Revenants: gendered memories of trauma in the works of Leïla Sebbar, Diane Kurys, Alice Zeniter, and Mati Diop
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Abstract
This dissertation reconsiders intergenerational transmission and the role of artistic interventions as instruments of traumatic memory in the works of Leïla Sebbar, Diane Kurys, Alice Zeniter, and Mati Diop. Each auteure brings to light varied artistic modalities, which seek to fill the ruptures and erasures in France’s present-day archive. Over the course of four chapters, I focus on the place of revenants in their respective novels and films, a term I use to locate the present-day ghosts of traumatic histories ranging from the Holocaust to the Algerian War to the current migrant crisis. This dissertation enacts Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional” heuristic model for individual and collective remembrance. It also probes tensions embedded within the malleability and instability of historical memory through an investigation of the off-frame—namely, missing or marginalized images and testimonies. How does the intertextual layering of traumatic histories direct our attention to lesser-known events, like the October 17 and Charonne massacres, through the presence of revenants that haunt the off-frame? In what ways do the coexistence of different traumatic memories allow for each auteure’s iteration of the revenant to counteract “foreclosed” elements of France’s (post)colonial history? This dissertation is divided into four chapters. I begin with Leïla Sebbar and her novels Sherazade: Missing, Aged 17, Dark Curly Hair, Green Eyes and The Seine was Red: Paris, October 1961, published in 1991 and 2008, respectively. I then conclude with an analysis of one of Sebbar’s untranslated autobiographical texts, Journal de mes Algéries en France (2005). In this chapter, I examine the artistic medium of décollage—based on tearing away fragments of political posters rather than piecing them together—as a revenant of the author’s ruptured Franco-Algerian identity, as well as historically silenced events of the past, notably the October 17, 1961, massacre. Chapter Two shifts to cinema to focus on Diane Kurys’s 1977 film, Peppermint Soda, through which she deploys the technique of deframing to call attention to traumas pushed to the margins of the frame. I notably focus on snapshot photography and its representation of the family and the nation during France’s postwar era known as the Trente Glorieuses (The Glorious Thirty)—an era that obscured major historical events, such as French collaboration and the Charonne Massacre. The second half of this dissertation engages with a younger generation of auteures who reconsider legacies of the past and intergenerational transmission. Chapter Three focuses on Alice Zeniter’s 2017 novel, The Art of Losing, which recovers the long-obscured Harki memory—that of Algerians who fought in the French Army. Through her own rendition of auto-fiction, Zeniter deploys an anonymous narrator and substitutes digital media in place of the erasures that haunt her own family narrative. An analysis of Mati Diop’s 2019 film, Atlantics, concludes this dissertation. In Chapter Four, I investigate Diop’s rewriting of the zombie mythos in the form of a female revenant. I argue that these revenants embody the missing voices of migrants lost at sea, while bringing into focus other traumas, notably the transatlantic slave trade. Throughout this dissertation, I theorize the concept of the revenant to reframe our engagement in the work of memory and its archival representation, giving rise to a reconstruction of France’s historical past in which narratives pushed to the margins of collective memory are rendered visible.
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2024