A Global Feminist Travels:Assia Djebar and Fantasia

Abstract

Scholars and critics have hailed Assia Fantasia, An Algerian Calvacade (1985) as a successful bridge between Western feminism and the experiences and philosophies of women living beyond the United States and Europe. Soheila Ghaussy's enthusiastic response to the text celebrates blend of Western and French feminisms and her careful attention to the politics and lives of Arab women: Djebar's ecriture feminine re(dis)covers woman; it voices the protest of Arab women, it escapes the confines of the harem, it gives body to the oral accounts of women, it inscribes woman's unspoken name (1994, 461). By means of a complex blending of genres and voices, novel successfully represents what was formerly silenced and absent from representation, the participation of Algerian women in resistance struggles against the French colonization of Algeria, and politicizes the everyday experiences of Algerian women in their global and historical contexts. Ghaussy and other critics such as Mildred Mortimer (1997), Anne Donadey (1993, 1996, 2000), and Mary Jean Green (1993), among others, analyze the complexity and theoretical sophistication of Fantasia that they argue results in its successful representation of Algerian women. Fantasia's ambitious project borrows strategies from a variety of genres to create a multifaceted, multilayered, multivocal text. The genre that most critics have overlooked but that nonetheless shapes the political and textual achievement of Fantasia is travel writing. Quoting nineteenth-century French travel accounts, invoking and reworking travel genre tropes, including Orientalist representations of harems and veiled women, and representing Algeria as a contact zone (Pratt