This dissertation studies mechanisms of identity formation in the works of women in the French colonies of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia). Informed by recent developments in feminist postcolonial studies and by the growing scholarship on French colonial history, this project envisions gender as a transcultural, transnational and translingual category which enabled women from varied backgrounds to make sense of the colonial situation. By establishing a connection between widely acclaimed writers and thinkers (like Assia Djébar and Lady Wortley Montagu) and lesser-known female figures (including Elissa Rhaïs, Taos Amrouche, Djamila Debèche, Baya and my own great grandmother), between European and Maghrebi women, this dissertation uncovers a rich and forgotten archive, composed of novels, letters, newspapers, and visual representations, which I argue, should be apprehended together since they circulated together, produced and consumed by the same women. This female corpus opposes an alternative epistemology to the dominant orientalist mood, in which the Other is not simply constructed in opposition to the Self, as an object to know, conquer and subject. This female archive, I argue, intimately ties the Self and Other through the construction of an alter ego, understood simultaneously as 1) the textual or visual representation of the authorial Self as "othered," 2) a depiction of the Other as complementary to the Self, and 3) an alternative notion of subjectivity where Self and Other co-exist. Across media, the female alter egos constructed in this archive reckon with a contradiction at the heart of colonial subjectivity (in the sense of being a metaphysical subject as well as a subject of the Empire). Extending beyond strict geographical and linguistic delineations, this project participates in the current reframing of Francophone studies by envisioning this archive not only in its relation to metropolitan France, but also to pan-Arab feminism and nationalism, and by considering French as a vector for transcultural exchanges, in conversation with the many other languages spoken in the colonial Maghreb and the Middle East.
Crucifix, Edwige,
"Alter Egos: Women, Identity and Transcultural Encounters in the Colonial Maghreb"
(2020).
Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/axsf-fk66
