Algerian Nationalism Research Articles

The Partisan Psychiatrist

ABSTRACT: Frantz Fanon's stature swelled in the late 1950s as he crisscrossed the nascent Third World, winning support for the Algerian nationalist cause. As a member of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the party fighting a war of independence against Algeria's French colonial rulers, Fanon held a dizzying number of responsibilities: he provided psychiatric treatment to FLN fighters; he helped produce the party's official newspaper; he delivered lectures on philosophy and history to soldiers at the front; and he traveled across the African continent as a formal ambassador for the provisional Algerian government-in-exile, raising political and financial capital for the revolutionary movement.

Public Liberty Appeals in Algerian Political Nationalism and French Anti-Colonialism Discourse (1919-1954)

In this contribution we have tried to follow through political discourse stemming from Algerian nationalist parties as well as progressive French political organizations and anti-colonial appeals within the frame of a colonial protection for access to public liberty By trying to give a glance at the idea of public liberty among the Algerian political elite before the first war beforehand; and the different historical stages, during which appeals have become more and more radical until total rupture happening with the start of the Algerian Liberation war.

Entangled migration states: mobility and state-building in France and Algeria

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of ‘entangled migration states’ as a means of highlighting the centrality of migration governance to state-building processes, the constitution of state sovereignty, and interstate relations. Drawing on the example of France and Algeria, it demonstrates the key role that migration played in three phases of state-building: the colonial period of Algérie française; the Algerian nationalist independence movement; and postcolonial state-building. In the case of France and Algeria, at least three actors constructed and instrumentalised migration and mobility regimes as sources of power and control – the French imperial state; the non-state Algerian independence movement; and the newly sovereign postcolonial Algerian state. A focus on the entangled nature of migration management allows for a deeper historicisation of contemporary migration regimes and draws attention to the central role played by migration diplomacy and transnational governmentality in contemporary migration management regimes, thus calling into question some of the spatial assumptions undergirding the ‘migration state’ concept. The article traces the evolution of mobility patterns and control in the Franco-Algerian case; their relationship to state-building processes; and the implications for rethinking the ‘migration state’.

The role of the Ibrahimi educational reform in preserving the constituents and characteristics of the Algerian origins

Return to Algeria's history from the beginning to the middle of s 19 to mid 20 s, makes us stand at a critical juncture for Algeria, where clearly reflected an effort when working on removing the French occupation the Algerian nation khssoiat. Which is what Unger about the emergence of elite Algerian intellectuals worked on viruses identification schemes marginalization and distortions which set her France, which worked on the blur of language, religion, customs, beliefs, and even cultural attitudes. It was Bashir Mohamed Brahimi "one of Algeria who they embody an educational reform policy tutorial according to Algerian Islamic Arabic elements. By reviving the broadcasting assets, competencies, individual privacy and Algerian society.Which we will disclose in this article.

THE IMPACT OF FACEBOOK IN SPREADING HEALTH AWARENESS DURING THE THIRD WAVE OF THE CORONA VIRUS IN ALGERIA A FIELD STUDY ON A SAMPLE OF FACEBOOK USERS IN ALGERIA

After the Algerian woman was respectable and protected during the Ottoman period, her status declined to the bottom during the colonial era. She became a traitor to backwardness and sorcery. She suffered from ignorance, poverty and ill-treatment, which made matters worse than colonialism. , Which prevented it from a decent human life. The Algerian reform movement rose up blessed, diagnosed its diseases, and tried to address the bad reality imposed on it, through education and composition, to play its role in society. AlShehab, the mouthpiece of the reformists in Algeria, has written many articles explaining the situation of women, and providing effective solutions to their social and cultural problems within the framework of her great reform project to promote the Algerian nation's stagnation, backwardness and long-standing neglect.

The Stora Report

ABSTRACT With the approach of the sixtieth anniversary of the Evian Accords that brought an end to the Algerian War, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, commissioned the historian, Benjamin Stora, to prepare a report on the evolution of relations between the two countries since the independence of Algeria. Stora, born in Algeria in 1950, is one of the most productive French historians of the Algerian nationalist movement, author of many studies of the wartime period and its aftermath. Relations between the two countries have often been strained, and observers note that there has been little reconciliation of the traumas of colonization and the exodus of the European pied-noir population in 1962. Predictably the Stora Report has proved controversial. The paper will analyse the context, the content, and the reception of the report on the two shores of the Mediterranean.

The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East

The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East

Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France Since 1954

Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France Since 1954

“Algiers and the Algerian Desert”: Decolonization and the Regional Question in France, 1958–1962

This article demonstrates how Algerian decolonization played a key role in shaping the discipline of territorial planning (aménagement du territoire) in metropolitan France. A number of liberal economists, including François Perroux, articulated notions of economic space that eschewed the nation-state as a unit of analysis. In colonial Algeria, this discourse was subsequently adopted by officials who sought to integrate Muslim Algerians into the French Republic. Discussions on territorial planning in late colonial Algeria echoed debates in the United States regarding the “social uplift” of African Americans in the South, which also attempted to stem the rising tide of separatism. In the 1950s, liberal understandings of the relationship among cultural specificity, territorial scale, and economic development were challenged by a host of actors, including Algerian nationalists who espoused ideas that would later appear in the analyses of world systems theorists. After the victory of the Algerian FLN (Front de libération nationale) in 1962, discussions on regional identities provided an important tool for political claims on both sides of the Mediterranean. Moreover, techniques of territorial planning developed in Algeria were imported to the Hexagon in the aftermath of Algerian independence.

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's <i>Gardiennes d'images</i>

The position of the Algerian national movements on the Palestinian issue (1936- 1948)

The aim of this study is to show the Algerian National Movement's position towards the Palestinian Issue in a specific period, i.e. 1948, and to show that the fall of Algeria under French occupation has not distracted Algeria's attention from the Arab issues, particularly the Palestinian Cause. The study is also an attempt to show the Algerians attitude to the Palestinian cause, for this is a critical cause which is of great concern, not only to the Palestinians but to the whole Arab region. This attitude shows the political awareness of early risks arising from the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. This study showed that the Algerian interest towards the Palestinian issue was not only religious due to the sanctity of the place, but it was a blend where Arabism and Islam become mingled. This study will show that the position of the Algerian nationalist movements towards the Palestinian cause, has deepened Algeria's correlation with the Arab East issues, despite the attempts of colonialism in all its forms for the fragmentation of the Arab region, and for the occupancy of each country with its internal crises, and not outside its borders.

“Purely Artistic”

Following World War II, French police surveillance in Algeria increasingly focused on the threat of Algerian nationalism and policing theater proved no exception. The police assiduously investigated the contents of plays and the background of performers, seeking to determine whether a performance could be considered “purely artistic.” In cracking down on theater, the police attempted to produce “pro-French” art that could influence Algerian loyalties, a cultural civilizing mission carried out by the unlikely figure of the beat cop. Ultimately, their mission failed. Live performances presented an opportunity for spontaneity and improvisation that revealed the weakness of colonial policing. In this article, I argue that in trying to separate art from politics, the police created an impossibly capacious idea of the political, giving officers justification for inserting themselves into intimate moments of daily life. The personal, the interpersonal, and the artistic became a realm of police intervention.

The Layers of History Beneath Algeria's Protests

One of the essential tasks of the movement is to reconstitute a richer tapestry of Algerian nationalism than has been permitted since independence.

Star Faces and Star Bodies in an Age of Atrocity: Alain Cavalier’s L’Insoumis and Mark Robson’s Les Centurions

Abstract Often physically flawless to the point of perfection, cinematic stars are frequently metaphorized as gods, or mirrors, of our own collective desires. But why would the iconography of stardom be mobilized to narrate a socio-political phenomenon defined by absolute violence — for example, the war that raged between the French army and Algerian nationalists from 1954 to 1962? Through detailed analysis of Alain Cavalier’s 1964 polar, L’Insoumis, and Mark Robson’s combat film, Les Centurions (1966), this article will trace connections between the history of decolonization and political engagement, and theories of identification, gender, stardom, and spectacle, before examining how the contradictory values embodied by stars in these films mirrored the ideology of a society in a state of contradiction: split between a desire to know the truth about the war and a desire for ignorance.

Thinking about the ‘historical heritage’: a question of incoherence

ABSTRACT Oran’s inhabitants have been discussing patrimony for many years. They are now insisting that it is urgent to preserve the urban sector of Sidi El Houari. According to Oran’s Master Plan for Urban Development, Sidi El Houari includes many very dilapidated neighbourhoods in various states of ruin. The architecture of the area’s very precisely aligned buildings is predominantly Spanish and French and reflects the determination of the colonial population of the time to reproduce European urbanism in Algeria so that they could feel at home there. In this essay, I suggest that we consider Sidi El Houari to be our historical heritage rather than our patrimoine. This was an area in which only the occupiers lived during the colonial era and from which Algerians were excluded. In other words, Sidi El Houari tells a very incomplete story about Algerians because most of its rare historical Arabo-Muslim vestiges have been significantly transformed. I have argued that preservation should have begun in M’dina Jdida, which should be considered a patrimony. First known as Madinat al-Hdar (the place of city dwellers) and later the village nègre, M’dina Jdida became a stronghold of Algerian nationalism. We need to examine both Sidi El Houari and M’dina Jdida if we are to appreciate the technical know-how and architectural interest of the constructions there.

Re-remembering Third Worldism: An Affirmative Critique of National Liberation in Algeria

This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a number of Algerian intellectuals. By taking Algeria as a privileged locus of investigation, the discussion zooms into a specific context of Third Worldism, the Algerian War and the decade after, therefore focusing on the period between the 1950s and the 1970s. Here I understand Third Worldism to mean more than the instantiation of the postcolonial state through anticolonial liberation struggles. Rather, I take into consideration (Algerian) voices that push against the rigid boundaries of methodological nationalism and postcolonial theory. By embracing the ethos of ‘affirmative critique,’ the analysis aims to bring to light those ‘forgotten, hidden or invisible acts of critique’ that expose under-currents of Third Worldism not usually discussed or engaged. Thus, I engage writings of rarely considered Third World intellectuals, such as Kateb Yacine, Jean Amrouche, Jean Senac. These are all Algerian intellectuals; the reason behind this focus is the following: their involvement in Algeria’s decolonization struggles translated into translocal solidarity with other decolonization projects, whether in Vietnam or in Palestine. Aside from gesturing toward a translocal spatiality, their writings also embody a more genuine retrieval of dignity by the colonized, and an alternative memory of a different Algerian nation, intrinsically plural and hospitable to difference. Put differently, these voices both attempt a kind of diagnosis (however partial and incomplete) for the reductionism into which the Third World liberation state (inevitably) fell, while suggesting an alternative political horizon that comes closer to Fanon’s idea of ‘national consciousness’, especially in its attention to the ‘international dimension.’1

Fanon’s Police Inspector

Frantz Fanon practiced psychiatry in a colonized Algeria during its struggle for independence. In his 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon described cases from his treatment of Algerian nationalists and French colonists. I present one of Fanon’s cases as an ethical inquiry into posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A French police inspector, who is employed in torture, visits Fanon with symptoms of PTSD after escalating domestic violence. The patient asks Fanon “to help him torture … with a total peace of mind.” Is it possible to treat the inspector in a meaningful way? More broadly, how might researchers and clinicians balance collective responsibilities to individual symptoms and social conditions? The answer depends on how trauma is framed: as disorder of meaning-making or circuit dysfunction, as individual illness or social rupture, as potentially gendered and racialized. These framings can reveal different views on the allocation of responsibility for the causation, expression and management of PTSD. I do not propose that it is inherently immoral to modify traumatic memories; nor do I question the efficacy of individual interventions. Rather, I ask whether PTSD has a social meaning that transcends individual comfort in decision making about erasure. What do individual interventions accomplish in the absence of concurrent political and social transformations? I argue that a holistic understanding of PTSD entails a set of social obligations: to address at its root political, gendered, and racialized violence, to repudiate occupations centered on exploitative manipulation of individuals and cultures, and to social change that prioritizes these commitments.

Tracing the shadows of Occupation: memory as ‘screen’ in La Dénonciation (1962) and Tu ne tueras point (1961/1963)

ABSTRACT Despite ravaging the minds of a generation of young French men threatened with the prospect of death-in-combat, the Algerian War—which tore through the landscape of French colonial Algeria from 1954 to 1962—has consistently been described as a ‘forgotten’ conflict, which left precious little trace of its trauma in the vectors of metropolitan, collective memory. Typically, scholars have tended to conceptualise this amnesia as a symptom of three main factors: political hagiography (see, for example, the work of Henry Rousso), modernisation (Kristin Ross), and censorship (Benjamin Stora). This article does not aim to challenge the elemental premise upon which this scholarship is founded—that the Algerian War was indeed forgotten by large swathes of French society—but rather dilates the scope of this inquiry in order to include an ambivalent obsession with the Second World War that arose at precisely the point at which Algerian nationalists began to stake their claim for independence. In the first part of this article, we will therefore explore how this obsession manifests itself in the sublimated landscape of Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s La Dénonciation (1962), before shifting our attention to Claude Autant-Lara’s mystifying portrayal of post-World War Two pacifism, Tu ne tueras point (1961/1963).

THE PARTY OF GOD: THE ASSOCIATION OF ALGERIAN MUSLIM ʿULAMAʾ IN CONTENTION WITH THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT AFTER WORLD WAR II

AbstractScholarship has long held that Islamic reform was a preparatory stage for nationalism in the Muslim world. In challenge to this view, this article shows how in the context of 20th-century Algeria Islamic reformers and nationalists continued to maintain distinct political ideas, visions, and projects. The article examines the internal framework of the Association of Algerian Muslim ʿUlamaʾ, an Islamic reform movement founded in 1931 when Algeria was under French colonial rule, and its interactions with other local movements, especially the Algerian nationalist movement. Through a comparison of the discourse of the Algerian ʿulamaʾ to that of the nationalists, it argues that while both groups claimed to be successors of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, their understanding of politics (siyāsa) was different. Whereas the ʿulamaʾ associated politics with their own spiritual leadership, the nationalists associated it with institutions. The study situates these distinct visions within the post–World War II historical context, in which the expanding nationalist movement undermined the ʿulamaʾ’s popular appeal.

(Auto)biographic Algerian Travels of Albert Camus and Assia Djebar

Author(s): Breen, Gina Marie | Abstract: Algerian born French writers Albert Camus and Assia Djebar both employ their memories and experiences, and those of their family and friends, within French-Algerian landscapes, to construct travel narratives that blend myth with reality. Albert Camus’ Le Premier Homme, published posthumously in 1994, is a blend of fiction and non-fiction that can be described as a semi-autobiographical novel. Le Blanc de l’Algerie, published in 1995 by Assia Djebar, is a memoire on loss. Although written four decades apart and published one year apart, together their descriptions of physical and mental voyages demonstrate their unique representations of Algeria pre and post independence.For Camus, writing during the colonial period, his Algerian journey is both literal and imaginary. For Djebar, having published before and after independence, this particular journey of the nineties describes Islamist conflict and civic turmoil and is predominantly political. In Le Premier Homme Camus, a pied-noir of French and Spanish ancestry talks about his impoverished childhood but he specifically contrasts his early travels in Algeria with his later travels from France to his former Algerian homeland in a deliberate attempt to trace his roots and visit his father’s grave. In Le Blanc de l’Algerie Djebar, of Arab and berber origin, discusses the final journeys of her fellow Algerian friends and writers who lost their lives during the Algerian Civil War.Travel within Algeria and between Algeria and France enables Camus and Djebar to discuss the effects of colonization and decolonization on their lives and the lives of their friends and families. I will demonstrate how travel facilitates their narratives to and from the Algerian nation as they expose the hybrid identities that exist in French-Algeria. Indeed, their travelling through Algerian space and time allows them to re-appropriate Algeria and overcome identity crises and displacement associated with their homeland.