French colonial publications and their situated re-presentations of native Algerian leadership (late 1840s–1860s)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores new ways to fruitfully investigate French colonial expedition diaries and memoirs, and help deconstruct what their authors framed as ‘historically accurate’ accounts of ‘pacification’ during the violent French military colonization of Algeria. How can we use such problematic sources in the absence of subaltern voices to counter the master narratives of these mid-nineteenth-century publications? As a way of reading them against the grain, this article proposes to shift the focus from their discursive representations of the colonized Other to the authors’ situated re-presentations of native Algerian chiefs and the embodied performance of their leadership. Such a performance-oriented approach with attention to acoustics is presented here as a perspective that may help differentiate between the colonial writers’ socio-cultural habitus and their political strategy when it comes to their misinterpretations of native Algerian expressions of loyalty and resistance. As (former) high-ranking officers and officials attached to the French army’s administrative sister institution (the bureaux arabes), or as novelists and interpreters joining the military campaigns, these authors claimed to rely on their own ear- and eyewitness accounts when describing what (a)political Arab or Berber leadership looked and sounded like. By exploring their representations of speech, silence, and performance during these encounters, we can trace the mechanisms by which they artificially separated spiritual and political authority, and ultimately failed to grasp how power worked in the colony.