largely through the novel’s insistence on orality and embodiment.

Ces voix qui m'assiègent…en marge de ma francophonie is the only book written by Assia Djebar that might be interpreted as theoretical. Nevertheless, she has made important contributions to postcolonial thought and the francophone. Djebar's engagement with ‘postcolonial’ issues is evident in her focus on a colonial history whose significance has often been underplayed or underrated by Europe. She has also written repeatedly about a post-independence Algeria that remains deeply influenced by its colonial history. Djebar's fiction challenges a certain Eurocentricity and some of the dominant narratives in post-independence Algeria in connection with religious and ethnic identity. Djebar's approach to Algerian politics must be seen in terms of her focus on women's lives and feminine perspectives.

This first chapter studies Djebar’s works published during the early years of her career, from her first novel La Soif to the last of her novels written in the early period, Les Alouettes naïves. The chapter explores Djebar’s notions of identity construction, the role of women, including their subordination and revolt, social convention, political thought, and Algerian identity.

This chapter focuses on the autobiographical novels and memoirs of two important twentieth-century Arab women writers who provide models for the adaptation of the genre in colonial and postcolonial cultures: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Nowhere in My Father’s House, two Francophone autobiographical novels by Algerian writer Assia Djebar, and The Search: Personal Papers, a memoir in Arabic by Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyat. By framing autobiographical production in anticolonial national movements, Djebar and al-Zayyat rework the genre to comment on postcolonial cultures. Both writers contest colonial formations and offer revolutionary representations of solitude in the postcolonial nation: the Francophone Algerian writer’s challenge to the French archive of the Algerian War of Independence and the Egyptian writer’s reexamination of national culture and the history of the 1940s student movement. In the chapter, solitude is read as an emancipatory opportunity when the writers rethink the language of the new nation through autobiography.

Chapter five considers how the colonial state of emergency in Algeria was framed and contested in a range of literary and legal texts. The chapter begins by considering the way in which the declaration of a state of emergency in Algeria in 1955 made possible the increasingly military character of French colonial policy in Algeria. After an analysis of the rhetoric of necessity that was used to justify the recourse to emergency powers, the chapter proceeds to analyse how the French colonial state of emergency is figured in French colonial narratives of the Algerian war. If these narratives try to create a heroic mythology that justifies the recourse to emergency powers, memoirs of the Algerian war such as Henri Alleg’s The Question (1958) and Louisette Ighilahriz’s Algérienne (2001) disclose the implications of emergency powers from the standpoint of the Algerian civilian population. By reading these narratives in conjunction with Assia Djebar’s novels of the Algerian war and Soleiman Adel Guémar’s Etat D’Urgence (2007) the chapter concludes by tracing the emergence of a subaltern history of the Algerian war and its aftermath in recent Algerian writing.

This chapter critiques the masculinisation in postcolonial discourse and its remembering, through an analysis of the work of Assia Djebar. Djebar's film, The Nouba of the Women of Mont Chenoua (1978), which pays tribute to the heroism of Algerian women during the struggle against French colonialism — omitted from the numerous war films made in post-independent Algeria — and challenges the image of women as mute objects and renders them as active subjects. The film's storytelling structure, follows the form of a nouba, a classical Maghrebian/Andalusian musical suite, in which women play active parts either as the main singers of the nouba, or as part of the chorus and orchestra. The nouba becomes a stylistic technique and a metaphor for restoring the voice of women. Through this technique, women become commentators on the progression of history, even as they challenge oblivion and marginalisation.

In my proposal of cut sound as a literary device, I demonstrate that silences can be woven into literary narratives through the interplay of dialogue and characters’ reactions with characters’ thoughts. To develop cut sound as a literary mode of listening, I draw from Djebar’s theorization of women’s silences in the essay ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ (1978), from her collection Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, as well as oral folklore and performance studies scholar Richard Bauman’s concept of the performance event. Music recording production techniques serve as a critical metaphor for how to listen for silences in literary narratives. The characters’ thoughts either belie their reactions to what other characters say, or their thoughts efface parts of dialogue altogether, effectively erasing what other characters say from the text. In my readings of Djebar’s novella ‘Femmes d’Algers dans leur appartement’ and Leïla Sebbar’s novel Shérazade (1982), I demonstrate how cut sound weaves dialogue with thought in order to articulate cut sound, or the gendered silences of postcolonial subjects.

‘Haunted Algeria’ studies Djebar’s expatriation from Algeria in her later works. The chapter describes loss felt by Algeria and foregrounds the country’s search for identity and belonging, as its remembrance of the horrors of its past by which it is still haunted.