Untranslating the Maghreb: reckoning with Gender in literature and film from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia

Abstract

Orientalist cultural translation remains immanent to the creation and reception of Maghrebi women's fiction. However, recent literary and cinematic texts from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia problematize and critique this dynamic. Reappropriating both the process of translation and the highly charged figure of the Maghrebi heroine, Maghrebi women's cultural production performs a literary, cinematic, and critical intervention that I call "untranslation." Untranslation thwarts Orientalist translation through a variety of mechanisms including narrative deferral, the use of alternative linguistic and religious idioms, the reappropriation of technology and modernity, and the deployment of self-ethnography. Resisting the notion that "postcolonial" or "World" literature and film readily translates a known Other, untranslation calls for a new understanding of Maghrebi women's fiction as participating in its own scholarly and pedagogical productions of meaning.