Abstract:
This thesis, whose problematic lies at the crossroads of postcolonial criticism and postmodern theory, examines violence in the autobiographical texts of three women writing in the postcolonial entre-deux of the French-Algerian encounter. Investigating the poetics of the autobiographies of Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem and Nina Bouraoui unveils the literary strategies these writers deploy to accommodate into their writing both an experience of violence and resistance against violence.
The analysis undertaken in this research of the thematics and the textual and linguistic functioning of six autobiographical texts reveals how these writers transform, through textual violence, an identity inherited from colonial and patriarchal discourses in order to construct a new subjectivity that escapes fixed structures and existing power relations. While many theorists have denounced postmodernism's apparent inability to adopt a political position, this research, through its evaluation of the oppositional force of this intrinsically postmodern corpus, is able to enact a rapprochement between postcolonial and postmodern theories.
In their struggle against the violence inherent in dominant discourses, the writers examined in this thesis underline the ambiguity of Franco-Algerian relations and stage acts of resistance by women and the colonised. By means of textual and linguistic counterviolence, they deconstruct the binary oppositions that underpin inherited forms of identity in order to assert a hybrid space that generates creative power. Like Deleuzian nomads, the three writers deterritorialise inherited ethnic and sexual identities, creating for themselves lines of flight towards a new conception of identity. Due to the need to resist the violence inflicted upon the group, the autobiographers anchor this new identity in their community of origin and in female memory. Rather than inscribing their identity in a nationalistic project they claim for themselves the identity of a Deleuzian subject group, an identity invested with becoming.
