Algerian War Research Articles

From national park to cultural park an Algerian experience

The status of National park was adopted in Algeria in 1921, during French colonisation, within the framework of the forestry law in force. It was renewed as is, after 1962 by independent Algeria and placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture, in its general forestry directorate. In 1983, it was redefined in the first national law on the environment, then, from 2011, in that of protected areas, within the framework of sustainable development. All Algerian national parks are created under the forestry regime and agricultural administration, with the exception of a single case where they are attached to the cultural sector: that of Tassili and Ahaggar, both located in the extreme south of the Sahara, including the Tuareg customary domain of Kel Ajjer and Kel Ahaggar. A particular case, linked to the process of administrative construction of the Saharan space. It is following the adoption of paradigm of sustainable development and a new law on the protection of cultural heritage , that this particularism has disappeared, with the introduction of a new legal category of protection, called “parc culturel”, based on the principle of “indissociability” between culture and nature, an innovative notion which has not yet acquired the conceptual force necessary to achieve the required stabilization and social appropriation, hence the difficulty of its translation into operational tools.

Mighty Eagles and Mercenaries: Existentialism and War in Ghāda al-Sammān’s Early Short Stories

Abstract This article looks at the existentialist nature of Ghāda al-Sammān’s early short stories, with a particular focus on her very first collection, Aynāka qadarī (Your eyes are my destiny), published in 1962. Ghāda al-Sammān was born in Syria and widely celebrated for her novelistic career: this article gives centrality to two of her early short stories as they present narratives that intricately weave individual and collective struggles within the context of the Algerian war of independence. Analysing the interplay between overarching Arab causes, feminism and existential themes, this study explores the nuanced portrayal of characters grappling with the complexities of war, morality and personal redemption. The protagonists, often embodying dichotomous perspectives, symbolize dignity and barbarism, echoing existentialist principles. The article examines how al-Samman’s youthful perspective and Sartrean influences shape the narratives, offering readers a unique lens into the psychological and moral dimensions of conflict. By unravelling layers of existential struggle and political engagement, this analysis sheds light on the richness and relevance of al-Samman’s early works within the broader literary and philosophical landscape.

Suleiman Al-Nabulsi and His Position on Arab Nationalist Causes

This study addressed the position of Suleiman Al-Nabulsi on many Arab and national causes, as Al-Nabulsi is considered one of the men of Jordan had a prominent role in the Jordanian and Arab political life. His life reflected to a large extent the reality of political life and its interactions in the Jordanian arena and the Arab world at large ,this study aims to underline Al-Nabulsi ’s position regarding all causes at Jordanian and Arab national levels , such as the Palestinian situation, Arab unity, the Algerian revolution, the Baghdad Pact, the tripartite aggression against Egypt and other Jordanian and national causes, in addition to clarifying Al-Nabulsi ’s philosophy of national loyalty, which stems from principle of Arab existence unity. he is one of the prime ministers in Jordan who did not limit nationalism just at Jordan’s level , besides his role in the social reform that aims to attain more of democracy and opposition to foreign mandates which he considered as a form of colonialism (Al-Mousa, 1986, p. 57), and therefore it was natural that this philosophy will be in conflict with the philosophy of the state which aims to maintain its entity and independence ,the descriptive historical method was used that relies on the historical events as they appeared in their sources ,and to apply critical approach and analyze them in a scientific ,rational and neutral objectivity far from prejudice .the study reached many conclusions some of which are :the national philosophy of Al-Nabulsi that transcends the political and geographical boundaries of Jordan ,because he upholds the high values and ideals in his calculations ,and in fact he tried to subject reality to those values , also President Nasser’s ideas regarding unity has a great impact on his personality ,so he experienced a conflict between the loyalty to the country ,and the loyalty to Arab nationalism by president Nasser ,so naturally he saw no conflict between the two loyalties to the country on the one hand and the larger Arab nationalism on the other hand (Al-Mousa 1986 ,P 58 ), but the two loyalties complimented each other and he defended this concept until the last day of his life.

Progress and prejudice: rethinking Françoise Sagan’s legacy

Who better than Françoise Sagan to exhibit the privileges of the postwar White writer? This wealthy novelist, better known for her excesses than for her activism, appears very distant from the decolonial question, and it may seem inappropriate, even indecent, to associate her name with it. However, her literary career is guided by a struggle against discrimination and a stance in favor of social justice. Although her contribution has remained completely invisible, it is crucial to understand her literary journey. As a writer, Sagan denounced the segregation of African Americans, opposed the War in Algeria, advocated for gay rights, and took a position in favor of abortion as early as 1965. But what resonance did her voice have in the francophone landscape during the period of independence movements? This article aims to revisit the epistemological significance of a struggle overlooked today in postcolonial studies. Therefore, this study tackles the thorny question of the influence of the White writer through the analysis of Françoise Sagan.

Resistance and stylistic reverence: A typological study of colonial facades in Tlemcen (Algeria)

Abstract In Algeria, which was colonised for over a century, the arrival of the French colonisers led to the introduction of new architectural styles imported from Europe. This adoption of an exogenous style in a different cultural context was only made possible by French military domination. Importing and imposing a style was not always easy, as Algerian resistance was as much stylistic and socio-cultural as it was military. To illustrate this point, we have taken the case of the historic city of Tlemcen (Northwest Algeria), where the French occupiers met with stylistic resistance complicating the achievement of their colonial project. Our research raises the following question: What forms of stylistic resistance are manifested in colonial architecture in the city of Tlemcen? Our aim is to identify the specific characteristics of colonial architecture in Tlemcen, in order to bring out the signs of stylistic resistance that testify to a desire to maintain a local cultural identity despite the colonial influence. The typological analysis of colonial facades serves as a tool and a means of providing in-depth understanding of architectural facades and typological classification in view of the diversity of styles and ornamentation of colonial facades in Tlemcen. This resistance manifests itself in European revivalism in Tlemcen, which involved an exceptional effort aimed simultaneously at composition and a search for stylistic anchorage and originality. It also manifested itself at the level of the native population, who stepped in to protect their cultural heritage and identity against the colonial authorities. Moreover, a certain form of stylistic reverence can be detected, expressed in avoiding pronounced aesthetic or stylistic expressions, favouring instead a more universal and timeless appearance.

Surrealism in the Shadow of the French–Algerian War

Surrealism in the Shadow of the French–Algerian War

Uncovering Silence: France’s Move to Reconciliation and the Depiction of Algerian Migrant Workers

In the catalogue Algériens en France: 1954–1962, la guerre, l’exil, la vie (2012), Benjamin Stora and Linda Amiri represent the lives of Algerian labourers and their struggles in the shantytowns around Paris during the Algerian War for Independence. From 1954 to 1962, the Algerian population in France rose sharply; yet, the workers were silenced in the national story until 2001, on the fortieth anniversary of the 17 October 1961 massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters in Paris. This article examines works that move Algerian migrant workers into the spotlight while considering historian Benjamin Stora’s 2021 report Les Questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d’Algérie . This article analyzes how formal reconciliation work functions in the memorialization of Algerian migrant workers in France from the 1990s onwards, and how new memorial efforts embrace a discourse of silence and forgetting that effectively covers over the memory work that had already been undertaken.

Time Never Regained: Film, Memory and History in Mila Turajlić’s Labudović Reels

Abstract The article reviews the documentary film diptych The Labudović Reels by film-maker Mila Turajlić. Based on her archival work at the Filmske Novosti production company, Turajlić discovers the legacy of hitherto unknown cinematographer Stevan Labudović. Both films are hybrid documentaries that combine archive footage with interview-style documentary, and both focus on two intertwined thematic cycles – Labudović’s coverage of the Algerian war of independence (1959–1961) and the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (1960–1961). Conceptually, Turajlić’s films engage thought-provoking matrixes, among them Pierre Nora’s lieux de memoire and, more especially, Walter Benjamin’s reflections on historical progress. This review finds that the implementation of the latter blurs the boundary between the critique of the idea of progress and historical relativism, which leads to the confusing presence of mutually exclusive voices in Turajlić’s film, one calling for the reappropriation of the past, and another calling that same past into question.

Colonial prejudices and decolonization complexes according to Sartre

For Jean-Paul Sartre, the oppressor breaks intersubjective solidarity and transforms the oppressed into an Other, fearing him and making him strange. It’s paradoxical since the colonizer is the one who “creates” the Other based on prejudice. This proposal follows a textual analysis focused on the essence of the colonial prejudice of the oppressor and on the complexes of liberation and independence of the oppressed peoples in the decolonization process. The objectives are: a) to highlight Sartre’s contribution to understanding colonial prejudices and decolonization complexes, as well as the position taken by the author against the war in Algeria and in favour of the colonial liberation movements in Africa; b) substantiate the position of respect for the Other as a fundamental question of an ethics of alterity.

Ahmed BEDJAOUI, (2020). Cinema and the Algerian War of Independence

Ahmed BEDJAOUI, (2020). Cinema and the Algerian War of Independence

Lawyers, Archivists, and the Turn to Transparency in the French State

In 2021, the French government commissioned two reports on episodes of extreme violence involving France's past: the Algerian War and the Rwandan genocide. Both reports grapple with how “the past haunts the present and the future,”3 a theme that is central to Karen Knop's scholarly legacy. In both reports, legal, historical, and archival expertise are positioned to redraw and recast relations of France to Africa. We argue that the reports’ focus on the role of a particular class of experts (namely archivist and historians, rather than lawyers) reflects France's current approach to narrating historical injustice, emphasizing public memory of violent pasts, rather than legal responsibility of the French state.

Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence by Mani Sharpe (review)

Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence by Mani Sharpe (review)

Codzienność rozszczelniona. O "Codziennej walce" Manu Larceneta

In the proposed reading of Manu Larcenet’s Le Combat Ordinaire, everyday life appears not only as the setting of the story but also its fundamental—though by no means obvious, despite the abundance of everyday life imagery and motifs—theme. In Larcenet’s unspectacular narration, conducted in a tone oscillating between buffo and serious, human day-to-day affairs, obscured by the facade of ritual, appear as an effort, a task to complete, a risk to be taken, a problem of existence in the “cracks” of which the most important experiences occur, defined by the dialectics of life and death, health and illness, nature and culture, order and disorder.
 The article presents an analysis of the key dimensions of this “everyday struggle:” from the textual game whose stake is the axiology of everyday life (the issue of intimate diary, the value of journalism as a profession), to the sense of locality and the construction of identity based on memory and postmemory, to use Marianne Hirsch’s concept (references to the war in Algeria). The interpretation of Larcenet’s graphic novel was carried out based on three premises: (1) the everyday settles into fiction thanks to mimesis; (2) contact with everyday life may lead to an epiphanic revelation of a spiritual truth (drawing on Jolanta Brach-Czaina’s concept described in her philosophical essay Szczeliny istnienia [Cracks in Existence], this phenomenon can be called the “unsealing” of everyday life); (3) literary depictions of human daily existence are where literature and sociology intersect, as a result of which literary works (or, comics in this case) help reveal the structures of everyday life.

DECENTRING WESTERN FEMINISM AND MANLY NATIONALISM

Gender based segregations either in public and private spheres have been recurrent problem for women in Western world, however the cases of women in the “Third World” highlight the ways in which race and gender intersect, exemplifying a double form of oppression. This intersection also functions between colonialism (external) and local patriarchy (internal) mechanisms that control women as in the case of Algerian women. This article considers the ways in which Algerian women reformulated the ways of decolonising Western feminism and nationalism in the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). As such, this paper looks at the distinct perspective, created by Algerian women with an emphasis on their implicit contribution to Western feminist scholarship. By veiling and unveiling interchangeably for national liberation movement against France, Algerian women deviate from the very definitions of Western feminism and challenges patriarchal notions of nationalism. The strategic albeit voluntary act of unveiling earns them a space that is self-representative. This space also represents the backbone of national liberation movement where colonial gaze on women, and control on men in Algeria were contested. The paper concludes that Algerian women can successfully cross national and colonial borders, and hence create a space that is beyond the definitions of Western feminist scholarship, and beyond the demands of colonial authority. The theoretical background of this paper is mainly based on the ideas proposed by Chandra Mohanty, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak to explore insights from transnational feminism and postcolonial theory regarding gender and nationalism.

Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence. By Mani Sharpe

<i>Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence</i>. By Mani Sharpe

Anarchist Prisoner Networks in Franco’s Spain and the Forging of the New Left in Europe

This article explores the little-known but formative networks developing across the 1960s between anarchist political prisoners in Franco's Spain and emerging activists of the European New Left. As social change accelerated, these prisoners broke with the out-of-touch anarchist leadership-in-exile to connect with a new generation of activists inside and outside Spain. The article uses prisoner correspondence and prisoner-aid bulletins to reconstruct these informational networks, and argues they were an important element in the ‘global rupture of 1968’. It posits that anarchist prisoners’ input was a formative influence on how New Left activists came to see post-war Europe as a whole: both looked beneath Francoism's consumerist surface (habitually foregrounded in discussions of it as a Western client regime), to its reconfigured repressive core. The article discusses key discursive shifts by the anarchist prisoners as they sought international support in a new era of decolonization, ‘national liberation’ and the ramping up of the Cold War. In a landscape shaped by Castro's success in Cuba, war in Algeria and the birth of ETA inside Spain, anarchist prisoners and New Left activists alike defined Franco's political prisoners as victims not only of a national dictatorship but also of the Western Cold-War order.

Memory in action: Reflections on multidirectionality’s possibilities in the classroom

Our essay examines the use of multidirectional memory in three different classrooms and institutions. It reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a multidirectional framework for Europeanists seeking to teach students how to identify and/or commemorate historical linkages between minoritized groups, encourage students to develop bonds of solidarity among themselves, and diversify and globalize their syllabi. Reading authors such as W.E.B Du Bois, Amié Césaire, and William Gardener Smith through a multidirectional lens helped students place events such as the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Algerian Revolution in conversation with one another while staying attuned to the spaces between particularist and universalist readings of the past. Discussing media sources such as films La Haine and Battle of Algiers within this larger multidirectional context give students a frame with which to imagine alternative trajectories of memory and solidarity in Europe. Finally, by applying their understanding of multidirectional memory to a real-life scenario in a commemorative proposal, students attempt to grasp the never-finished complexities of creating liberatory, solidarity-based historical commemorations. We argue that the concept of multidirectional memory helps students to develop a stronger sense of investment in learning about the complex historical legacies of persecution of violence and to engage more critically with the competitive memory frameworks that remain dominant in contemporary political discourse about antisemitism and racism.

Going beyond the guerre des mémoires in theatrical representations of the Algerian War

ABSTRACT This article examines the ‘guerre des mémoires’ that has defined the memorial landscape surrounding the Algerian War and seen it mired it in a competitive memory dynamic that Benjamin Stora terms ‘une surenchère victimaire’. It argues that since the fiftieth anniversary of independence in 2012 there are signs of attempts to move beyond the impasse. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Anna Cento Bull, the article examines two recent plays that adopt contrasting approaches to the aim of representing conflicting experiences of the war. Et le cœur fume encore features elements of Rancerian thought, emphasising the multiplicity of conflicting experiences, and interrupting viewer empathy through distancing techniques that disengage actor from character to defer empathetic engagement until the full complexity of post-war experience is made available. In contrast, Les Pieds tanqués works to create an entente between audience and characters that emphasises not only division but also the culture and humour that unites protagonists from different backgrounds.

North African immigration in France: The aftermath of the Algerian War in graphic narratives Les Mohamed and Une Famille Nombreuse

The Algerian War (1954–62) has had a lasting impact on Arabs living in France since the First World War, whether they are Algerians or not. This article focuses on North African immigrants and ethnic minority lived experiences using Les Mohamed by Jérôme and Une Famille nombreuse by Chadia Chaibi , two graphic narratives that depict the North African immigrants’ contribution to a more diverse French history and the family/communities’ memories. Throughout this article, I analyse the various framing strategies used in Les Mohamed and Une Famille nombreuse that seek to change French readers’ perception of the North African identity and ultimately speak against the myth of cultural assimilation. By telling personal stories, Ruillier and Loueslati succeed at creating a collective memory that promotes a discourse in favour of integration. By designing his characters in a minimalist fashion, Ruillier combats existing stereotypes and invites his readers from diverse backgrounds to identify with the characters. By using humour and metatextual comments from her siblings, Loueslati emphasizes the diversity of immigrant and second-generation experiences. Using those framing strategies, both authors expose the normalcy of mistreatments and discrimination towards immigrants and their descendants in France.

La guerre sans nom, la guerre sans visage : Amnesia and Mutilation in Japrisot’s Piège pour Cendrillon

Abstract: Sébastien Japrisot’s novel Piège pour Cendrillon , written in 1962, just at the end of the Algerian War, revolves around the identity of a young woman who awakens with total amnesia and badly burned by a fire. I propose that through this novel of investigation, Japrisot is most interested in representing the paradoxes of a changing French national identity complicated by France’s wartime crimes and its ultimate relinquishment of l’Algérie française . It is through images of amnesia and mutilation that this novel speaks to the anxieties that the French soldiers and public experienced during the war.