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Show 47 college of humanities This presentation touches on the concept of the poetic language as a political act and investigates Homi Bhabha's notion of the "third space" implemented by Maghrebi poscolonial feminist and author, Malika Mokeddem, to challenge and undermine cultural, physical, and psychological boundaries established by both domineering neocolonial and patriarchal ideological systems of Algeria and France whose "arbitrary historical inventions" (294) lead to social exclusion and exile of the subalterns, particularly of women. I will, furthermore, show that the author's novel The Forbidden Woman which rests on the "double writing or dissemi-nation" (299), and centered around her hybridity, uses this "third space," though only, as Valerie Orlando calls it, a "space of negotiation." In this "suspended" space the protagonist, Sultana, in what she calls a "narrow junction," (83) is able to explore her shattered identities; yet she is unable to root her-self in it. Mokeddem's "nomadic" novel, allows the heroin, Sultana, to "seek identity through many trajectories" as she goes through "spaces, ‘plateaus' in the Deulozo-Guarttarian sense, which take her to new modes of existence" (38). I will demonstrate that Sultana as a representative of the marginalized Maghrebi woman writers belongs nowhere, i.e in no definite "space" where she can "come to terms with [her] hybrid identity" (Braidotti). EXILE, HYBRIDITY, THIRD SPACE AND THE "SUSPENDED" IDENTITY: MALIKA MOKEDDEM'S FORBIDDEN WOMAN Meriam (Memi) Chibane (Thérèse De Raedt, Jerry Root) Department of Languages and Literature University of Utah UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Thérèse De Raedt Meriam Chibane |
