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

Abstract

This research explores Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s 2018 non-fictional text, Le peintre dévorant la femme. The text addresses questions relating to religious extremism, the meaning of art, death and eroticism, and the relationship between l’Occident and l’Orient through the visual aid of Picasso’s 1932 Année érotique. Central to this research is the notion of the hybridized public intellectual (Daoud) entering hybridized public spheres (Franco-Algerian and beyond). The consequences of operating within a plural readership suggest that Daoud, subconsciously or not, speaks to particular sectors of his western-French audience more so than the Muslim-Algerian ones, risking an imbalance. This research unpicks how Daoud negotiates the relationship between aesthetics and politics in his non-fictional writing, showing how his public move to an essai in 2018 can be read as facilitating a conversation with more a bourgeois, and potentially more republican, French audience. It also 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 generalizations about Islam sometimes unwittingly plays to French (and more widely, western) Islamophobic assumptions.