Abstract:

This study presents a postcolonial reading of Algerian feminist writer and film director Assia Djebar’s autobiographical/historical narrative Fantasia An Algerian Cavalcade (1985). In Fantasia, Djebar juxtaposes different kinds of texts with each other: she takes the “official” records of the French colonial conquest of Algeria, which is itself a rewriting of a historical fact, and she rewrites it by complicating that narrative by layers of voices. The text includes three narrative layers: chronicles of the Algerian defeat of 1830 recorded by French soldiers and journalists; oral accounts of rural Algerian women who retrospectively narrate their participation in the independence struggle during 1950s and 1960s; and the author’s own experience growing up in colonial Algeria. In this multi-layered text, Djebar aims to represent a vignette of colonial Algeria, women’s involvement in the independence war against the French colonial power, and women’s role in the nation-building stage afterwards. While the official accounts of the French colonial occupation of Algeria and the nationalist rhetoric afterwards do not fully acknowledge the essential role of women, Djebar’s personal narrative and the oral histories of women allow the reader to make a contrapuntal reading of the colonial and nationalist histories. This study makes the argument that by emphasizing the various levels of resistance to colonial violence and silencing in anticolonial nationalist struggle, Fantasia challenges both the colonial official paradigms of the Algerian independence movement and the patriarchal understandings of the Algerian women who participated in the independence movement.  

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