La Fantasia Research Articles

The Geography of Exchange Between Assia Djebar and the Colonial Archive: Retracing Uncited References in L'Amour, la fantasia

Abstract: Assia Djebar actively participates in the questioning of colonial history, writing L'Amour, la fantasia as a palimpsestic reparative historiography that turns the gaze of the colonial archive in on itself. Identification of the sources of uncited archival references, which Djebar interpolates in her own writing, offers a further glimpse of both her historiographical work, as well as how her authorial voice intervenes within the reappropriation of the archive to illustrate narratives which challenge a singular historical record. By pursuing a map of the uncited archival references that help to compose the novel, this work highlights how Djebar circumvents conventional archival authority and traditional historiographical methods through the literary. Locating the vast network of Djebar's uncited references to the archive by tracing them back to the original publications reveals the geography of exchange between Djebar's historiography and the colonial archive. Abstract: Assia Djebar participe activement au questionnement sur l'histoire coloniale en écrivant L'Amour, la fantasia comme une historiographie palimpsestique réparatrice qui tourne le regard de l'archive coloniale sur elle-même. L'identification des sources de références archivistiques non citées, que Djebar insère dans le texte, offre un aperçu de son travail historiographique, ainsi que la façon dont sa voix d'auteur intervient dans la réappropriation des archives pour illustrer des récits qui remettent en question la composition d'un texte historique singulier. À travers une cartographie des références archivistiques non citées qui contribuent à composer le roman, ce texte met en évidence le contournement de l'autorité archivistique conventionnelle produit par Djebar et les méthodes historiographiques traditionnelles par la littérature. En retrouvant la trace des publications originales, la localisation d'un vaste réseau de références aux archives non explicitement citées par Djebar révèle la géographie d'échange entre l'historiographie de Djebar et les archives coloniales.

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

The Author as Cannibal: Rewriting in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre, 1969–1995. By Felisa Vergara Reynolds

In this monograph, Felisa Vergara Reynolds develops a compelling framework for analysing postcolonial francophone literature — ‘literary cannibalism’ — to foreground the political dimensions of novels that explicitly rewrite canonical works from hegemonic cultures. Through Vergara Reynolds’s new theoretical lens, the pejorative label traditionally used to justify colonization and denigrate indigenous peoples is transformed into a mode of critique, through which authors may absorb and assimilate imperial canonical works to subvert them and destabilize their supposedly inviolable status. For Vergara Reynolds, the postcolonial text that devours another literary work constitutes a form of ‘postcolonial revolt’ (p. 31) that surpasses the dialogic relation of intertextuality underpinning all literary creation. While this gesture of re-inscription raises the question of colonial mimicry, Vergara Reynolds convincingly argues that literary cannibalism is no mere submissive imitation but, rather, ‘an act of menace’ (p. 27; original emphasis) that actively seeks to upend dominant power relations within a canonical text to restore agency to marginalized or oppressed characters. This is exemplified by Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623) as Une tempête (1969), in which the author empowers the most oppressed character, Caliban, who vomits out the colonizer in his first act as a free man — an apt metaphor for the liberating effect of literary cannibalism itself. The remaining chapters explore similar instances of literary cannibalism in works from across the former empire — Senegal, Algeria, and Guadeloupe — that all grapple with the implications of writing and publishing in the language of the colonizer, and also contribute distinct approaches to literary cannibalism. For example, Boubacar Boris Diop’s cannibalization of Prosper Mérimée’s Tamango (1829) in Le Temps de Tamango (1981) parallels Césaire’s critique of departmentalization to denounce the residual colonialism in post-independence Senegal, but Vergara Reynolds contends that Diop’s method of literary cannibalism also decolonizes the novel. In L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Assia Djebar shifts our focus to imperial historiography as the source of literary cannibalism, constructing her novel as a means of restoring silenced female voices and writing women of colour back into history. Finally, a distinct aspect of this book that sets it apart from traditional literary criticism is the fact that Vergara Reynolds has drawn her theorization from a close working relationship with Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, which has allowed for a more collaborative development of the concept of literary cannibalism. The last chapter draws on personal interviews with Condé on the rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) into La Migration des cœurs (1995), during which the author reflects on literary cannibalism’s emancipatory potential within the narrative. While this monograph focuses on francophone authors of the former French colonial empire, Vergara Reynolds’s elaboration of literary cannibalism will certainly be of interest to other scholars of global postcolonial literatures: as Oswald de Andrade declared in the Manifesto antropófago (1928), ‘Only cannibalism unites us.’

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

La traduction dans L’amour, la fantasia d’Assia Djebar: une tunique de Nessus.

One of the interesting features of L’amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar is that it tries to combine historiography and autobiography by confronting both genres with the stories of Algerian women. More concretely, the author joins different textual sources in one multilingual palimpsest: the written text is based on oral texts and the French is based on Arabic, but also on English, Spanish, Turkish and German. The interrelations between the different components constitute as many translational stages, in a literal and in a figurative sense, at the heart of Djebar’s historiographical and autobiographical project. However, the explicit references the narrator makes to the communication problems between the French and the Algerians, draw our attention to the difficulty and pain involved in such an enterprise. L’amour, la fantasia is a novel based on the intertwining of sources of a different nature and from different languages, but all attempts at communication between the different cultures break down, and all the interpreters’ or translators’ efforts are doomed to fail.

Theory of Mind and Experimental Autobiography: Alain Robbe-Grillet and Assia Djebar

This paper argues that experimental autobiographies can help readers take the perspectives of others when the practice of theorizing other minds become, at best, tired, and at worst, dehumanizing. The essay studies two experimental texts: one that eschews the traditional means of communicating psychological character development in order to explore the world outside the human (Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le Miroir qui revient), and another that deliberately invests in the representation of marginalized persons as an ethical imperative (Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia). This confluence suggests that perspective is an unalienable aspect of human subjectivity, in literature as in life.

Women’s Education in Colonial Algeria: Emancipation, Alienation, and the Aphasia of Love in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985)

Women’s Education in Colonial Algeria: Emancipation, Alienation, and the Aphasia of Love in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985)

Women’s Education in Colonial Algeria: Emancipation, Alienation, and the Aphasia of Love in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985)

This paper examines the contradictory yet complementary forces that connect women’s spatial liberation to the colonial power’s institutions. It explores the cacophony between women’s education, emancipation, and alienation in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985). It argues that spatial mobility bears the potential to challenge patriarchy and colonial violence. Djebar’s struggle to reconcile with or condemn her Western education foregrounds the ambivalent relationship the author entertains with the vehicle of her empowerment. The appropriation of the language of the other equips the schoolgirl with the instruments needed to subvert extra-Islamic traditions, and to regender the history of Algeria by voicing the stories of her matriarchs, withal, it sentences her to an aphasia of love.

El Estado reproduce la fantasía infantil: “Soñemos”, de Luis César Amadori, Argentina, 1951

The State Reproduces the Children’s Fantasy Sonemos by Luis Cesar Amadori, Argentina, 1951 O Estado reproduz a fantasia infantil: Sonemos , de Luis Cesar Amadori, Argentina, 1951 During the early administrations of Juan Domingo Peron (1946-1952), the Press and Dissemination Secretariat made films to praise projects promoted by the Government. As part of this communication policy, Luis Cesar Amadori directed the medium-length film Sonemos (1951) that shows the facilities of Ciudad Infantil, a children’s home inaugurated by the Eva Peron Foundation in 1948. This paper intends to describe and analyze the aesthetic choices of this film, based on the hypothesis that the main features of state communication in the period are condensed in this audiovisual piece, due to the scale-down used for presenting this miniature society. From the methodological point of view, we focused on two rhetorical features, understood as a formal correlative of ideological features: miniaturization and imitation. The article concludes that scale-down made it possible to materialize an urban utopia but also showed its limits: a temporary boundary for the containment of children and a spatial one for the city whose production sources were excluded. Furthermore, imitation is outlined as an aesthetic preference of the poor represented by Peronism. It was about giving them the same luxury that the rich enjoyed and not a new lifestyle, as the avant-garde proposed. Both the autonomy of geopolitical blocs proposed by Peronism and the ability to reproduce this model in the future remain unresolved. Para citar este articulo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo Varela, M. (2019). El Estado reproduce la fantasia infantil: “Sonemos”, de Luis Cesar Amadori, Argentina, 1951. Palabra Clave, 22(4), e2249. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.4.9 Recibido: 21/02/2019 Aceptado: 04/06/2019 Publicado en linea: 18/09/2019

The Politics of Form in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia

This article calls attention to the categorical confinement of Algerian novelist, historian, and feminist Assia Djebar (1936–2015), and argues that the politicization of Djebar’s text has contributed to the relative obscurity of her work. Following a call by Françoise Lionnet to reimagine the relationship between politics and aesthetics in critical response, I analyze modified repetition—rhyme, recall, echo, imitation, and mirror—as a formal device in L’Amour, la fantasia. In its third section, this paper, drawing from Rita Felski’s discussion of the four types of activities in which academics engage, argues for the importance of formal comparison in postcolonial scholarship. In attending to the particulars of Djebar’s text, so as to privilege connection, postcolonial scholars might increase her exposure and broaden the reach of postcolonial theory.

De l’écriture journalistique à l’écriture romanesque: la conquête de l’Algérie chez Assia Djebar

This study focuses on the colonial intertexts in Assia Djebar’s novel L’Amour, la fantasia and on the manner in which they are inserted in the text. It shows that Djebar’s novel tends to privilege direct discourse and narrated discourse in order to comment on the representation of the conquest of Algeria in the military press of the 19th century. In drawing attention to the state of the press during the colonisation of Algeria, this study draws a parallel between the narrative strategies at work in L’Amour, la fantasia and those exploited by literary journalism. Polyphony and intertextuality prove to be valuable not only in the fight against censorship but also in the struggle for freedom, whether this freedom be freedom of speech or political and social emancipation.

Hearing Silent Voices: Women and History in Assia Djebar's Novels

Silence in the universe of women in the Maghreb is a common topic in the Francophone literature. The main topic in Assia Djebar’s writings in what has been called the second period of her literary production (1980-1990) is resurrecting the silent voices of women in history. By breaking the silence imposed on women and giving them a voice and a memory, Assia Djebar unveils the silences of the Algerian history (past and contemporary). We intend to examine in this paper the silences unveiled by Assia Djebar in her novels of this period – Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, L’amour, la fantasia, Ombre sultane and Loin de Médine – in order to show how Assia Djebar (re)builds another critical view of history and restores the hidden voices of women and places for them in history, thus bringing into question the relationship between fiction and history, women and history. To this end, we will rely on theories of postmodern historiography and on the Derridean concept of phenomenological voice identified as a “third space” in which the woman exists as a subject.

Assia Djebar and the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria: mimicry and subalternity in Nowhere in my Father’s House

ABSTRACTAssia Djebar’s autobiographical Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007) portrays a conflicting relationship with her father which breaks with the sympathetic image in her early L’amour, la fantasia (1985). This paper examines their complex relationship by exploring the main character’s sense of place, represented by the home and the school, where dominates the authoritative figure of her father. The latter’s identity emerges as that of the assimilated native, constructed by the ideological forces of French colonialism and fostered by its state-controlled education. The conclusion shows that the protagonist’s feeling of female invisibility, spelt in the very title of the novel, and her discomfort at her father’s subaltern and mimic identity underline the historical, political, as well as cultural impasse of the French colony in Algeria, and function as an indirect indictment of the presumably positive legacy of the colonial past.

Scattered Letters

In Assia Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia, the narrator describes the linguistic resonance of her mother’s claim that her daughter “reads”—by which she implies, via Arabic, that her daughter studies. The circularity of an Arabic expression spoken in French makes the scene both descriptive and performative of the sorts of migrations, displacements and appropriations at play in this Algerian novel. In what language ought such multilingual work be read? By looking at inter and intra-lingual travels, this article emphasizes slippages between texts and readers, French and Arabic, and postcolonial and world literature. We encounter here less a lingua franca—that is, a global French or francophone framework—than we do the fundamental instability of any particular language in this internally translating text that travels from French to Arabic and ultimately into a market for readers in other languages.

Languaging Space in Assia Djebar’s L’amour, La Fantasia

Languaging Space in Assia Djebar’s <i>L’amour, La Fantasia</i>

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

Elusive Shores: Lamartine’s Méditations and the Art of Poetry

A quels bords irai-je porter mes reveries et mes malheurs? --Lamartine to A. de Virieu, 5 Oct. 1811 When referring to his first Meditations Poetiques (1820), Lamartine often portrayed his lyric voice as free melody detached from consciousness: Je veux me laisser aller ou me portera la fantasia (Dec. 1818 [18-73]). (1) Persona notwithstanding, this paper aims to nuance the traditional view of Lamartine as purely inspired lyricist through an analysis of specific changes in his concept of poetry as they are reflected in specific poems and prose commentaries. Lamartines so-called inattention to form is actually, to use Maurice Blanchot's words, purete that reflects the will and methode of the poet: La facilite est sa principale rigueur. (176) Others have highlighted the same purposeful restraint when it comes to the poet's language and rhetoric: Ce n'est pas par negligence ou paresse que Lamartine s'est peu corrige,--et il s'est plus corrige qu'on ne l'a cru jadis (Bruneau 154). (2) More recently, Mary Ellen Birkett has lent refreshing counterpoint to the view of Lamartine as an instrument played upon, to demonstrate the poet's artful use of a kaleidoscope of poetic expressions, creating beautiful, everchanging patterns from pieces which are already supplied (40). (3) The Meditations invite further study of Lamartine's poetic process. Though the towering Chateaubriand had pointedly omitted poetry from his recent overviews of modern French literature in Conservateur, Lamartine asserted the French lyric's relevancy through slim volume of elegies. Charting chronological path that aligns the poet's correspondence with developments in several key poems reveals Lamartine to be highly self-conscious, lucidly experimental poet who tempers feeling with compositional restraint: N'as-tu pas quelquefois chante pour toi seul dans ta chambre ou dans les bois? C'est le meme sentiment involontaire qui me force composer; composons donc (to Virieu, Corr Dec. 1818 [18-73]). (4) Lamartine was aware when publishing the Meditations that he was cultivating new poetic style, one rooted in protracted meditation on the art of poetry making. Alain Vaillant has already made compelling case that the hard evidence of versification in Lamartine is more at stake than philosophy, psychology, or abstract discourses on music; but while Vaillant limits himself to Le Lac and the hermeneutics of its echoing structure, I propose fuller reading of the overall volume as the story of Lamartines own developing ars poetica. The first section of this paper will highlight how the poet, reconnecting with the experiential and expressive self, reinforced poetry through surprisingly non-sentimentalized confrontations with as well as through an explicit resistance to the genre of prose. Next, through chronological reading of select poems that enact his discourse on poetry in his correspondence, I will trace the poet's figurations of water in the Meditations to show how they reflect critical stages in an evolving poetic process. Lamartine's elusive shores will serve as metaphor for the way he continually reassesses, effaces, and resituates the limits of poetry. The Poetics of Prosaic Landscapes In surprising contrast to the pale and nebulous depictions of scenery that appear throughout the Meditations, Lamartine's comments to close correspondents indicate that he found inspiration in ordinary, unadorned but vividly illuminated natural surroundings: je ne me sens aucune curiosite pour tout ce qui n'est pas du soleil et de la belle et pure nature (to Virieu, Corr Aug. 1818 [18-44]). Informed by English poetry at young age, Lamartine, who sought to emulate what he described as Alexander Pope's fused role as poet, philosopher, and bon ami, also picked up on Mme de Stael's connection between what she considers the superiority of the English imagination to English poets' propensity for capturing sensory experience: ils ont l'art d'unir intimement les reflexions philosophiques aux sensations produites par les beautes de la Champagne (De la litterature II: 220). …

De la Révélation de Soi à L’auto-Compréhension : Assia Djebar , L’amour , la Fantasia et Nulle Part dans la Maison de Mon Père

A writer of fiction since the late 1950s, Assia Djebar began introducing autobiographical elements into her texts with her fifth novel, L’amour, la fantasia , (1985) published in English as Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade (1985). Fully aware that subjectivity in life and fiction are often considered transgressions in Algerian culture, the novelist responds to by implementing narrative strategies in the text that signal an original approach to autobiography -- fragmented autobiography, polyphonic discourse, and autofiction. Two decades later, Djebar offers her readers, Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (2007), a personal history that sheds further light on a life story that is both exemplary and unique. This text is crucial to our understanding of the novelist’s autobiographical project for several reasons. First, we can now view Djebar’s narrative unveiling as a two-stage process that began as a collective project but has resulted in the production of a singular life, a singular voice. Second, her previous focus upon unearthing occulted colonial history is now a personal quest, as she recovers, through memory, hidden personal history. Third, we see more clearly the ambiguous relationship between the young girl and the father who is alternately liberator and censor, a conflict that reflects, in part, the tension between the writer and the French language. Fourth, as we witness the unfolding of the autobiographical project, we become aware that Djebar, trained as a historian, is first and foremost a novelist, someone for whom the construction of a literary persona is a cornerstone of her craft, the blending of fact and fiction an important component of her writing. Finally, her approach to self-representation forces readers to consider two related questions that concern the Algerian writer’s work in particular and the realm of women’s autobiography in general: Does the autobiographical process heal the fragmented narrating self? Does it effectively challenge patriarchal structures and ideology or merely create nostalgia for a lost Eden in which women are jealous guardians of tradition?

Writing the Personal: The Evolution of Assia Djebar’s Autobiographical Project from L’Amour, La Fantasia to Nulle Part Dans La Maison de Mon Père

Examining Djebar’s autobiographical project as a quest for truth—and an interrogation of “truth”—I chart the difficult process of self-disclosure in the three published texts of the Algerian Quartet: L’amour, la fantasia (1985) (Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade); Ombre sultane (1987) (A Sister to Scheherazade); Vaste est la prison (1995) (So Vast the Prison) then show that Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007) (No place in my father’s house), draws closer to the autobiographical pact. Probing the shift in Djebar’s autobiographical writing from a collective project to express community concerns to a singular voice, I argue that Nulle part dans la maison de mon père reformulates the writer’s trajectory as a circular movement, circling back to episodes of previous works, in the attempt to achieve a more truthful self

Where Do We Go From Here?: Reading “Arab Women’s Writing” Today

Al-Hassan Golley, Nawar, ed. 2007. Women's Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. New York: Syracuse University Press. $45.00 he. $22.95 sc. xxxvi + 271 pp.Mehta, Brinda. 2007. Rituals of Memory In Contemporary Women's Writing. New York: Syracuse University Press. $45.00 hc. 303pp.No one today is purely one thing.(Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism)Who is writer? Both Nawar el-Hassan Golley s edited collection and Brinda Mehta's book confront us with this label. Indeed, category of often functions as a stock subset of both postcolonial and studies. The classification Arab may expand into North African and Eastern, women's studies into gender studies.These represent slightly more pertinent, but still extremely general categories. In aftermath of pan-Arabism, rise of Islamism, and increasing examples of sectarian conflicts throughout region, usefulness of term Arab must itself be interrogated. As example of Morocco perhaps illustrates best, women who under current theoretical paradigms fall under Arab or Middle Eastern umbrella may, in fact, define themselves as neither, choosing simply Moroccan or Amazighii instead. However, as is usually case, categories remain maddeningly hard to shift. Indeed, at its worst category writing serves to sell odalisque back to (ex)colonizer, giving us opportunity to once again turn a sexualized yet politically correct gaze on orientalized Other. In this way, socio-political and economic consequences of decolonization have created a curious reversal: Oriental woman has too-often become (writer), who now sells her story of brutal opression, followed by liberation and realization of Western values, to ex-colonizer.In this light, entire category of writing can be seen as a kind of literary prostitution in which teller performs empowerment of Western reader. Ayan Hirsi Alis Infidel provides a recent, popular example of this new genre, whilst highbrow literary texts such as Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Tresspass or Assia Djedbar's L'amour, la fantasia take a second path, attempting to correct Western misperceptions of their oppression by offering a more complex narrative framwork. Both narrative types enjoy a new popularity in wake of post-September 1 1 politics. Also building on interest in grouping of texts we call writing are critical works such as those by al-Hassan Golley and Mehta. Academic work on as it appears most often today tends to overlap a great deal with discourse of postcolonial studies, both in its choice of primary texts and tendency to rely always on same three theorists (Said, Homi Bhaba, Spivak).We also find a marked tendency to focus on autobiographical writing, or at least to point out way in which a given fictional text exemplifies lived reality. In all fairness, as Lydie Moudelino has pointed out, this is in part due to production of a large quantity of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical material as a necessary first step as those whose voices have been silent begin to write (Moudelino 2006, 13).With its choice of subject matter, Women's Lives Retold follows in steps of its predecessors, such as Cooke and Badran's Opening Gates (2004) or Fedwa Malti-Douglas's Women's Body, Women's Word (1991), or even alHassan Golley's previous book Reading Women's Biographies (2003). In her introduction to new collection, Golley lays out four main theoretical areas anthology will address: cultural hybridity, transnationalism, communal identity, and the personal and political (xxviii). All four areas are hotly contested in this critical moment for postcolonial studies, where many are trying to write a way out of more traditional theoretical paradigms. …