Rereading "Nedjma": Feminist Scholarship and North African Women

Abstract

GENDER AND SEXUALITY ARE KEY FORCES in the negotiation of national and cultural identities, as is evident in the texts of North African writers such as Abdelkdbir Khatibi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nabile Fares, Mohammed Dib, and Assia Djebar, and women's negotiation of these identities is frequently a central issue. Yet some critics have taken a postfeminist approach to these questions, analyzing the textual deployment of woman without considering its relation to women's historical and material reality. Others have taken a feminist approach devoted mainly to studying images of women (as mothers, militants, etc.), leaving aside the problem of the texts' staging of the social processes by which human subjects are constituted as women in particular cultural and historical circumstances.' Critical neglect of women's constitution as historical subjects in literature is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in readings of Kateb Yacine's Nedjma, for though readers readily recognize in Nedjma (the character) an emblem of the contradictory forces at work in Algeria's search for national identity, they rarely consider Nedjma's significance for Algerian women's liberation, and never see in it a figuration of the revolution's failure to ensure social equality for women. I would argue in favor of feminist readings of North African fiction that neither limit inquiry to the examination of sex roles and their literary representations, nor bypass women's interests by focusing attention on woman as a textual marker of intractable difference. Taking Nedjma as my example, I hope to demonstrate the importance of attending to the relation between fiction and North African women's potency as makers of social meanings. After showing why Nedjma must be read in the context of women's political situation in Algeria today, I will trun to the related question of Western feminist scholarship on women of North Africa and the Middle East, arguing that debates in Arab feminism and recent reflections on theory and methodology in feminist social science should be taken into account by literary scholars.