“The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria” writes Jill Jarvis at the start of this book, “is such that only aesthetic works, in particular, literature, have been able to register its enduring effects” (2). Literature has the capacity to “register the traces of the disappeared in ways that provoke disturbance, unsettlement, pain, anger, and movement” (3); aesthetic works “move in an elusive, anarchival relationship to the power of the nation-state and its laws” (173). The introduction already offers a fine illustration of what Jarvis has in mind, as she deftly tracks the meanings and emotions echoing through Assia Djebar’s uses of cris, écris, and various cognates and homophones in the first pages of L’amour, la fantasia (1985), where Djebar describes how the French fleet, with an eye on something like “memory,” arrived not only with obliterating force but with painters and engravers ready to glorify its work. In Djebar’s literary world, other perspectives are restored, or imagined; the reader is asked “to submit to becoming a vessel for anguished, indecipherable voices that arrive, insistent and disturbing, from another place and another time—like ghosts” (22).Jarvis emphasizes at the outset that “postcolonial francophone memory, testimony, and trauma studies” continue to be “oriented by cartographies, textualities, and temporalities that implicitly center French experiences and narratives of decolonization” (13). Even “the ‘multidirectional’ memory paradigm,” though it has been very fruitful in recent years, has reflected a critical orientation in which wide-ranging vectors appear to lead back toward the French metropole, so that the “tangled knots” of memory that come into clearest focus also tend to be those located within or indelibly connected to French cultural spaces and public spheres, while aesthetic works addressed to other audiences or in Algerian and African languages other than French have largely fallen outside the scope of consideration. (13)Of course, if you—like Jarvis, and like me—work in “francophone literary studies,” perhaps outside France but in a French department or program, and if “French” has become partially detached from France but still means a specific language and its cultural materials, then you may hope that the “linguistic partitions” that come with the territory need not always “replicate a colonialist enterprise” (13). Nevertheless, Jarvis makes a strong case for the benefits of comparativism and multilingual materials, for anyone trying to vault away mentally from their own starting point.Jarvis’s principal example of an originally non-French-language text is Waciny Laredj’s novel Sayyidat al-maqām (The Wings of the Queen [1993], translated into French by Marcel Bois as Les ailes de la reine [2009]), whose testimonial force is investigated in chapter 4. It is perhaps in the first chapter, however, that her decolonial, multidirectional project is pursued most powerfully. “Remnants of Muslims,” reworking an essay that won New Literary History’s Ralph Cohen Prize, scrutinizes and contextualizes the use of the term Muselmann in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo sacer, placed in dialogue with Zahia Rahmani’s autofictional trilogy, Moze (2003), “Musulman” roman (2005), and France, récit d’une enfance (2006). Many of us, when reading Agamben’s text, must have been struck by the oddness not only of the term itself, reportedly used at Auschwitz to describe prisoners in the most abject state, but also by the way Agamben adopts it; yet few critics (with exceptions including Gil Anidjar and Fethi Benslama) have given this double anomaly the attention it deserves. Jarvis’s wide-ranging critique is at once dogged and imaginative, and makes it uncomfortably clear how recklessly Agamben deployed the term. The “ready ease” with which the “Oriental” is associated with suffering and lack of dignity, in Agamben’s work as well as in the histories and discourses on which he drew, “suggests that the word musulman already signified not-quite-living or not-quite-human when it assumed its new status as a camp epithet” (41). The juridical use of musulman as a category in colonial Algeria has particular importance here for Jarvis; she notes Patrick Weil’s point that for legal purposes, even Algerian converts to Catholicism were “Muslims,” an example that underscores how deeply racialized and hierarchical the term was in colonial usage, and how little it had to do with religious belief or practice.The chapter is eerily effective in bringing out strange reverberations and coincidences around imagery—and memories—of drowning, involving Rahmani’s father (accused of being a former harki), Primo Levi’s I sommersi e i salvati (1986; The Drowned and the Saved), and the massacre of “Muslim” anticolonial protesters in Paris in October 1961, at the time of the Eichmann trial—where the camp survivor and author Yechiel Dinur “referred to the ‘Muselmänner’ of Auschwitz just before fainting in the courtroom” (44). The capaciousness of the term memory as backdrop to this sort of comparativism is characteristic of much of the work done by those of us who write about colonial histories (and other histories) but are not primarily historians. A quick summary may risk making these juxtapositions and connections sound hasty or tenuous; behind them lie elusive questions about the relationship between individual and “cultural” memory, and about the historical transmission of worldviews across countries and cultures. Perhaps this is an advantage of the term anarchive, whose occasional usage in this book is influenced by Lia Brozgal’s recent work around the 1961 massacre: it avoids some of the problems of trying to locate “cultural memory” or track its dissemination, and conceives of literature (and film, and so on) as an oblique and unruly resource for memory, as much as or more than memory’s embodiment. But in any case, the details of Jarvis’s argument are compelling and carried me with her, supporting that foundational claim that literary texts like Rahmani’s—and, in turn, literary-critical work such as Jarvis’s—can cast new light on transnational histories and imagined temporalities that link and divide us.A more specific historical question raised by Jarvis’s terms of analysis is the precise role and relative importance of the legal system in colonialism. How far and in what ways did French law in the colonies, and in Algeria in particular, reflect, or help create, colonial ideologies? Did it serve colonialism consistently? To come at the issue from another angle, how important is the word legal in Decolonizing Memory’s opening assertion about the “[legal] violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria”? Jarvis uses the word plaint repeatedly, perhaps because it can be a legal term (an accusation or charge), but isn’t always; and because in its more general sense, as a complaint or lament, it is, according to my dictionary, “mainly literary.” Perhaps, then, law is better understood here as a guiding theme than a conceptual or historical framework. At moments, nonetheless, I felt that the analysis would have been strengthened by more detailed consideration of the legal framework in colonial Algeria, and by providing more information about it for those of us who lack expertise in that area. Jarvis moots the possibility that “the French penal code was never designed to protect Algerian lives, but only to disappear and destroy them” (77), but she also notes that some of the texts on which she focuses attempted—albeit unsuccessfully, and without much hope of success—“to legally force the state to abide by its own codes and agreements” (68). At that point, perhaps there is more to say about the role that the Geneva Conventions played, or failed to play, but they are mentioned only very briefly. Later Jarvis quotes Fadhma Amrouche’s reflections on her mother’s precarious circumstances when, unmarried, she gave birth to Fadhma in Kabylie in 1886: “Avant la domination française la justice était expéditive; les parents menaient la fautive dans un champ où ils l’abattaient. . . . Mais en ce temps-là, la justice française luttait contre ces mœurs trop rudes. Et ma mère eut recours à elle” (Amrouche 25; “Before French conquest, justice was expeditious; family members led the offender into a field where they killed her. . . . But in those days, French law was fighting against these brutal customs. And my mother had recourse to it”; Jarvis, her own translation, 164). That story does not amount to a defense of French law and its discriminatory implementation in colonial Algeria, and does not undercut Jarvis’s substantive arguments around particular texts, but it does seem to call for a more complex account of law’s relationship to colonialism, and of the general notion of the “coloniality of power” (14). The word legal in Jarvis’s phrase “legal violence” is ambiguous, and productively so; but more light could have been cast on the gray areas created by this ambiguity—something Jarvis touches on in an interesting passage where she discusses the policy of traduction directe introduced in March 1956, which enabled extrajudicial military execution (81–82). There may be several reasons why euphemisms such as “corvée de bois” were commonplace in the French military (that notorious phrase is discussed here; it evokes Algerian POWs who were nominally sent on “woodgathering duty” and then shot in the back), but perhaps one is that even among those willing to carry out torture and summary executions, and who may have considered them ethically justifiable, there was a nagging sense that they were illegal.It is in the second chapter that the book moves closest to the institutions of law, as it focuses on a series of quasi- or para-legal texts dealing with torture during the Algerian war of independence—especially Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir’s Djamila Boupacha (1962), the collection La gangrène edited in 1959 by Jérôme Lindon, and the pamphlet Nuremberg pour l’Algérie put together in 1960 by three FLN (Front de libération nationale) lawyers including Jacques Vergès. These texts and others like them gathered evidence of “French state violence against Algerians” (94) and “racial crimes” (78), and called for forms of legal redress—calls that were never met. This focus moves us away slightly from the central claims about the powers of “literature” and “aesthetic works,” but Jarvis places emphasis on the texts’ “unexpected, unsettling literary qualities” (68) and gives a persuasive account of ways in which they may instantiate, or at least help imagine, a form of “decolonial justice” (97).The third chapter pursues the themes of memory and imaginative testimony into post-independence Algeria, beginning with a verbal snapshot of the massive Martyrs’ Memorial in Algiers. The writer Yamina Mechakra, who is at the heart of the chapter, worked for decades “literally in the shadow of the monument, at Drid Hocine Psychiatric Hospital” (99–100); she lived in a small house on the grounds, practicing as a psychiatrist and also receiving treatment. Her writing was admired by her friend Kateb Yacine, and her first novel, La grotte éclatée of 1979, was acclaimed by Danielle Marx-Scouras in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French of 1995 as “one of the most remarkable literary texts on the Algerian War” (515), but today it does not appear to be much read or remembered; and her second novel, Arris, published twenty years later, is largely unknown and unsung. It is “difficult to find, disorienting to read, and . . . largely disregarded by critics,” in the words of Jarvis (105), who tells us in a footnote that she needed to borrow a copy from a colleague. The limited circulation of Mechakra’s texts raises again those questions about cultural transmission that “memory” as a cultural category tends to evoke. By the end of the book, Jarvis wants to claim that “in a real way, literature saw the Ḥirāk coming [the Algerian protest movement that began in 2019]. Literature helped to call the movement into being” (173). That sort of assertion may be appealing to many of us in literary studies, but I am worried that it is incontrovertible only in a weak sense; there is an unsettling gap between this sort of notion of public impact, and the intimacy of literary-critical methods, however politically rich and however widely diffused the material on which they are brought to bear.The greatest strength of Jarvis’s work, in that chapter and across Decolonizing Memory, lies in her close and inventive attention to literary languages, in and beyond “literature,” and the intriguing web of connections she weaves around particular texts. Mechakra’s supervisor at work was Mahfoud Boucebci, who is best known among students of Algerian writing as one of the three friends to whom Djebar dedicated Le blanc de l’Algérie, a book (also discussed by Jarvis) that describes and commemorates his death, among many others. Boucebci was stabbed outside the hospital gate in June 1993, during Algeria’s “Black Decade.” Mechakra’s texts, like Djebar’s, are explored sensitively as “a site for mourning deaths that have no written place in history” (134), and Jarvis, in showing how Mechakra’s writing disrupts the Algerian state’s “teleological nationalist epic” (105), teases out “a recessed signifying network marked by the Arabic term shahīd” (111)—which sits with mujahidin among the religiously inflected terms used by the FLN, during the war and subsequently, to sanctify the work of anticolonial nationalism. The importance of the figure of the shahid to official “memory” in Algeria is evident not least in the Martyrs’ Memorial itself (maqam al-shahid), a structure, as Jarvis points out (107), that incorporates multiple elements including not only a military museum but an underground mausoleum dedicated to the shuhada, furnished with an open Koran and the sound of suras piped through speakers. (Among Jarvis’s many elegant translations from French, incidentally, I spotted just one slip: in her discussion of the typical invocations of nationalist martyrdom made by President Bouteflika in a speech in Sétif in 2012, his description of the city as “séculaire” meant something like “ancient,” not secular.)In many respects, French law and even colonialism are less important by this point in the book, and in the history; and perhaps Jarvis is straining too hard to pull different threads tightly together when, in the concluding chapter, she describes “the [Algerian] state’s war on civilians” in the 1990s as “a continuation of colonizing force in which ‘musulman’ ghosts now have a slightly different name—‘terrorists’ and sowers of discord” (179). But the broader point about the lingering ghosts of colonialism, and the intertwining of (somewhat) different histories, still stands. Despite its Islamic aspects and the eclecticism of its architectural and cultural influences, the Martyrs’ Memorial, built a full twenty years into the era of independence, seems to remind many people, starting with Algerians, of the Eiffel tower as much as anything else. The later chapters of this book, with their center outside France and outside the colonial period, not only bring home that the legal uses of musulman in the colonial period, Jarvis’s starting point, remain an important part of the story about the shifting relationship between Islam and politics in Algeria, as in France; they also remind us how knotty the projects of “decolonizing memory” and moving beyond Eurocentricity really are, in Algeria, France, and the many other parts of the world that were touched, or are touched, by European colonialism.