“A door open to full sun” the politics of linguistic, national, and gender identities in Leila Ahmed’s and Asia Djebar’s autobiographical narratives -

Abstract

This thesis investigates identity manifestations in the autobiographical narratives of Leila Ahmed and Asia Djebar. The object of my research in the broadest sense is to study the language-identity-ideology link in post-colonial contexts in the Arab world, in Egypt and Algeria particularly. More specifically, I look at the linguistic, national, and gender aspects—I dub shades—of identity manifest in the life writings of both writers as they speak of, and unpack, the diverging, and more accurately conflicting, ideologies of the time: (1) that of the hegemonic ex-colonizer and (2) that of the nationalist movements that hovered over the two countries for long. I attempt to adumbrate how ideological shifts in such turning points in the history of Egypt and Algeria have affected the identity construction of both writers, in so far as it relates to language, nation, and gender. The thesis meditates how such identity nexus responds to the political conflicts in the society with their ideological underpinnings to which no one remains outcast. It particularly traces through close textual readings how these identities are negotiated in the written medium that the autobiography furnishes and how they are intertwined, in an attempt to adumbrate what kind of conflicting power(s) has interpellated these three categories of identity, goading both writers to expound upon them, either covertly or overtly, in a given narrative. It follows that writing about identity and the negotiation thereof render identity balanced in its very fluidity as it moves it time and space. It further allows women to engage creatively with multilayered discourses, cultivating, as such, new consciousness(es) that fosters “multiple critiques.”