Undoing Shame: Women Writing and Political Disidentification in Postcolonial France

Abstract

ABSTRACT By the end of French colonization of Algeria, a new population category had been produced, the harkis, often forced to assist the French army of occupation on Algerian territory prior to 1962. Then repatriated to France and relegated to internment camps, invisibilized on the national territory and administratively constituted as second-class citizens, and they took on the shame associated with an uninhabitable condition that was nonetheless transmitted from generation to generation until now. I look here at how those who describe themselves as “daughters of harkis” have opened up a double horizon of emancipation by writing: turning shame against itself to politicize a subjective condition from its own point of impossibility, and speaking from a position explicitly designated as feminine to free oneself from postcolonial prohibitions on existence.