The Kaleidoscope of Gendered Memory in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Novels
Through its unique kaleidoscopic lens, this book analyzes the work of Algeria’s first postcolonial woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi. Her novels Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses return to the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence to address the lingering anxieties of national belonging and memory in postcolonial Algeria at a time when the nation is caught between two forces: entrenched bureaucratic-political elites and populist Islamists, who imagine a return to a pre-modern, utopian past. This book argues that Mosteghanemi’s polyphonic narratives reveal that national narratives are always multiple—“unity” is not one, all-encompassing narrative, but instead an ever-evolving Bakhtinian dialogism accommodating multiple perspectives, memories, and stories. The study interprets Mosteghanemi’s metaphor of the bridge as a powerful device for exploring tensions between reality and imagination, exile and belonging, and traditional concepts of gender in ways that reimagine nationhood and gesture towards a new, collective future.
Nuha Ahmad Baaqeel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Studies. She is currently Deputy Head of the Department of Languages and Translations at Taibah University, Saudi Arabia. She holds a PhD in Postcolonial Literature from the University of Sussex, UK, an MA in Comparative Literary Studies and Criticism from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in English Literature from King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia. She has published scholarly journal articles on postcolonial literature, and has previously worked as an English teacher at several schools and colleges in Saudi Arabia, and as a Lecturer in English Literature at Taibah University, Saudi Arabia.
“Nuha Baaqeel’s book on Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s work is a timely and important addition to the field of postcolonial literary studies. As the first comprehensive scholarly study of this important writer, Baaqeel provides engaged and informed insights into her fictions, framed by a perceptive and culturally-attuned discussion of the entanglement of gender and nation in postcolonial Algeria.”
Dr Denise deCaires Narain,
Reader in Postcolonial Literatures, University of Sussex, UK; Director of Consortium for Humanities and the Arts South-East England
“An original work of scholarship, Nuha Baaqeel’s study of postcolonial literature’s first Algerian women writer in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, represents an important contribution to the fields of postcolonial literary theory, gender studies, and postcolonial feminist theory with her introduction of a new kaleidoscopic method for reading postcolonial literature in ways that reconfigure earlier approaches to reading postcolonial literature, trauma, gender, and nation.”
Jessica Hope Jordan, PhD
University of California, Davis
Buy This Book
