representations of the family through the french-algerian war by stefanie alicia sevcik ba reed ...

330 Pages·2015·0.86 MB·English

by  Clint Sevcik

A FAMILY AFFAIR: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FAMILY THROUGH
THE FRENCH-ALGERIAN WAR
BY
STEFANIE ALICIA SEVCIK
B.A. REED COLLEGE
A.M. BROWN UNIVERSITY
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
© Copyright 2016 by Stefanie Sevcik
This dissertation by Stefanie Alicia Sevcik is accepted in its present form by
the Department of Comparative Literature
as satisfying the requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Date___________________ ___________________________________
Ariella Azoulay, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council
Date__________________ ___________________________________
Elias Muhanna, Reader
Date___________________ _________________________________
Ourida Mostefai, Reader
Date___________________ ____________________________
Amine Bekhechi, Reader
Approved by the Graduate Council
Date___________________ _________________________________
Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School
iii
CURRICULUM VITAE
Stefanie Alicia Sevcik was born in 1984 in Owatonna, Minnesota.
She graduated with a B.A. From Reed College where she majored in
General Literature. In 2008, she entered the graduate program in
Comparative Literature at Brown University where she received her
A.M. in 2013. In 2010-2011, she participated in an exchange
between Brown University and the Université de Bourgogne in
Dijon, France. At Brown, she served as a Graduate Teaching
Assistant for the Departments of Comparative Literature and
Political Science.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to the faculty, staff, administrators, and students at
Brown University who enabled me to pursue my intellectual dreams in various
capacities over most of the last decade. I know this dissertation would have never
existed without each and every one of you. In particular, I must thank Ariella Azoulay
for agreeing to be my Chair and helping me to question myself and my work in critical
ways. Thank you for pushing me toward a more ethical reading of my work and my
world. A thousand and one thanks to Elias Muhanna for his continued support as a
patient mentor, advisor, and sounding board through the perpetual ups and downs of
graduate school. Thank you for never giving up on me! Special thanks to my mentors
Amine Bekhechi and Paul Armstrong for floating in and out of my academic life at
crucial moments. Thank you both for pushing me and believing in me when I did not
believe in myself. And to Ourida Mostefai for agreeing to join my committee in the
eleventh hour of this project.
I am thankful to the graduate students in Comparative Literature, English, and French
who have supported my ideas inside and outside of the classroom. Andrea Actis, you
are a first rate friend, scholar, and artist. No amount of time apart could ever change
that. To Bruno, Sonja, Anja, Andrea, and Bessie for sharing dinner parties, ideas, and
laughs with me. Louis, without your sofa, I know this project would not exist. And to
everyone who has shared a table and some time with me over the years. I have
cherished every moment!
Thanks to my mother for teaching me to always challenge myself—even when the
going gets tough. To my father (in memoriam) for being the absent presence
underscoring my life. And to Lesley, Clint, and Garth who always had to live in the
shadow of an older sister who actually enjoyed school.
The biggest thanks of all goes to my loving husband, Michael. Your emotional support,
patience, and loving kindness have been invaluable. Thank you for reading my drafts,
incessantly discussing my work with me, and supporting all of my whims. And to
Addie, whose final months of gestation aligned with the final months of the gestation of
this project. May you always have the courage to speak out against injustice and to
love unconditionally.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction.......................................................................................................................1
Chapter One: Illegitimacy and the Birth of an Algerian Nation.....................................15
Chapter Two: Algerian Sons and the Question of History..............................................70
Chapter Three: Nedjma and the Illegitimate Children of the Revolution.....................134
Chapter Four: The Eloquent Silences of Algeria's Sisters............................................208
Conclusion: Algerian Nouba.........................................................................................310
Bibliography..................................................................................................................316
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1
INTRODUCTION
[We broke] up the great traditional families of Algeria...Because we found
them to be forces of resistance. We did not realize that in suppressing the
forces of resistance in this fashion, we were also suppressing our means of
action. The result is that we are today confronted by a sort of human dust on
which we have no influence and in which movements take place which are to
us unknown.
---Jules Cambon, 1894
Jules Cambon, Governor General of Algeria in 1894, anticipated the loss of French
colonial possession of Algeria sixty years before the official beginning of the Algerian
war for independence on November 1, 1954. The French had identified the large,
traditional family as a potential foundation for anti-colonial collective action in Algeria.
By breaking up these families, they had hoped to dispel pockets of resistance to their
authority. However, by asserting their dominance and disrupting the family, the limits of
France's hegemony were revealed. Cambon's words betray his fear of losing control over
the non-European masses as a result of French interference and ignorance. After years of
disenfranchisement and exploitation, the French had created a “human dust” out of the
indigenous population that they could no longer read or influence. Politically, this fear of
losing control over the non-European majority blocked subsequent social and legal
reforms from passing. Dissatisfaction with French rule fueled by broken promises and
interference into the civil sphere led non-European Algerians to create alternative forms
of collectivity which gradually led to armed resistance. This was not only the result of a
colonial/indigenous struggle over history as Ranajit Guha describes in the case of
colonial India in Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India,
2
but a struggle over identity in the civil, family sphere. As French attempts at
manipulation of the family increased, the Algerian family likewise changed form—sons
violently resisted their fathers' traditions and sisters dropped their veils to go to war to
shake off the yoke of colonial oppression.
Evidence of the changing Algerian family structure are visible in legal, literary,
and cultural documents of the period. One of the most famous “Algerian” intellectuals,
the Martiniquais Frantz Fanon, describes alterations in a number of family relationships
in his 1959 essay “The Algerian Family” in Studies in a Dying Colonialism.1 These shifts,
Fanon argues, developed out of “direct” political action replacing political discussions or
complaints of the “party.” The revolution dominated every aspect of life—including
family relations:
The political party passes over to direct action, and the problems that the son
faces are problems of life or death for the country. In a parallel way, his
attitude toward his father and the other members of the family frees itself of
everything that proves unnecessary and detrimental to the revolutionary
situation. The person is born, assumes his autonomy, and becomes the creator
of his own values. (101)
Disrupting the patriarchal relationship between father and son set the stage for shifts in
other kinds of relationships. As soon as respect for the father and elders came into
question, it revealed the unsteady foundation of other family relationships between
daughters and fathers (105) and between brothers (110). This dislocation of the family's
traditional foundation also changed the nature of social relationships between women and
men (111), feminine society (116), and legal matters such as marriage and divorce (114).
1
In French, this was published as L'an V de la révolution algérienne.
3
By discussing different types of relationships, Fanon indicates that matters of the family
relate directly to a variety of different discourses—particularly the political.
Representations of the family provide a useful lens through which to view the
Algerian war for independence. The family structure was viewed as a potential threat
early in the course of colonial rule as seen in Cambon's comments and France's actions.
Although I would argue that relationships of the family inherently involve political, legal,
cultural, religious, and literary concerns,2 the family structure in the case of Algeria seems
particularly relevant to a discussion of the politics of decolonization in part due to its
unique relationship with France as both a colony and a state comprised of many different
religions and ethnicities. Civil law was left largely in the hands of the people, so matters
of the family were de jure dictated by Muslim law courts. This gave the people a vestige
of freedom in their private affairs, so when the French interfered in civil matters such as
forced unveiling and a new family code (as I will discuss later), the non-European
majority did not react well.
Challenges to French colonial treatment appeared in various forms throughout the
twentieth century in literature, newspaper articles, and conflicts between family members
in the case of both indigenous and European Algerians.3 In this dissertation, I will look at
a variety of these forms between the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the end of the French-Algerian War in
1962. By doing so, I will argue that this was a “civil” war embodying many meanings of
2 As per Marx, Foucault, and Althusser to name just three of many theorists.
3 It would be inaccurate to suggest that only the non-European Algerian population sought reform in the
colonial system and ultimately independence. Europeans such as Albert Camus, for example, called
attention to injustices committed by the French in a series of articles he published before the war.
4
the word—a nation at war with itself, a conflict involving the private sphere of the
family, and a struggle of ordinary citizens against systematic state and cultural
oppression. However, as James D. LeSueur skillfully illustrates in Uncivil War:
Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (2005), the
battles were also categorically “uncivil” in their divisiveness and cruelty. Perspectives
became increasingly binary and often violently excluded those who suggested
compromise or peaceful resolutions. Over the course of the war from 1954 to 1962, acts
of torture and terrorism were perpetrated by both pro- and anti-colonial fighters on
military and civilian victims. A closer investigation into the (un)civil aspects of this
conflict reveals a tangled mess of relationships that ultimately ended in Algeria's painful
divorce from France at the expense of moderation and peaceful coexistence.
Another critical aspect of Algeria's relationship with France that comprises a
foundation for the following chapters is the distinction between the pedagogical and
performative qualities of Algerian identity. Homi Bhabha invokes Fanon, Jameson,
Anderson, Derrida, and many others in his analysis of the temporality of culture in The
Location of Culture (1994) distinguishing between a relatively static temporality of the
“pedagogical” and a fluid temporality of the “performative.” The gap between these two
produces a space where “the people emerge” (228) in an ideal position for the
construction of a competing national imaginary in the context of decolonization. The
“enunciative 'present' of modernity...would provide a political space to articulate and
negotiate such culturally hybrid social identities” (359). In a sense, Cambon describes
the gap between a “pedagogical” and a “performative” temporality when he admits his