The work of collecting: Objects, sociality and self in Leïla Sebbar’s Lettres parisiennes and Mes Algéries en France

Abstract

This article investigates the ways in which Leïla Sebbar draws on collecting practices as a means of performing what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemorial work. It begins with a close analysis of Sebbar’s accounts of the small, apparently trivial objects with which she surrounds herself, and how these accounts function as part of the narrative identity work in which she engages in the course of Lettres parisiennes. The insight afforded Sebbar into her own collecting practices in the course of this correspondence, and in particular her understanding of personal collecting as a social act, can be seen as subtending the composition of Mes Algéries en France, published 18 years later. Sebbar has now shifted from asking herself why particular objects have accumulated about her to displaying the work that collection performs. By juxtaposing and interspersing photographs of her own collections with those of others and with objects clearly designated as constituent parts of other collections, Sebbar crafts an archival site that negotiates between personal, familial and institutional contexts of display to designate the history of France–Algeria as constructed by the particular kinds of encounters that occur between people and objects in each.