'Postcolonial studies' have become increasingly popular in both the francophone and the anglophone context, but the concepts of diversity and difference upheld in this field remain a subject of contention. While some thinkers affirm that varying identities within the francophone world should be understood to constitute an array of specific groups, others assert that any such 'identities' are in reality interminably different from themselves. Conceptions of postcolonial resistance to centralised, republican identity waver between the urge to privilege an alternative, monologic subject position on the one hand, and liberation through the dissolution of all specified identity categories on the other. The focus of the postcolonial debate oscillates between notions of the difference between particular groups on the one hand, and reflection on differences within those groups and their singular members on the other. The apparently stark opposition between these two modes of thought demands, however, to be unsettled and rendered more subtle.

I want to use work of Assia Djebar, with reference also to the theories of Foucault, Derrida and Nancy, in order to rework the terms of this debate. Rather than championing exclusively either cultural specificity or endless internal difference, Djebar's work incorporates a tripartite struggle between the specific, the singular and the plural. First, Djebar's texts set out to unveil or conceive a feminine Algerian identity, rescuing Algerian women from occlusion both by French (neo)colonialism and by Islamic law and giving voice to their repressed specificity. Despite her belief in the necessity of this project, however, she finds that it is troubled on two levels. On the one hand, the desire to retrieve some particular essence results in the continual retreat of that essence, and the more the texts hope to uncover the more they inadvertently mask or hide. Algerian identity is replaced, therefore, with a sense of the intractable singularity of the occluded 'self'. Furthermore, this singularity is at times presented not as absolute but as composite, as the erasure of the subject is coupled with a proliferation of diverse traces and echoes. The quest for a different, self-contained identity intermittently dissolves, and Djebar displays 'postcolonial' experience in Algeria as a curious coalescence of intractable singularity and ongoing intercultural plurality.