Restoring Sight and Sound to the Algerian Woman: A Postcolonial Reading of Djebar’s novels

Abstract

Known as Algeria’s most prominent woman novelist, Assia Djebar has successfully brought to the forefront issues of a feminist
nature all the while keeping her texts immersed within the discourse of nationalism. Djebar’s novels exhibit a multitude of female
personalities and experiences that defeat all attempts at fixating women into objects of textual representation. This paper aims at
presenting Djebar’s novels as counter narratives to the phallocentric constructions of the female figure as lack and Orientalist
implications of the feminine as marginal and inconsequential through the use of feminist and postcolonial approaches. By analyzing the
multi-faceted accounts of women in Fantasia and Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, this paper seeks to replace old notions of a
stagnant female subject with one where women are vibrant figures of resistance, agency and change. It is mainly through the language
of the body as exemplified in the sound, gesture and ‘gaze’ that Djebar gives women a chance to be ‘visible,’ to represent themselves
and to speak with a voice that is unique and singular in its diversity from the norm, yet plural and multi-dimensional in its functionality and
role.