4. The Polyphonic Hermeneutics of Assia Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines Assia Djebar’s (1936–2015) celebrated 1985 novel L’amour, la fantasia [translated as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade]. The work is a palimpsest of texts that weaves together: French archival records and eyewitness accounts of the occupation of Algeria in the 1830s, oral histories recorded in Algerian dialect and Tamazight by women involved in the war of independence from 1954 through 1962, as well as Djebar’s personal memories and reflections. The chapter argues that Djebar models a practice of ethical reading [ijtihād] in her re-narration of official histories and archives—colonial, national, as well as Islamic. It resituates L’amour, la fantasia, outside of the postcolonial, feminist, and Francophone critical paradigms that dominate the copious scholarship on her work. However, rather than reading gender and language as external to Qurʾanic intertextuality, the chapter emphasizes how they inform and shape Djebar’s narrative ethics—largely through the novel’s insistence on orality and embodiment.