Browsing by Author "Schneider, Annedith"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Citation Count: 0
In the Father’s House: Language and Violence in the Work of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar
(2018) Schneider, Annedith
This essay examines autobiographical writing by two women who grew up in colonial Algeria; it considers how the relationship between fathers and daughters is marked by linguistic conflict. For each of these writers, language is not a simple tool, but instead a problematic inheritance that shapes her world and her relationship with her father. Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar, who were children in colonial Algeria of the late 1940s and early 1950s, examine their relationships to Arabic and French in terms of their relationships with their families and in particular with their schoolteacher fathers. The fathers, who benefitted from French colonial education, fail to understand the different risks inherent for their daughters in transgressing conservative community and linguistic boundaries. Each writer, even as she acknowledges the benefits of the colonizer’s language, also describes the language as a scene of violent trauma for which she holds her father responsible. With language and paternal love so tightly entwined, this essay argues that even in highly politicized colonial contexts, the national value of a language can only be understood if the familial and personal value of the language is also taken into account.
Citation Count: 0
Literature of Immigration as a Literature of Europe
(Sage Publications Ltd, 2016) Schneider, Annedith
Any understanding of European literature that does not include immigrant literature results in an incomplete vision of literature created in Europe. As immigrant writers have sought to find a place for themselves and their writing the labels attached to that writing have been crucial. While such debates certainly have to do with the writers themselves and how they seek to have their writing read they also reflect an anxiety in Europe about what counts as European literature and not incidentally who counts as European. To examine these issues this article takes the example of the work of Franco-Turkish writer Sema Klckaya. In contrast to the usual French fear of communautarisme which signals for many the fragmentation of society along ethnic and religious lines the article argues that Klckaya's writing provides another model for national and European belonging one that depends perhaps paradoxically on sub-national and local belonging - in both the country of origin and the country of settlement.
Citation Count: 2
Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home in France
(Manchester University Press, 2016) Schneider, Annedith
Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home in France argues for a cultural, rather than a sociological or economic, approach to understanding how immigrants become part of their new country. In contrast to the language of integration or assimilation which evaluates an immigrant's success in relation to a static endpoint (e.g. integrated or not), 'settling' is a more useful metaphor. Immigrants and their descendants are not definitively 'settled', but rather engage in an ongoing process of adaptation. In order to understand this process of settling, it is important to pay particular attention to immigrants not only as consumers, but also as producers of culture, since artistic production provides a unique and nuanced perspective on immigrants' sense of home and belonging, especially within the multi-generational process of settling. In order to anchor these larger theoretical questions in actual experience, this book looks at music, theatre and literature by artists of Turkish immigrant origin in France. © Annedith Schneider 2016. All rights reserved.