SOURCE: Bigelow, Gordon. “Revolution and Modernity: Assia Djebar's Les enfants du nouveau monde.” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 2 (summer 2003): 13-27.

In the following essay, Bigelow discusses how Djebar's subjective feminine perspective in Les enfants du nouveau monde creates a “vision of revolutionary modernity.”

With the 1985 publication of her landmark novel L'amour, la fantasia, Algerian writer Assia Djebar moved into a position of increasing international visibility and critical attention. With its blending of history, autobiography, and fiction, this work would position Djebar alongside authors like Bessie Head (A Question of Power, 1974; Serowe, 1981) and Sara Suleri (Meatless Days, 1989) as a lucid critic of gender, history, and subjectivity in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Djebar's earliest works, however, in a career that stretches back to 1956, are rarely mentioned in recent critical debate.¹ Her wartime novel Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962) is nonetheless long overdue for critical revival, for it reveals an early...