Delacroix, Djebar’s Interlocutor, Par Excellence

Abstract

Arguably the most well-known Algerian writer in the world, Assia Djebar's literary career is nothing short of monumental. In the early twenty-first century many of her books have been marketed with covers that include a photograph of her or simply her name. This practice increased following her election into the Académie Française. However, in their first paperback editions, or in their incarnations as livres de poche, Djebar's books often have reprints of famous nineteenth-century orientalist paintings, particularly those of Eugène Delacroix. While Djebar directly invokes both Delacroix and his painting in her 1980 book, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, whose name she takes from Delacroix's 1834 painting, the continued selection of Delacroix's paintings for subsequent book covers has created a continuous dialogue between the author, her work, and the nineteenth century. The exoticism represented in Delacroix's paintings transmits a certain esthetic understanding of the Orient, one that Djebar is both refuting and exploiting, but one that the potential reader cannot help but consider when faced with the book cover choices. This dialogue between a twenty-first-century Algerian writer and a nineteenth-century French artist serves as an example of a cross-cultural encounter that is both productive and reductive.