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8 Narrativizing foreclosed history in ‘postmemorial’ fiction of the Algerian War in France: October 17, 1961, a case in point Michel Laronde The larger question of institutional violence and its erasure from public consciousness by the manipulation of the representation of violent events in collective memory has been brought to the forefront of postcolonial studies for some time now. More precisely, in the specific domain of immigration studies in France, understanding how camouflaged acts of State violence surface naturally or forcibly in, and through, cultural
This excerpt from James Baldwin: Living in Fire details a key juncture in Baldwin’s life, 1957–59, when he was transformed by a visit to the South to write about the civil rights movement while grappling with the meaning of the Algerian Revolution. The excerpt shows Baldwin understanding black and Arab liberation struggles as simultaneous and parallel moments in the rise of Third World, anti-colonial and anti-racist U.S. politics. It also shows Baldwin’s emotional and psychological vulnerability to repressive state violence experienced by black and Arab citizens in the U.S., France, and Algiers.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
This is a full-length monograph about one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers, perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his award-winning Les Roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds of 1994. It locates André Téchiné within historical and cultural contexts that include the Algerian War, May 1968 and contemporary globalisation, and the influence of Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French New Wave. The originality of his sixteen feature films lies in his subtle exploration of sexuality and national identity as he challenges expectations in his depictions of gay relations, the North African dimensions of contemporary French culture and the centre–periphery relationship between Paris, especially his native southwest and the rest of France. The book also looks at the collaborative nature of Téchiné's filmmaking, including his work with Catherine Deneuve, who has made more films with him than with any other director, and the role of Philippe Sarde's musical scores.
For imperialists, the concept of guardian is specifically to the armed forces that kept watch on the frontiers and in the heartlands of imperial territories. Large parts of Asia and Africa, and the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean were imperial possessions. This book discusses how military requirements and North Indian military culture, shaped the cantonments and considers the problems posed by venereal diseases and alcohol, and the sanitary strategies pursued to combat them. The trans-border Pathan tribes remained an insistent problem in Indian defence between 1849 and 1947. The book examines the process by which the Dutch elite recruited military allies, and the contribution of Indonesian soldiers to the actual fighting. The idea of naval guardianship as expressed in the campaign against the South Pacific labour trade is examined. The book reveals the extent of military influence of the Schutztruppen on the political developments in the German protectorates in German South-West Africa and German East Africa. The U.S. Army, charged with defending the Pacific possessions of the Philippines and Hawaii, encountered a predicament similar to that of the mythological Cerberus. The regimentation of military families linked access to women with reliable service, and enabled the King's African Rifles to inspire a high level of discipline in its African soldiers, askaris. The book explains the political and military pressures which drove successive French governments to widen the scope of French military operations in Algeria between 1954 and 1958. It also explores gender issues and African colonial armies.
Shocking, even by the violent standards of the Algerian war, the shootings at El-Biar drew extensive press commentary in Paris. Much of it dwelt on the ‘fascistic’ ruthlessness of the OAS. The killers’ ‘Hitlerian methods’ transported French society back twenty years, reversing the geometry of foreign occupiers and domestic victims. But OAS counterterrorism, some journalists insisted, was merely the
between different groups and their cloistered memories of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) and its sequels has found overall little echo among today’s literary critics. Susan Ireland’s article ‘Creating Shared Memories in Three Harki Narratives’ is a notable exception. Instead of comparing works written exclusively by members of the harki community, she studies novels by different actors of the Algerian War: a pied noir, a harki daughter, and a veteran French soldier. Not only do these works diegetically engage in a comparison of the ‘perspectives of memory
10 Representations of the harkis in contemporary French-language films Susan Ireland After the signing of the Evian Accords on March 19, 1962, which officially ended the Algerian War of Independence, thousands of harkis, the Algerians who had worked for the French Army during the conflict, were killed by angry compatriots who viewed them as traitors. Many of those who managed to flee to France found themselves isolated in temporary housing camps, felt abandoned by the French, and were often rejected by Algerian immigrants who had supported the Front de
Rachida Krim (1997) and Vivre au paradis by Bourlem Gherdjou (1998), two first feature films set in part during the time of the Franco-Algerian war; Le Gone du Chaâba (1998), a feature film by white director Christophe Ruggia, but faithfully adaptated from Azouz Begag’s 1986 autobiographical coming-of-age novel, set in a bidonville (shanty-town) outside Lyons in the mid-1960s; and Yamina Benguigui’s highly acclaimed documentary triptych, Mémoires
emancipated Muslim woman. As a symbol of modernity and Franco-Algerian integration Zohra also had to be eliminated by the die hard reactionaries, and among the many hundreds of executions carried out by the Guelma militias she, the most independent and Francophile, was the only woman.3 Thirteen years later in May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, the revolt led by generals Salan and Massu again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. But, in a reversal