This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Between History and Fiction The Destabilisation of Masculinist History in Contemporary Algerian Women's Fiction Kosniowski, Jennifer Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 Between History and Fiction The Destabilisation of Masculinist History in Contemporary Algerian Women's Fiction Jenny Kosniowski King's College London Department of French Submitted for the degree of Doctor Of Philosophy in September 2014 Abstract Masculinist constructions of Algerian history relegate women to symbolic roles. The texts by Algerian women writers studied in my thesis all use fiction to express agency and create empowerment through – or in spite of – these symbolic positions. My thesis is concerned with how fiction highlights and negotiates various manifestations of the tension created when authors engage with masculinist historical discourses by casting women in – and so perhaps validating – the roles that they are assigned within these same discourses. Chapter one defines what I am terming 'masculinist history' by analysing historical documents. Chapter two examines how, in Assia Djebar's La Femme sans sépulture, Leïla Marouane's La Jeune Fille et la Mère, and Maïssa Bey's Entendez-vous dans les montagnes..., real- life freedom-fighters are fictionalised in a way that negotiates the tension between filling in the blanks of history and upholding discourses of martyrdom. The third chapter explores the more recent violence in Algeria, how Bey's Puisque mon cœur est mort and Marouane's Le Châtiment des hypocrites employ fiction to create sites of mourning that are otherwise unavailable because of the amnesty for crimes committed during this period – although the violent conclusions of the texts imply the limitations of fiction in this respect. Chapter four moves away from representations of women caught up in extraordinary circumstances and focuses on the everyday. This chapter investigates the figuration of the domestic as a site of female resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression – a figuration that simultaneously risks reinforcing women's symbolic position as bastions of tradition – in Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père and Bey's Bleu blanc vert. Finally, the fifth chapter inspects how Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Chaos of the Senses reconfigures her earlier fictional work in a way that spotlights female agency, and how Malika Mokeddem's autobiographical La Transe des insoumis does something similar, but in a much more personal way. Across the thesis I therefore conceptualise a history/fiction entre-deux that is not so much a space of emancipation as it is multiple spaces that allow for an exploration of agency within traditional – and often oppressive – female roles. 2 Contents Introduction: Facts and Fictions .......................................................................................................................... 5 1. The Representation of Algerian Women since 1954 . ................................................................................. 23 Moudjahidates ....................................................................................................................................... 25 The 'Emancipation' of Muslim Women .................................................................................................. 33 Post-Independence Disappointment ..................................................................................................... 40 The Family Code ..................................................................................................................................... 43 Islamism, Violence and Amnesty ........................................................................................................... 45 Algerian Women in the French Collective Consciousness ..................................................................... 52 Contemporary Algeria ............................................................................................................................ 56 2. Heroism Between History and Fiction . ........................................................................................................ 60 Ethical Appropriations: Assia Djebar's La Femme sans sépulture .......................................................... 61 Writing as Resistance: Leïla Marouane's La Jeune Fille et la Mère ........................................................ 73 Transnational Reading: Maïssa Bey's Entendez-vous dans les montagnes... ......................................... 78 3. Forced Forgetting: Mourning and Amnesty . ............................................................................................... 84 Mourning Mothers: Bey's Puisque mon cœur est mort ......................................................................... 84 Bodily Remembrance: Marouane's Le Châtiment des hypocrites .......................................................... 99 4. Domestic Bliss? . ......................................................................................................................................... 110 A History of Domesticity: Bey's Bleu blanc vert ................................................................................... 111 The Individual and the Domestic: Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père ........................... 123 5. Reconfiguring the Reconfigured . ............................................................................................................... 140 Fiction within Fiction: Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses ........... 140 Nomadic Rewriting: Malika Mokeddem's N'zid, La Transe des insoumis and La Désirante ................ 152 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................... 169 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................... 175 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Prof. Nick Harrison, who supervised this thesis, for his guidance and support. His scholarly insights have been equal parts inspiring and invaluable. I am also grateful to Dr Siobhàn McIlvanney, whose suggestions added elements to the study which would otherwise have been lacking. I would also like to thank all the staff of the King's College London French Department for the encouragement and thoughts offered at various times as my research progressed – in particular, Prof. Anne Green, Dr Jo Malt and Dr Andrew Counter for their comments on various chapters, and Dr Soizick Solman for her professional support. More postgraduate colleagues and friends are due thanks for their valuable scholarly and moral support than I can name here, but two were particularly influential on the thesis: Sara Leek acted as a valuable sounding board in the beginning stages; Rym Ouartsi has provided references and insights into Algerian culture, and much needed friendship in these final stages. Thanks are also due to the organisers of various postgraduate conferences and reading groups where I was given the opportunity to test out my work – both in London and New York. Finally, special thanks go to my family, in particular my partner Simon, who has supported and encouraged me throughout, and Tango, my ever faithful friend. 4 Introduction: Facts and Fictions Maïssa Bey, Assia Djebar, Leïla Marouane, Malika Mokeddem and Ahlam Mosteghanemi come from different regions in Algeria, currently reside in various countries, and do not all write in the same language (Mosteghanemi writes in Arabic, while the others write in French). What they have in common is that they all insert historical facts into their texts in ways that expose the fictions – in particular those about women – in masculinist conceptions of history. I want to argue that these texts are not historical novels where history provides the backdrop – and in some cases the characters – for the story, in the same way another writer may use a city.1 Nor is the history in them used simply as a means to contextualise the lives of the women about whom they write. Rather, because modern Algeria has been built to
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