Habiba Djahnine: Memory Bearer
- Author Name: Sheila Petty
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication Date: 2025
- ISBN: 9781474439992
About the Book
Focusing on the contemporary Algerian feminist documentary filmmaker Habiba Djahnine, this book examines her role as a ‘memory-bearer’ who gives voice to her compatriots, enabling them to tell their own stories in her films. It provides the reader with exposure to key issues in contemporary Algerian culture and history (colonialism, the Algerian War, the Black Decade of the 1990s), and women’s and human rights. Habiba Djahnine: Memory Bearer gives a brief overview of Algerian cinema and Algerian women filmmakers, and situates Djahnine’s oeuvre and its significance within the North African context. While examining her work as a feminist, teacher and poet and how she transmits this locally and transnationally, the book also explores how Djahnine uses documentary film form for personal and autobiographical explorations of Algerian memory and trauma.
About the Author
Sheila Petty is professor emerita of film studies at the University of Regina. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity and nation in African and African diasporic screen media, and has curated film, television and digital media exhibitions for art galleries across Canada. She is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema, and co-editor of Directory of World Cinema: Africa. Her research focuses on manifestations of cultural heritage in screen media, especially sub-Saharan African, North African and Amazigh cinemas. Her most recent books are: Habiba Djahnine: Memory Bearer (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), and African Film Festivals and Transnational Flows of Living Cultural Heritage (editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). She is currently completing a book entitled Moroccan Amazigh Cinema and Cultural Heritage: History, Identity, and Representation for Bloomsbury Academic, Inc.