Arianna Robertson ’23 recently presented her Emerson grant research project at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) convention in Baltimore, Maryland.
Robertson presented her project titled “Colonialism, Composition, and Concession: Representations of Language and History in Postcolonial French-Algerian Women’s Autofictions” in NeMLA’s Undergraduate Forum and Poster Session. The theme for this year’s convention was “Care.”
In her research with Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies Claire Mouflard, Robertson focused on autofictions written by Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, Malika Mokeddem, and Nina Bouraoui, and found that the authors chose to write in French — as opposed to Arabic — as a means to rewrite Algeria’s colonial history from their bicultural perspectives, and to establish their female postcolonial literary identities.
