Tactical Silence in the Novels of Malika Mokeddem

Tactical Silence in the Novels of Malika Mokeddem, an inquiry into how silence may be used to challenge a gender-differentiated power system, relies on Michel de Certeau’s model of strategies and tactics applied to a postcolonial assessment of both Algerian literature in French as well as Algerian women’s stereotyped silence. This book analyzes the relationship between tactical silence and freedom in the lives of Mokeddem’s female protagonists in all her novels, published between 1990 and 2008. The notion of deliberate silence also lends itself to a discussion of the reader’s efforts in comprehending Mokeddem’s textual silences as well as her exclusion of certain topics from her writings.