Readers of a book called Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World will expect it to contain chapters on Fanon, Glissant, Césaire and Senghor. The reasons for including or resituating other figures as postcolonial thinkers will be clear enough. Assia Djebar, however, has written only one book that might be labelled theoretical, Ces voix qui m'assiègent … en marge de ma francophonie (Djebar, 1999b). That collection, not yet translated into English, deserves to be better known, but it is primarily as a novelist that Djebar is a significant figure. To some readers, her place in the present volume may appear anomalous, even tokenistic. My aim is to show that she has engaged deeply with questions around the postcolonial and the francophone that are central to the volume and, ultimately, to argue for the pertinence, in this context, of the distinctive literary form of her thought.

Djebar and the postcolonial

Djebar's engagement with ‘postcolonial’ issues is manifest on several levels, starting with her very focus on a colonial history whose significance Europe has often underplayed or underrated. This theme featured prominently in her speech at the Académie française in June 2006. Djebar recalled the long years her predecessor, a lawyer named Georges Vedel, spent in a prison camp during the Second World War, and his deep shock when he found out, after his release, about the extermination camps that had operated nearby.