Defying distance : remembrance, narration, and the gender imaginary in Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine

This dissertation explores Algerian author Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine (1991) (Far from Madina), a novel that re-imagines the early Islamic past through women’s perspectives. Djebar framed the work as an inspired re-reading of the earliest Sunni historiography compendiums: Ibn Hishām’s (d. 828-835) prophetic biography, the biographical dictionary of Ibn Saʿd (d. 845), and the historical chronicles of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923). This study approaches the novel through its intertextuality with classical Islamic tradition, attending to how it reconfigures historical narratives, identifying unnamed sources, and taking up new readings through lenses from Arabo-Islamic religio-scholarly and literary traditions. Djebar models a practice of transmission that centers women’s subjectivities, re/claims the literary voice of compendium text tradition, and embraces a collective, performative practice in constructing a relationship to the past. I argue that Djebar’s project is compelled not only by an ethical imperative to respond to gendered silences in the archive but also by a desire to recall beloved figures of Muslim memory and make them speak to her contemporary moment. I attend to the models of narration imagined in the novel and works including La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979) and L’Amour, la fantasia (1985) to suggest that Djebar’s reflexive practice of transmission not only inscribes counter-discourse in tradition but also recovers the dynamism and collective voice of oral literary culture. Djebar re-enters the scene of history and invites the reader to dwell on events through women’s perspectives, unsettling narratives that have naturalized gender discourses in the received canon and challenging gender ideologies of her own time. By asserting the ethical dimensions of representational practice, including the obligation to expand the horizons of the imaginary, and by calling the reader to participate in re-evaluating tradition and making meaning out of the past as a mode of moral-ethical witness, the novel revives the classical definition of the concept of adab. Djebar’s imaginative treatment makes visible a range of women’s experiences that prompt ethical deliberation over gender codes propagated by tradition, law, and the state and opens a space for Muslims to envision avenues for overcoming gendered patterns of injustice and alienation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Davey, Jennifer Lynne

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M. (Elizabeth Merle), 1964-
• Azam, Hina, 1970-

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Hyder, Syed A
• Wettlaufer, Alexandra

• Assia Djebar
• Women and gender in Islam
• Islamic historiography
• Algerian literature
• Islamic feminism
• Fatima
• Aisha
• Francophone literature
• Early Islamic history
• Arabic poetics
• Sufism
• Sufi literature
• Postcolonial literature
• Narratives of Islam

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/62354

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/135033