Playing to the West only? Representations of Picasso, the gendered body, and Islamism in Kamel Daoud’s Le peintre dévorant la femme

This thesis explores Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s non-fictional text, Le peintre dévorant la femme (2018), which has been met with acclaim in French literary circles, winning various prizes. As the text explores a variety of questions relating to religious extremism, the meaning of art, death and eroticism, and the relationship between l’Occident - l’Orient through the visual aid of Picasso’s année érotique (1932), this thesis will use a postcolonial, feminist theoretical approach. It will also touch upon concepts relating to the visual, to explore how Daoud negotiates and performs his positionality in the Franco-Algerian discursive space and beyond. Central to this thesis is the notion of the hybridised public intellectual (Daoud) entering hybridised public spheres (Franco-Algerian and beyond) which undoubtedly has consequences for the plural readership existing within them. Indeed, another main concern of this thesis is to ascertain whether there is an imbalance in the text that means Daoud, subconsciously or not, speaks to particular sectors of his Western-French audience more so than his Muslim-Algerian ones. Split into three chapters; this thesis firstly aims to unpick how Daoud negotiates the relationship between aesthetics and politics in his non-fictional writing. It will attempt to show how Daoud’s public move to an essai in 2018 can be read as facilitating a conversation with more bourgeois, and potentially more republican, French reading publics. In the second and third chapters respectively, this thesis analyses Daoud’s representations of Picasso, Paris, the museum, and the gendered body in Western and Muslim societies. By doing so, it attempts to highlight how although Daoud appears to offer a ‘double-edged’ critique of Algeria since Independence and French neo-colonialism, his tendency to make generalisations about Islam sometimes unwittingly plays to French (and more widely, Western) Islamophobic assumptions.