Demarginalizing the Margins: Gender, Agency, and Nostalgia for French Algeria in Carnets d’Orient (Jacques Ferrandez, 2011)

Abstract Representations of the Other, particularly the racialized and gendered Other remains problematic for many artists, particularly in the context of representing aspects of French colonialism. This is notably the case for French pied-noir artists who set out to retrospectively tell the history of colonial Algeria. Jacques Ferrandez, a francophone pied-noir graphic novelist, published his series Carnets d’Orient between 1987 and 2009. In the second cycle, there is one single, recurring female Algerian character named Samia who will be the focus of this article. A close analysis of Samia’s representation illustrates the degrees to which the artist exploits the medium’s specificities in order to influence the message received by their readers. The reader is required to be an active co-creator and becomes implicated from an ethical point of view in that they are asked to reflect critically on their own subjectivity and biases. In the case of Carnets d’Orient, while a reading in which the Algerian woman’s agency is foregrounded is possible, we will see that instead of giving a voice to the female Algerian character, the white male pied-noir author uses her to voice a plaintive nostalgia for an Algeria which according to some “could have been.”