This is the second part of a two day event: A workshop organized by the Cornell World Gender International Research Network.

To request workshop readings or further accommodations, please contact Elise Finielz (eff36@cornell.edu)

Tristan Leperlier is a tenured research fellow at the French CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, and Visiting scholar at Columbia university.

While France and the French language have long remained the mediators between North Africa and the USA, there have been exceptions that are worth studying. Among the few North African writers who gained recognition in the USA before elsewhere in the world, several of them happen to be women: Assia Djebar (1936-2015), Francophone Algerian; Leila Abouzeid (1950-), Arabophone Moroccan; and Laila Lalami (1968-), Anglophone Moroccan. How can we explain their literary success first in the USA? What is their place and reception in the US, as postcolonial Muslim women writers? In this workshop, we will discuss the results of a research focusing on the literary careers of these three internationally acclaimed North African women writers. The study of their trajectories includes book reviews, published in newspapers, academic journals, and social media; archival work conducted in some of their American publishing houses, and in the university departments where they had been invited to teach.