SOURCE: Mortimer, Mildred. “Reappropriating the Gaze in Assia Djebar's Fiction and Film.” World Literature Today 70, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 859-66.

In the following essay, Mortimer examines Djebar's effort to recast Algerian women as independent beings who see and make themselves publicly visible in defiance of Maghrebian patriarchy and French colonialism, focusing primarily on Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, Vaste est la prison, and Djebar's film La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua.

Although Assia Djebar is known as Algeria's foremost woman novelist, her corpus also includes poetry, theater, essays, and film. She has used the image as well as the word to chronicle Algeria's transition from colonialism to independence and to foreground Algerian woman's struggle to redefine her role in postcolonial Algeria. Portraying Algeria's women as victims of dual oppression, French colonialism and Maghrebian patriarchy, Djebar claims subjectivity for herself and her Algerian sisters by reappropriating language, history, space, and...