The I truths is an other: landascape, desert, and alterity in Isabelle Eberhardt

Abstract

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) is one of the travelers of the Nineteenth Century that arouses more interest on criticic and historiography. His diaries, unpublisheds until his tragic death in a flood in the Algerian desert, proposes several problems to the genre of travel literature. A gender reconstruction, narrated often in an male voice, she traveled the desert dressed as a man; an intricate and problematic relationship with alterity, in their relations with the natives and the French colonial power, which she was opposed, but which she also helped by his friendship with Marshal Lyautey; a complex relationship with the landscape of the Algerian desert, which it often serves to produce a mystical and tormented character. This project aims to interpret their travel diary to the Algerian countryside, this African hinterland, and its travestism serves for the development of its performativity of gender and its relationship with otherness in the colonial and Muslim world.