Jim House

Post-colonial cultures in France

Ethnic minorities, principally from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the surviving remnants of Frances overseas empire, are increasingly visible in contemporary France. Post-Colonial Cultures in France edited by Alec Hargreaves and Mark McKinney is the first wide-ranging survey in English of the vibrant cultural practices now being forged by Frances post-colonial minorities. The contributions in Post-Colonial Cultures in France cover both the ethnic diversity of minority groups and a variety of cultural forms ranging from literature and music to film and television. Using a diversity of critical and theoretical approaches from the disciplines of cultural studies, literary studies, migration studies, anthropology and history, Post-Colonial Cultures in France explores the globalization of cultures and international migration.

Antiracist memories: The case of 17 October 1961 in historical perspective

This article examines the causes and subsequent cover-up of the massacre of Algerians by French security forces on 17 October 1961, and assesses the place and symbolic importance the memory of this massacre has come to occupy within Algerian immigrant communities and antiracist groups since the 1970s. These groups have actively campaigned for official recognition of the extent of and responsibility for the massacre. Finally, the article reflects on the way in which the 17 October massacre is often discussed in relation to Vichy, and the ambivalent conclusions which can be drawn from this in relation to Frances coming-to-terms with its colonial past.

Colonial containment? Repression of pro-Independence street demonstrations in Algiers, Casablanca and Paris, 1945-1962

This article draws on three examples of the violent repression of pro-independence nationalist street demonstrations: Casablanca, 7–8 December 1952; Algiers, 10–13 December 1960; Paris, 17 October 1961. Changes in the urban landscape due to migration, urban planning and housing policy brought the threat perceptions of the colonial authorities to centre upon certain poor districts and their inhabitants, in the context of strengthening pro-independence nationalism. These developments help explain where and how this lethal repression took place, as well as its key objectives (containment, punishment, deterrence). The late colonial authorities experienced great difficulties in spatially containing pro-independence demonstrations and urban mobility more widely.

Shantytowns and Rehousing in Late Colonial Algiers and Casablanca

This chapter takes a comparative approach to examine shantytowns and rehousing policies in Algiers and Casablanca, both of which became ‘welfare arenas’ in the final decades of colonial rule. Welfare, however, was rarely the sole factor driving policy: security and public health concerns were also invoked, and their relative importance for the colonial authorities shifted over time. The inter-war period witnessed mass inward migration to cities and over-crowding in existing Muslim areas generated shantytowns. From the late 1940s, municipalities and the colonial state sought to appear more attentive to social justice: Algiers mayor Jacques Chevallier (1953–1958) developed ambitious housing and slum clearance schemes before the arrival of larger-scale initiatives with the Constantine Plan (1958–1962). Changes in leading colonial personnel could also inflect policy, as with Michel Ecochard’s tenure as chief urbanist in Morocco (1946–1952). This in turn forced pro-independence nationalists to respond: should they boycott the new housing? The chapter draws on archives and interviews to analyse two prominent shantytowns—Carrieres centrales/Hay Mohammadi in Casablanca and Mahieddine in Algiers—and situates them in wider urban and colonial contexts. Many problems affected these programmes. First, it proved impossible to address the backlog created by decades of neglect. Second, policies were frequently compromised by tensions between reform and repression. Third, stagnant incomes usually relegated people to the cheapest alternative accommodation, leading to the displacement, rather than reduction, of socio-ethnic segregation. Finally, few Algerians or Moroccans participated in the decision-making process, despite the colonial rhetoric of greater political and social incorporation that characterised the ‘modernising mission’.

Arabs of the Jewish Faith: the civilizing mission in colonial Algeria

Joshua Schreier’s original and lucid study of Algerian Jews in the period from the start of the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 to the imposition of the 1870 measures granting Algerian Jewish men full citizenship, covers a wide range of strongly gendered religious, social and political issues, such as synagogues, schools and family life. While the empirical research is concentrated on the western city and province of Oran, home to Algeria’s largest Jewish population, this study also provides an important analysis of colonial governance. Here, in line with recent imperial historiography, Schreier closely articulates thinking and policy in Metropolitan France with measures in Algeria, their application and constant negotiation: he shows that Algerian Jews were not mere targets of colonial policy, but active agents contributing to resisting, appropriating and hence shaping it. French military and civil actors viewed Algerian Jews as essential allies in the colonizing project, and this despite Jews displaying a wide range of attitudes towards what was a cultural imposition seeking to regulate and police their religious, cultural and social practices on the road to citizenship. Metropolitan French reformers, and some of their Algerian Jewish supporters, strategically adopted discourses of emancipation that drew on earlier nineteenth-century formulations (e.g., Abbé Grégoire) of the supposed degeneracy of the Algerian Jews due to oppression. Such discourses carefully inferiorized both Jews and Muslims by underlining their alleged lack of civilization, albeit to different degrees. Schreier thus succeeds in placing Jews and Muslims within the same interconnected analytical frame, and convincingly shows that Jews were firmly embedded within Algerian society in 1830 and how colonial policy subsequently divided Jews and Muslims. Indeed, contrary to Algerian Muslims, Algeria’s Jews were considered capable of progress, and therefore needed to be targeted to ensure their compatibility with Napoleon’s Grand Sanhedrin of 1808, whereby Jews in Metropolitan France had become citizens but had to renounce their family code to conform with the civil code. However, Schreier shows that it was impossible for the newly established consistories in Algeria (1845), the key vehicles of France’s civilizing mission, to abolish private synagogues: in Oran, the consistory needed to be at least partially representative of local Jewish communities whose most powerful members often had political, social and economic stakes in such synagogues and could draw on links across the wider Mediterranean space. Consistories thus provided symbolic as well as physical spaces in and through which the colonized could inflect colonial policy. Indeed, given these complicating factors, legal assimilation with regard to Algerian Jews under the 1870 Crémieux Decree did not so much crown a process of cultural assimilation as intervene

Shantytowns in the City

This article compares the different late-colonial histories, and subsequent memorial afterlives, of two shantytowns, one in Algiers (Mahieddine), and one in Casablanca (Carrieres centrales, in Hay Mohammadi). It examines how and why centrally located Mahieddine went from being Algerias best-known shantytown until 1954, to its subsequent political marginalisation during and after the war of liberation. In marked contrast, outlying Carrieres centrales was and remains central to the anti-colonial narrative, owing to the nationalist protests and their repression of December 1952, alongside interest today in addressing post-independence repression that also marked the area. This article identifies the resulting opportunities and sources for local memorial practices and historical research for both Mahieddine and Carrieres centrales. However, beyond the different multilayered experiences of both these (post)colonial situations, the article shows how oral sources reveal many similarities regarding the lived exp...

BOOKS: Review Forum

On 19 July 1995 President Nelson Mandela signed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, setting into motion South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which would, by December, begin its work under its chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The TRC would hold its first public hearing on 15 April 1996, would ultimately take statements from more than 21,000 witnesses, and hear testimony in public hearings from some 2,000 individuals. It would receive more than 7,000 amnesty applications and present its final report in October 1998. A full seven-volume report was only completed and presented to President Thabo Mbeki five years later. As intended, the work of the TRC, and especially its public hearings, became a crucible of South Africa’s transition from apartheid and offered a specific path towards a new and non-racial nation. The TRC was, in its time, a vehicle that saturated through newspaper, television and radio coverage, through artistic and dramatic representations, and through live hearings that moved about the country virtually all the spaces of civil society. More so, as various publics engaged with the TRC in radically different ways, the TRC became constitutive of civil society in the ‘new South Africa’. The TRC, its unfolding role in South Africa’s post-apartheid transition years, its reverberations through truth processes in other countries (still ongoing), and its opening of spaces for ‘voices’ not broadly acknowledged before, created an extraordinary opening for commentary, interpretation and publication

Violent Modernity. France in Algeria

the ‘clash of civilisations’ hypothesis (which is not a particularly difficult feat) but also briefly takes aim at the argument, made by Noam Chomsky and others, that America’s imperial quest for ‘oil hegemony’ is central to the current poor state of US-Arab relations. Makdisi argues that although oil might explain ‘why the United States is in the Middle East’, it does not explain ‘the depth and nature of Arab disillusionment with America’ (pp. 356–357). His argument that the ArabIsraeli conflict is what has soured US-Arab relations is generally convincing, but he seems somewhat less than confident about the implications of this contention. For example, he argues in his epilogue that the decision of the United States to continually ‘privilege Israel over the Arabs’ has ‘precluded the possibility of a less fraught American relationship with the Arab world’ (p. 357). If, then, the United States ended its privileging of Israel or was somehow able to calm the Arab-Israeli conflict by brokering a peace deal, would there still only be a ‘possibility’ of ‘less fraught’ relations? Such a statement might not convince US policymakers that making efforts in this direction would be worth the time and political capital such a task would require. The damage, in Makdisi’s mind, has been done and it has been extensive. It is a brusquely honest but disheartening conclusion. In 1922, the US House of Representatives held hearings in the run-up to the passing of a resolution in favour of the Balfour Declaration, during which they heard testimony from two prominent Palestinian-Americans, Fuad Shatara and Selim Totah. Both of these men futilely testified that the Zionist project was inherently unjust to the Palestinians and that American backing for this project would contradict the much-vaunted ideals of the United States. Their testimony, however, amounted to ‘voices in the wilderness’ according to Makdisi (pp. 166–169). Faith Misplaced is the heir to these voices, and it is a forceful restatement of the dissenting American argument on the issue of Zionism. The book will likely be read by many Americans who already feel sympathy for the Palestinian plight, but the country would be better served if it was read by those who generally identify with Israel. This is not to say that Makdisi’s book will necessarily change minds, but it will richly reward anyone who hopes to more fully understand the recent genesis and evolution of Arab anger towards the United States.