Algeria Revisited: History, Culture and Identity

319 Pages·2017·4.11 MB·English

by  Rabah Aissaoui

Algeria
Revisited

CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Map of Algeria
Introduction: Revisiting Algeria Rabah Aissaoui and Claire Eldridge
PART ONE Re-imagining Colonial Conflicts and Relationships
1 Criminalizing Dissent: Policing Banditry in the Constantinois, 1914–
18 Samuel Kalman
2 The Young Algerians and the Question of the Muslim Draft, 1900–
14 Michelle Mann
3 Between Two Worlds’: Emir Khaled and the Young Algerians at the
Beginning of the Twentieth Century in Algeria Rabah Aissaoui
4 Weapons of Mass Representation: Algerians in the French Parliament,
1958–62 Arthur Asseraf
PART TWO Identity Construction and Contestation
5 Individual and Collective Identity in Algerian Francophone Literature: Jean
Sénac’s ‘Poetry on All Fronts’ Blandine Valfort
6 Algerian Female Identity Re-constitution and Colonial Language: A
Postcolonial Malaise in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia Rachida
Yassine
7 ‘Encounters’ of Frustration and Hope in the Writing of Maïssa
Bey Samira Farhoud and Carey Watt
8 On the Shifting Significance of ‘Algerian Cinema’ as a Category of
Analysis Patricia Caillé
9 The Algerian Woman in Conflict in The Battle of Algiers (Gillo
Pontecorvo, 1966) Sophie Bélot
PART THREE Remembering Algeria
10 The Entangled Politics of Postcolonial Commemoration Jennifer E.
Sessions
11 Passing the Torch: Memory Transmission and Activism within the Pied-
Noir Community Fifty Years after Algerian Independence Claire Eldridge
Conclusion: Culture as War by Other Means: Community, Conflict and Cultural
Revolution, 1967–81 James McDougall
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Carlo Marochetti’s equestrian statue of the Duc d’Orléans on its current site
in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Author’s photo.
2 Postcard of the Djemaa el-Djedid mosque and the statue of the Duc
d’Orléans monument in Algiers, published by CAP c. 1914. Author’s
collection.
3 AMNS 25W 73, André Donzet, plan for the re-erection of the Duc
d’Orléans monument in front of the Neuilly city hall, June 1976. Author’s
photo.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This volume arose out of the Algeria Revisited international conference held in
April 2012 at the University of Leicester to mark the fiftieth anniversary of
Algerian independence. We would first like to thank all of the delegates whose
wide-ranging and thought-provoking contributions made the event so
intellectually stimulating and enjoyable. We both learned an enormous amount
from the experience and we hope that we have been able to capture some of the
energy and variety that we felt were distinctive hallmarks of that conference in
this volume. We also want to acknowledge the numerous sponsors whose
financial support made the conference possible in a practical sense: The Institut
Français, The Society for the Study of French History, The Society for French
Studies, The Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France,
The Society for Algerian Studies, The Society for Francophone Postcolonial
Studies, The Modern Humanities Research Association, The Royal Historical
Society, the University of Leicester and the University of Southampton. We are
grateful to Claire Lipscomb and her team at Bloomsbury who have been highly
supportive of our project and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive
comments. At the copy-editing stage, Thomas Martin proved invaluable to us.
Our thanks equally go to Teresa Bridgeman for her fantastic translation of
chapter 6, and to Kamlesh Chandarana who produced the map for the volume.
Our biggest thanks, however, go to our contributors. During the time it has taken
to bring this volume together they have shown enormous patience and good will
towards us. For this and for the really excellent quality of their chapters we
thank them all. We hope they are as pleased with the end result as we are.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Rabah Aissaoui is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of
Leicester, UK. His research focuses on immigration and racism in colonial and
postcolonial France and on colonial identities in Algeria. He researches French
colonial history and the relationship between history, memory and ethnic
identity. He is the author of Immigration and National identity: North African
Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France (2009).
Arthur Asseraf is Examination Fellow in History at All Souls College, Oxford
University, UK. His work focuses on foreign news in Algeria in order to
examine the relationships between different groups in colonial society and the
wider world. He is also interested in the uses of comparison and foreign models
in decolonization and in postcolonial France.
Sophie Bélot coordinates and lectures on the part-time Degree in French
Language and Cultures at the University of Sheffield, UK. She also lectures at
the University of Nottingham (UK). Her research and publications centre on
philosophical approaches to representations of women in contemporary cinema
as well as on forms of cinema, such as documentary, essay film and adaptations.
She has also completed a monograph on the director and scriptwriter Catherine
Breillat for Rodopi. She is currently developing a project exploring the notion of
emotion in French and Francophone cinema, particularly in relation to Jean-Luc
Godard’s Contempt.
Patricia Caillé is Associate Professor in the Communication and Information
Management Department at the Université de Strasbourg, France. Her research
focuses on Maghrebi cinemas, more particularly the construction of national and
regional identities, the work of women filmmakers, and audiences. She has co-
edited two Dossiers Africultures on ‘Cinémas du Maghreb et leurs publics’
(2012) and ‘Circulation des films et région MENA’ (forthcoming). She has
published in Diogène, Studies in French Cinema, French Cultural Studies,
Interventions and Mise au Point.
Claire Eldridge is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of
Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on memory and migration in postcolonial
France, particularly with respect to the pied-noir and harki communities. She is
also interested in the history of military service undertaken by the settler
population of Algeria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the
author of From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pied-Noir and
Harki Communities, 1962–2012 (2016).
Samira Farhoud specializes in francophone literature of North Africa and the
Middle East, and she has published in journals such as Nouvelles Etudes
Francophones, Présence Francophone and French Cultural Studies. Her book
Interventions autobiographiques des femmes du Maghreb (2013) explores
themes of complexity, hybridity and heterogeneity in the autobiographical ‘je’
(I/self) of North African and French women.
Samuel Kalman is an Associate Professor of History at St Francis Xavier
University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His research interests include the history of
fascism in modern France and the French empire, as well as crime and criminal
justice in Colonial Algeria. His publications include French Colonial Fascism:
The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–1939 (2013) and The Extreme Right in
Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu (2008).
James McDougall is a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Trinity College,
Oxford, UK. He previously taught at Princeton and at SOAS, London. His
publications include History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (2006),
Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (2012) and A
History of Algeria (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is currently
writing Empire in Fragments, a history of colonialism and its legacies in France
and Africa.
Michelle Mann is an advanced doctoral researcher in French Colonial History at
Brandeis University, USA, and current pedagogical director of the Brandeis
University Writing Centre. Her research explores the interrelated questions of
citizenship, culture and national identity in France and North Africa. Her
forthcoming work focuses particularly on the relationship between colonial
conscription in the First World War and the emergence of anti-colonial
nationalism in Algeria.