African American and Francophone Postcolonial Memory: Octavia Butler's<i>Kindred</i>and Assia Djebar's<i>La femme sans sépulture</i>

Abstract

This comparative article brings to light parallels between African American and postcolonial Algerian fictional rewritings of history by two women writers, Octavia E. Butler and Assia Djebar. It focuses on the convergence of two related elements in Butler's Kindred and Djebar's La femme sans sépulture: the need to resist historical amnesia and to speak the unspeakable. Both authors foreground the contemporary legacy of traumatic national pasts and the treatment of women's agency and desire under situations of extreme violence. Both texts enact similar tactics to represent the historical unrepresentable through fiction and to make feminist, womanist, and postcolonial interventions into the construction of the nation as imagined community.