Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (review)

In Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds, Anne Donadey sets out to shift the emphasis of most postcolonial criticism from its preoccupation with male, largely Anglophone writing to feminist writing in French in a postcolonial Algerian mode. Moreover, her critical model rejects the tendency of many studies to collapse diverse cultures and discourses by eliding them into undifferentiated, monolithic categories. Her analysis of the works of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar in a literary, social, and political context involves us in the significant issues of cultural hybridity, counter-hegemonic strategies, cultural pluralism, and intertextuality, which serve to refocus postcolonial theory in crucial ways.