Remembering Algeria: melancholy, depression and the colonising of the pieds-noirs

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the end of colonial Algeria and the subsequent repatriation of the settler population as it was experienced and remembered by the settler (or pied-noir) repatriates in the aftermath of the Algerian war. It argues that the often hostile reception which awaited repatriates arriving in mainland France played a fundamental role in the nascent pied-noir community’s reimagining of its identity, which was shaped by nostalgia, grief and melancholia. Drawing on the work of Ann Cvetkovitch and Kelly Oliver, this article examines the figure of the melancholic as a sufferer not of a pathological malady, but as the object of socially constituted oppression. Using the work of Fanon, it argues that although the pieds-noirs were themselves widely received as colonisers by the metropolitan population, they were subject to a form of discrimination which re-created within the Hexagon the conditions of colonial oppression through the colonisation of psychic space. Drawing on literary works by pieds-noirs, the article traces the experiences of depression and melancholia amongst the repatriates, and conceptualises the pieds-noirs, not as either guilty colonisers or innocent victims, but as individuals in a site of post-colonial conflict in which the discursive categories of coloniser and colonised are renegotiated.