Demarginalizing the Margins: Gender, Agency, and Nostalgia for French Algeria in Carnets d’Orient (Jacques Ferrandez, 2011)

Abstract

Representations of the Other, particularly the racialized and gendered Other remains problematic for many artists, particularly in the context of representing aspects of French colonialism. This is notably the case for French pied-noir artists who set out to retrospectively tell the history of colonial Algeria. Jacques Ferrandez, a francophone pied-noir graphic novelist, published his series Carnets d’Orient between 1987 and 2009. In the second cycle, there is one single, recurring female Algerian character named Samia who will be the focus of this article. A close analysis of Samia’s representation illustrates the degrees to which the artist exploits the medium’s specificities in order to influence the message received by their readers. The reader is required to be an active co-creator and becomes implicated from an ethical point of view in that they are asked to reflect critically on their own subjectivity and biases. In the case of Carnets d’Orient, while a reading in which the Algerian woman’s agency is foregrounded is possible, we will see that instead of giving a voice to the female Algerian character, the white male pied-noir author uses her to voice a plaintive nostalgia for an Algeria which according to some “could have been.”

Keywords:

• Algeria
• War
• Gender Studies
• Jacques Ferrandez
• Carnets d’Orient
• bande dessinée

Notes

1 A standard BD is typically 46 pages, printed in A4 format, double-sided in quadri-chrome.

2 For more on this concept see McCloud.

3 Loosely based on the real historical figure Jean-Joseph Constant who travelled to Morocco in 1872.

4 Ferrandez chooses to call her “une arabe,” rather than Berber, which either indicates a blind spot in his understanding of both cultures, or further problematizes the way he represents Samia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elke Defever

Elke Defever is a Ph.D. student at the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests center around the representation of the feminine in francophone graphic novels and cinema in the context of the French colonization of Algeria, the French-Algerian war and its aftermath. She studies female characters in the stories as well as the presence of women in the production of graphic novels.