Josephine Baker Essay Prize

Our 2022 Josephine Baker prize for an undergraduate Honors thesis goes to Nova Meurice for Le Cri Écrit: Voice, Art, and the Archive in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia. Meurice, a member of Stanford’s class of 2022, is a Comparative Literature major with a concentration in French and Arabic contemporary literature. In Le Cri Êcrit, she examines a 1986 novel by the Algerian author and filmmaker Assia Djebar (1936-2015), who worked in both French and Arabic, entitled L’Amour, la fantasia. The semi-autobiographical work treats the French invasion and occupation of Algeria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), and the beginnings of a post-independence Algeria.  Meurice studies how Djebar uses a fictional imagination to supplement historical sources and to fill the silences in the French archives, particularly the absent voices of Algerian women. For instance, the novelist uses a series of oral histories in which women recount their experiences of the Algerian War of Independence. By moving between historical sources and informed fiction, Meurice shows, Djebar uses art to combine memory, testimony, speech, and writing, to bring different experiences of the past into history’s present, and thereby to create a foundation for a future in which absent voices become present.