Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence

Abstract

EVEN BEFORE EDWARD SAID'S APPEARED SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO, Arab, French, and American scholars had begun to jostle keystone connecting knowledge and power in imperial edifice. Indeed, Anouar Abdel-Malek declared Orientalism in Crisis in 1963, as triumph of national liberation movements like Algeria's shook confidence of social scientists on both sides of Atlantic. In succeeding years, nowhere more than in scholarship on North Africa, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians criticized their predecessors for legitimizing colonial authority by depicting Muslims as an underdeveloped other. They recognized that orientalism could both reflect and reinforce inequality, ultimately serving as a coercive arm of state.' Since then, many more scholars have taken the historic turn, becoming increasingly critical of their disciplinary histories.2 At same time, new field of postcolonial studies has continued pursuit of orientalism, ranging ever further from institutions officially charged with preserving imperial power. Recoiling from elitism of official history, it would instead seek out voice of subaltern, or at least interrogate discourses that keep them silent. Following Said's lead in literary criticism, postcolonial scholars today catalog cultures of empire in novels and travel writing, museums and expositions, paintings and postcards-everywhere, it seems, but archives and personal papers of European and U.S. policymakers. Consequently, diplomats and high officials are becoming exotic other of postcolonial studies-passively receiving all