Delacroix, Djebar’s Interlocutor, Par Excellence

Arguably the most well-known Algerian writer in the world, Assia Djebar's literary career is nothing short of monumental. In the early twenty-first century many of her books have been marketed with covers that include a photograph of her or simply her name. This practice increased following her election into the Académie Française. However, in their first paperback editions, or in their incarnations as livres de poche, Djebar's books often have reprints of famous nineteenth-century orientalist paintings, particularly those of Eugène Delacroix. While Djebar directly invokes both Delacroix and his painting in her 1980 book, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, whose name she takes from Delacroix's 1834 painting, the continued selection of Delacroix's paintings for subsequent book covers has created a continuous dialogue between the author, her work, and the nineteenth century. The exoticism represented in Delacroix's paintings transmits a certain esthetic understanding of the Orient, one that Djebar is both refuting and exploiting, but one that the potential reader cannot help but consider when faced with the book cover choices. This dialogue between a twenty-first-century Algerian writer and a nineteenth-century French artist serves as an example of a cross-cultural encounter that is both productive and reductive.Keywords: Assia DjebarEugène DelacroixBook CoversOrientalismCross-Cultural Dialogue Notes1 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.2 Emer O’Beirne argues that Djebar first misreads then ignores the prominent figure of the slave woman in Delacroix's then Picasso's series, respectively.3 I want to be careful here to underscore that I am not suggesting that Djebar herself chose the painting as her cover. Although this is possible, my hypothesis is that the publishers simply chose to market the books this way, creating a familiar image, therefore “branding” Djebar's work and making it recognizable to potential readers. As Angus Phillips explains, “[t]he cover plays a vital part in positioning a book or author in the market” (29).4 Emphasis mine.5 It seems particularly noteworthy, too, that the same year that the Commune took hold in Paris, the French were descending upon Algiers, where they would remain until 1962.Additional informationNotes on contributorsPamela PearsPamela A. Pears is Associate Professor of French at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland. She has published on Maghrebi and Vietnamese women writers, including “Images, Messages, and the Paratext in Algerian Women's Writing” (in Judging a Book by its Cover, Ashgate) and “Ly Thu Ho” in the Dictionnaire des écrivains migrants de langue française (1981–2011) (Honoré Champion)

Art · Art history · Exoticism · Literature · Nothing · Orientalism · Painting · PICASSO · African history and culture studies · History · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · North African History and Literature · Philosophy

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