From Insurgent to Petitioner: Representational Shifts in Subaltern Resistance in the Late Nineteenth-Century French Colonial Context

Abstract

Abstract The first part of this essay addresses what a microhistory of petitions has to offer to subaltern studies. The second part illustrates this with a late nineteenth-century case-study revolving around a Kabyle man formerly belonging to the intermediate sphere between French-colonial and local Algerian society. Concretely, the focus lies on Ahmed ben Ali ben Aouadi and the political knowledge to which his 1888-petition to the French Chamber of Deputies and its chairman testified. This written interaction must be seen as an attempt to challenge the institutional framing of his family’s subaltern identity and to reclaim their property, confiscated by the French state. The third section of this essay reveals an interactive exchange between this colonial subject’s subaltern resistance and the institutional counter-resistance of the French colonizer’s legislative and executive authorities, which extended far beyond Aouadi’s second petition in 1892, and thus challenges our notions of political agency and success.