To Be Singularly Nomadic or a Territorialized National:At the Crossroads of Francophone Women's Writing of the Maghreb

Abstract

The terms postcoloniality, alterity, nomadism, and deterritorializing, as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak have brilliantly shown us, are familiarly used to represent the non-Western, nonwhite European, Othered novel of our era. The increasingly fluid theories and concepts that form studies have generated several debates (certainly in the past ten to fifteen years) in which the term postcolonial has morphed into new meanings. The result of the deconstruction of the Western literary canon is that Others' literatures are now taught as integral, necessary components of literary programs. In the case of francophone literature from the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), the time has passed when authors from this former French colonized region were, as Reda Bensmaia states, scotomized, blacked out in the American academy, as lesser works of little merit. Nevertheless, these novels have found their way into the American curriculum (2003, 19). In the deconstructed era of world literature, many of the theories inherent in literary studies have led to what Christopher Miller suggests is a powerful conundrum where the francophone literary world is divided between nationalists and nomads (1998, 6). He explains that the nomadic group, composed of scholars who use a fluid theoretical framework (that is, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Edouard Glissant, Peter Hallward) to examine texts of the francophone