North African women and colonialism

Abstract

The paper traces the roots/routes of North African women's engagement with colonialism from the seventh-century CE Arab/Islamic incursions to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' European colonialism. While the colonial experiences were both multiple and heterogeneous throughout the region, the paper attempts to show how North African women happened upon similar episodes of exploitation, abuse, and retrogression albeit relatively. It also attempts to show how, in face of these very infringements, North African women offered powerful accounts of defiance, be it in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, or Egypt and how in so doing they proved to be agents of revolutionary change, countering as such colonial and/or oriental narrations of the passive, submissive North African woman.