Reinventing community: Collective identity and cultural difference in recent theory and literature in French

This thesis examines representations of 'community' in recent critical theory and literature in French. I argue that the theoretical discourses that emerged through the eighties and nineties affirming the extinction of community need to be rethought. Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy have all suggested that the notion of the 'in-common' be replaced with attention to radically diverse and dissimilar beings, arguing that consensus is usually both dangerous and illusory. However, while these conclusions serve to a certain extent to rescue particular cultural perspectives from appropriation by assimilative discourses, the emphasis on intractable difference also risks perpetuating fragmentation and marginalisation. By juxtaposing theory with socio-political debates on multiculturalism in France, I demonstrate how a conception of the coexistence of cultural specificity with various forms of dialogue constitutes a more accurate depiction of actual community formations, as well as providing a more effective means to counteract prejudice. I then use Nancy's more recent work to show how singular beings continually converge and diverge within a wider interactive network. The rest of the thesis explores the complex mediations between singularity and collectivity represented in a range of texts written in French. The intersection of diverse cultural positions is enacted in representations of bilingualism and multilingualism; Khatibi and Glissant, for example, evoke the ways in which any language or idiom is unsettlingly shot through with traces of other dialects. Furthermore, literary works discussing North African immigrant communities testify to a shift from a reflection on cultural frontiers to a more unstable movement between particularity and relationality. While 'first-generation' authors reflect the emphasis on difference proposed in the work of Derrida and Lyotard, Sebbar and various Beur writers hover more uncertainly between exile and cultural or linguistic dialogue. These analyses convey the slippery relation between singularity and collectivity, problematising fixed models and blurring conventional cultural dichotomies. Fictional representation is shown to function as a locus where categories of 'identity' and 'difference' can be undermined, since its ludic and subjective form escapes the identification of any exemplary cultural position

“Le silence de l’écriture”. Arabic and its Absence in the Works of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar

Dans cet article nous explorons le malaise d’Assia Djebar et de Leïla devant la représentation de la langue arabe dans leurs textes francophones. Malgré les commentaires de Djebar sur les inflexions multilingues de son écriture, et malgré les évocations de l’hybridité culturelle et du métissage dans beaucoup d’oeuvres fictionnelles de Sebbar, les deux écrivains continuent à évoquer l’écartèlement entre les langues, l’impossibilité de la traduction, et le silence de la langue arabe dans une écriture construite sur la rupture linguistique. Notre recherche sur le tiraillement entre le français et l’arabe, et l’aliénation de ces écrivains par rapport aux langues de leur terre natale entend mettre en question le triomphalisme prématuré de la rhétorique des théories récentes de la transculturation, de l’hybridisation et de la littérature-monde : cherchant de façon salutaire à dépasser les frontières linguistiques et culturelles, elles occultent le conflit linguistique et l’exil qu’il continue d’engendre

The specific plurality of Assia Djebar

Recent postcolonial criticism suffers from a sense of anxiety regarding the appropriate balance between cultural specificity and post-identitarian hybridity or 'creolisation'. Thinkers differ in their understanding of the importance of identity, at times advocating that the affirmation of a particular subject position is the only means of resisting (neo)colonial domination, and at others asserting that a celebration of relationality and cultural plurality can serve to critique entrenched power relations. Conceptions of postcolonial resistance waver between the urge to privilege an alternative, monologic identity on the one had, and liberation through the dissolution of all specified identity categories on the other. The apparently stark opposition between these two modes of though demands, however, to be unsettled and rendered more subtle. I want to use the texts of Assia Djebar, with reference also to the theories of Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Hallward, to rework the terms of this debate. Rather than championing exclusively either cultural specificity or trans-culturation, Djebar's work incorporates a continued struggle between the specific, the singular and the plural. First, Djebar's texts set out to unveil or conceive a feminine Algerian identity, rescuing Algerian women from occlusion both by colonialism and by Islamic law and giving voice to their repressed specificity. Despite her belief in the necessity of this project, however, she finds that it is troubled on two levels. On the one hand, the desire to retrieve some particular essence results in the continual retreat of that essence, and the more the texts hope to uncover, the more they inadvertently mask or hide. Algerian identity is replaced, therefore, with a sense of the intractable singularity of the occluded 'self'. Furthermore, this singularity turns out not to be absolute but composite, as the erasure of the subject is coupled with a proliferation of diverse traces and echoes. The quest for identity intermittently dissolves, and Djebar displays postcolonial experience in Algeria instead as a curious coalescence of intractable singularity and ongoing intercultural plurality

10. Théories postcoloniales et poststructuralistes

Le dialogue entre la théorie postcoloniale et le poststructuralisme fait depuis longtemps l’objet d’un débat animé. Certes, le lien entre la théorie déconstructionniste et un certain scepticisme contemporain envers l’ethnocentrisme occidental a été suffisamment mis en lumière par la critique pour qu’on ne puisse plus l’ignorer. White Mythologies, de Robert Young, et plus tard son monumental Postcolonialism, montrent comment les œuvres de philosophes tels que Sartre, Foucault et Derrida furent..

The specific plurality of Assia Djebar

Recent postcolonial criticism suffers from a sense of anxiety regarding the appropriate balance between cultural specificity and post-identitarian hybridity or 'creolisation'. Thinkers differ in their understanding of the importance of identity, at times advocating that the affirmation of a particular subject position is the only means of resisting (neo)colonial domination, and at others asserting that a celebration of relationality and cultural plurality can serve to critique entrenched power relations. Conceptions of postcolonial resistance waver between the urge to privilege an alternative, monologic identity on the one had, and liberation through the dissolution of all specified identity categories on the other. The apparently stark opposition between these two modes of though demands, however, to be unsettled and rendered more subtle. I want to use the texts of Assia Djebar, with reference also to the theories of Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Hallward, to rework the terms of this debate. Rather than championing exclusively either cultural specificity or trans-culturation, Djebar's work incorporates a continued struggle between the specific, the singular and the plural. First, Djebar's texts set out to unveil or conceive a feminine Algerian identity, rescuing Algerian women from occlusion both by colonialism and by Islamic law and giving voice to their repressed specificity. Despite her belief in the necessity of this project, however, she finds that it is troubled on two levels. On the one hand, the desire to retrieve some particular essence results in the continual retreat of that essence, and the more the texts hope to uncover, the more they inadvertently mask or hide. Algerian identity is replaced, therefore, with a sense of the intractable singularity of the occluded 'self'. Furthermore, this singularity turns out not to be absolute but composite, as the erasure of the subject is coupled with a proliferation of diverse traces and echoes. The quest for identity intermittently dissolves, and Djebar displays postcolonial experience in Algeria instead as a curious coalescence of intractable singularity and ongoing intercultural plurality.N.B. Dr Hiddleston is now based at Exeter College, University of Oxford. The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. Citation: Hiddleston, J. (2004). 'The specific plurality of Assia Djebar', French Studies 58(3), 371-384. [The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available at http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/]

Reinventing community Collective identity and cultural difference in recent theory and literature in French

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Derrida, autobiography and postcoloniality

The question of Derrida's relationship with postcolonial theory has for a long time been a fraught one. Some of the major postcolonial critics engage directly with Derrida's reflections on dissemination and excentricity, while others argue, on the contrary, that his mode of thinking is too abstract to tell us anything informative about the mechanics of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. This article responds to these postcolonial critics, and analyses two recent texts, L'Autre Cap and Le Monolinguisme de l'autre, in order to argue that the intermingling of philosophy and autobiography can tell us something new about the dangers and difficulties of postcolonial inquiry. These works attempt to examine the damaging effects of European cultural hegemony, and the imposition of the colonial language in Algeria, but, in including anxieties about this project expressed in the first person, they also convey a sense of doubt about the appropriateness of universalising philosophical language. The philosopher grapples with an aporia between the need to describe the universal experience of alienation and dispossession in language (since this indeed weakens the coloniser's assumed position of dominance and ownership), and attention to the very singularities that colonial culture oppresses, and that resist theorisation in general terms. The hesitant incursion of the autobiographical subject into Derrida's later texts dramatises this aporia and its effects on postcolonial debate