Colonial Algeria Research Articles

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Algérie: le piège Gaulliste. Histoire secrète de l’indépendance

Charles de Gaulle is the most popular historical figure in France. He has consistently outperformed even Napoléon Bonaparte for the honour of the greatest Frenchman of all time in national polls. The approximately 4,000 French streets named after him attest to this. The General’s name is synonymous with grandeur, French sovereignty, resistance and national pride. However, this is not the de Gaulle presented to us in Henri-Christian Giraud’s polemic Algérie: le piège Gaulliste. Here de Gaulle is frequently portrayed as deceitful, callous and ruthless. No punches are pulled in this cutting analysis of l’homme du 18 juin’s handling of the Algerian War. The book begins with a refutation of Irwin Wall’s argument that de Gaulle was in favour of maintaining French Algeria but was forced by international pressure to relent and grant independence. Giraud’s work, with the help of newly examined Russian archival material, allows him to assert that de Gaulle had, in fact, decided that Algerian independence was inevitable, from at least 1956 onwards, when he admitted as much to the Soviet ambassador to France, Sergei Vinogradov. What followed was what de Gaulle described in his book ‘Vers l’armée du métier’ as ‘le voile épais de la tromperie’: in other words, de Gaulle’s deception of both hard-line and moderate supporters of French Algeria through a smokescreen of lies and equivocation. The enemy must never know your next move. Giraud skilfully charts de Gaulle’s navigation of the Algerian crisis, from the expertly deceptive ‘Je vous ai compris’ to the studied indifference of le Grand Charles, as the bloody consequences of independence unfurled.

Aiming for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic: the what, how, who, where, and when.

Aiming for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic: the what, how, who, where, and when.

War and Welfare in Colonial Algeria

AbstractA distinguishing feature of the modern state is the broad scope of social welfare provision. This remarkable expansion of public assistance was characterized by huge spatial and temporal disparities. What explains the uneven expansion in the reach of social welfare? We argue that social welfare expansion depends in part on the ability of the governed to compel the state to provide rewards in return for military service—and crucially, that marginalized groups faced greater barriers to obtaining those rewards. In colonial states, subjects faced a bargaining disadvantage relative to citizens living in the colony and were less likely to win concessions from the state for their wartime sacrifices. We test this argument using a difference-in-differences research design and a rich data set of local spending before and after World War I in colonial Algeria. Our results reveal that social welfare spending expanded less in communes where the French subject share of the population was greater. This paper contributes to the state-building literature by highlighting the differential ability of the governed to bargain with the state in the aftermath of conflict.

The Origins And Functions Of The First Translators During The French Occupation Of Algeria

The Origins And Functions Of The First Translators During The French Occupation Of Algeria

Uprooting what the French planted: Wine, culture and identity in colonial Algeria

Uprooting what the French planted: Wine, culture and identity in colonial Algeria

폭력의 식민주의적 기원

For hundreds of thousands of Europeans who once lived in Algeria, the idealization of the past is reproduced in melancholic ‘nostalgeria’. But the tragedy begins with the fact that only the OAS and its successors have dishonestly and consistently instrumentalized it. Not content to throw an entire community into chaos, the extremists in ‘French Algeria’ subsequently sought to monopolize the community’s memory. In this paper, I would like to examine the roots, history, and contemporary aftermath of the Secret Armed Organisation that intentionally triggered the amazing vortex of ‘violence’ in France and Algeria since early 1961. We want to track down the deviations of officers with false patriotic ideals, fascist fighters, and those who have turned into assassins who wanted to “block history”. And I want to look at how and why the hot memories of this period, dotted with killer madness, still work in a stealthy way underground in French society.

Editorial

The theme of this volume comes out of a research project entitled “Gender, Language and Identity in (Post) Colonial Algeria”, which was crowned by two successful national conferences in 2019 and 2021. The idea to extend the scope of research from Algeria to African contexts is realised in the sixth volume of this journal. African countries share a common history of colonisation, struggle and war of independence. Likewise, all of them witnessed an alteration in their languages during colonisation and after. Articles related to gender, language situation and identity in African countries were called for in which authors highlighted aspects of race, religion, culture, art, literature and many other topics in the (post) colonial African contexts.

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche's Terminal Sud (2019) and the Resurgence of a Franco-Algerian Archive

In this article, the author engages with the latest film by Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Terminal Sud (2019). The article situates the film within a cultural and political context characterized by a variety of polemical discourses: these concern the relationship between cultural memory and the French colonization of Algeria, the Algerian décennie noire (1991-2002), and policies of Franco-Algerian "reconciliation" pursued by the acting French government since 2017. With reference to this immediate context, the author examines a number of political, historical, and theoretical perspectives on the nature of the "archive" before undertaking a critical analysis of Terminal Sud's aesthetic practices of spatio-temporal deterritorialization, mixing semiotic referents, and cinematic aniconism. Through this analysis, the author contends that Terminal Sud enacts a visual recreation of an immaterial Franco-Algerian archive that responds to the fragmentation and destruction suffered by its material counterparts during, and following, French colonization of Algeria in the years 1830-1962. In doing so, this article explores the potential role of visual culture as a means to express a shared Franco-Algerian consciousness.

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

The Role of French Algeria in American Incorporation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico

This article argues that France’s conquest and subsequent legal treatment of Algeria as an integral part of France, though without French citizenship for Algerians, served as a transnational precedent for US incorporation of former Spanish colonies in the early twentieth century. While the United States also drew lessons from British colonial policy, as scholarship has shown, France’s republican empire offered particular tools, which scholars have not studied, for US courts to designate Filipinos and Puerto Ricans like French Algerians. In essence, French Algeria provided an example for US jurists to create an imperial category for new territorial peoples as neither US citizens nor foreign subjects but as “nationals.” The article draws principally on the so-called Insular Cases, US newspapers, and political documents. The article exposes transnational connections between the United States and France in constructing empires of white freedom, no less important than imagined Anglo-Saxonism at the time.

Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves by Natalie Edwards

Reviewed by: Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves by Natalie Edwards Araceli Hernández-Laroche Edwards, Natalie. Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves. Routledge, 2021. ISBN 978-0-367-15032-7. Pp. 184. Much has been written about the relationship between power and language. Cardinal Richelieu understood the power of standardizing the French language and literature. His legacy lives through l’Académie française, established in 1635. However, what or who are we excluding when our assumptions about French literature are grounded on unexamined monolingual perspectives? One of the ambitious aims of Natalie Edwards’s pioneering work is “challenging the monolingual paradigm of French literature” (15). Edwards successfully shifts our monolingual focus by exploring contemporary female writers who demonstrate the vibrancy of polyglot eruptions, relationships, hybridity, borrowings, and co-creations through the more intimate genre of life writing in French. Influenced by recent theorizations on multilingual learners by scholars from bilingual education, linguistics, and other disciplines, such as Ofelia García on translanguaging, Edwards challenges us to probe our archive of French literary understandings in more asset-based directions: “[O]ne of the main proponents of translanguaging underscores the ability of bilinguals to transform the two languages they inhabit, suggesting that the term ‘conceives of language relationships in more dynamic terms’” (16–17). Edwards urges us to engage with French literary productions from a more linguistically inclusive perspective as she explores the translanguaging of six contemporary multilingual authors who highlight power dynamics, gender, war legacies, colonial history and postcolonial environmental conditions, indigenous struggles, the porousness of national borders, and the voluntary and forced migrations of so many lived experiences, complicating hybrid identities. The title of Lydie Salvayre’s historical fiction, Pas pleurer, is in itself an example of the way in which Spanish syntax (No llorar) exerts an influence on the spoken French of a character with Alzheimer’s disease, especially when recounting the trauma of the Spanish Civil War after decades of living in France. Translanguaging in Salvayre’s text “restores the stories of the forgotten, the overlooked, the illiterate and the linguistically ‘weak’ to the public domain” (48), Edwards convincingly argues. Kim Thúy’s work, described as a récit de soi based on Vietnamese immigration in an already multilingual Québec, adds French to the more common Anglophone representations of Vietnamese refugees in literary and cultural works. Texts such as Mãn suggest that “the French language can be viewed differently, as a product of other linguistic encounters over time, and that it will continue to be adapted by individuals for their own communicative purposes” (69). Similarly insightful are the explorations of Indigenous or Creole influences and negotiated or impossible translations in the fiction of Catherine Rey’s Francophone Australia, Gisèle Pineau’s Caribbean translanguaging, and Chantal Spitz’s solidarity with the [End Page 260] Tahitian language and eco-struggles within French dominance. Hélène Cixous’s linguistic repertoire is less explored in scholarship but not in Edwards’s analysis of her polyglot childhood in French Algeria, which was immersed in French, Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, German, and English. Monolingual environments seldom exist. Diverse linguistic appreciation unearths cross-cultural infusions layering any local and globalized setting. French multilingual women writers not only decenter France as a literary center, they also successfully move readers beyond monolingualism. [End Page 261] Araceli Hernández-Laroche University of South Carolina Upstate Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria by Owen White

The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria by Owen White

The making of Islamic reform (iṣlāḥ) in Colonial Algeria (1882–1938): Ibadi scholars, French officials and the conceptual foundations of modern Islamic studies

Abstract Among the conceptual foundations on which scholars of modern Islam have built their narratives for decades, ideas such as “reform” and “reformism” have been singled out for charges of Eurocentricism and Orientalism. At the same time, research on early modern Islam leads us to question the specificities of these nineteenth and twentieth-century concepts. Building on this scholarship, this article examines the case of Algerian Ibadi reform (iṣlāḥ) in order to reassert the specificity of the early twentieth century as a moment when Islamic concepts acquired new meanings, but also as a moment of deep entanglements between Islamic and colonial knowledge production. It shows that a systematic understanding of iṣlāḥ as social and religious reform linked to the idea of progress developed only during the interwar period. It also demonstrates that the emic and etic uses of iṣlāḥ and “reform” developed together, a result of the confluence between modern Islamic scholarship and scholarship about Islam in the early twentieth-century Algerian colonial public sphere. Thus, the conceptual history of iṣlāḥ warns us against approaches that consider emic and etic categories bounded entities and invites us instead to unravel their complexities.

Book Review: Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Judith Surkis’ study on sex, law, and sovereignty in French Algeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries starts with a list of illustrations, a section in which she acknowledges universities (Rutgers, Brown, Princeton, and Harvard) and people—family, friends, colleagues but also graduate students—who have helped her publish this book, a note on translation and transliteration and an all-important map of 1834 Alger. The note on translation and transliteration indicates that the current book is based on the colonial archive of French Algeria.

Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918–39.

Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918–39.

LITERARY ARTS IN THE DIWAN OF AMIR ABD AL-QADİR AL-JAZA'İRİ

Emir Abdülkâdir el-Cezâirî, hem bir lider, hem bir mutasavvıf hem de şair kimliğiyle dikkatleri üzerine çeken tarihsel bir şahsiyettir. O, ince zekâsı, ilmi, cesaret ve savaşçı özelliği ile kendi zamanının parmakla gösterilen bir delikanlısı idi. Onun ailesi, dönemin Cezayir toplumunun en nüfuzlu ailelerinden biri olup Fransızların Cezayir’i işgali sırasında bu aile bağımsızlık mücadelesi önderliğini üstlenmiştir. Emir, babası Muhyiddîn b. Muhammed liderliğinde iki yıl Fransızlara karşı savaştıktan sonra, babası liderlik makamını ona bırakmıştır. O, savaş dehası ve cesareti ile Cezayir’in kurtuluş mücadelesinin simge ismi haline gelmiştir. Bu çalışmada onun şair kimliğinin yansıması olarak divanındaki şiirlerinin barındırdığı edebi sanatlar ele alınacaktır. Zira Emir Abdülkâdir’in divanına yapılan en büyük eleştiri, onun şiirlerinin diğer şairlerin şiirleri kadar edebi olmadığı ve daha sığ ve basit kaldığı yönündedir. Böylece hem Arap edebiyat tarihçileri hem de Türk edebiyat tarihçileri tarafından gereken ilgiyi görmeyen Osmanlı Dönemi Arap edebiyatına da ışık tutulmaya çalışılacaktır. Emir’in şiirlerini daha iyi değerlendirebilmek amacıyla onun hayatı hakkında kısa bilgiler verilmiş, sonra onun divanına yapılan tahkik ve baskılara değinilmiştir. Emir’in divanındaki şiirlerinde yer verdiği sanatsal örgüler incelenirken, yeterli ve kısa açıklamalardan sonra çalışmanın boyutu çerçevesinde birkaç örnekle değerlendirilmeye çalışılmıştır. Sonuç olarak, Emir’in divanındaki şiirlerin iddia edilenin aksine belagat unsurlarına ustaca yer verdiği görülmüştür.

UNRRA in North Africa: A late colonial history of refugee encampment

Abstract This article tells the story of two long-forgotten United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) camps in wartime French North Africa, using their history as a lens through which to view the emergence of a modern global regime of refugee encampment. It examines these camps’ entanglements with the mechanisms of late colonial rule; their resonances with the systems of detention articulated by the Third Reich and its Vichy collaborationists; their rehabilitation of the practice of encampment for post-war colonial ‘development’ schemes like French Algeria’s centres de regroupement; and their eventual clearing of the way for the Cold War–era extension of an internationalist, American-dominated regime of refugee internment, first into Tunisia and Morocco and later across much of the Global South. Through its attempt to present its North African refugee camps as a new, modern, humanitarian form of encampment, UNRRA managed to rehabilitate the old colonial strategy of migrant internment as fundamentally humanitarian rather than punitive, successfully eliding its relationships with Nazi and Vichy practices in the process and establishing encampment as a central strategy of the modern internationalist refugee regime for the era of decolonization.

“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.

A Drinking Problem: French Psychiatric Fears about the Increase in Muslim Alcoholics in Colonial Algeria

Until the establishment of psychiatric institutions in the colonial Maghreb in the 1930s, the consensus of most colonial French psychiatrists was that alcoholism had previously been unknown amongst Muslim North Africans, but that it was quickly becoming a medical, social and economic problem. They voiced fears of an explosion in numbers of psychiatric patients due to this increase in alcoholism and a corresponding increase in crimes committed by intoxicated Muslim men. These psychiatrists also described alcoholism as a serious problem among male and female French settlers in Algeria, while suggesting that most Muslim women did not consume any alcohol, even though they regularly commented on the excessive alcohol consumption of certain marginalised Muslim women they encountered. These accounts strongly pathologised and criminalised alcohol-drinking Muslims, framing them as being just one glass away from ending up in a prison or psychiatric hospital.