Natalya Vince

Our fighting sisters: Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954–2012

Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian women played a major role in the struggle to end French rule in one of the twentieth century’s most violent wars of decolonisation. This is the first in-depth exploration of what happened to these women after independence in 1962. Based on new oral history interviews with women who participated in the war in a wide range of roles, from urban bombers to members of the rural guerrilla support network, it explores how female veterans viewed the post-independence state and its multiple discourses on ‘the Algerian woman’ in the fifty years following 1962. It also examines how these former combatants’ memories of the anti-colonial conflict intertwine with, contradict or coexist alongside the state-sponsored narrative of the war constructed after independence. Making an original contribution to debates about gender, nationalism and memory, this book will appeal to students and scholars of history and politics.

Saintly grandmothers: youth reception and reinterpretation of the national past in contemporary Algeria

It is well documented that contemporary debates about political legitimacy in Algeria are often structured through the juxtaposition of conflicting narratives of the past, and in particular, the War of Independence (1954–62) and its aftermath. Alternative versions of what happened to female combatants (mujahidat) after the war are a case in point: in the glorified official discourse, the revolution liberated women though the emancipation of the Algerian people; in feminist oppositional narratives, female combatants were betrayed by a patriarchal post-colonial regime composed of men of dubious wartime credentials. How these discourses are received and reinterpreted by young Algerians today has received little academic attention. This article presents new empirical research: a case study carried out in 2007 of 95 trainee teachers in History, Arabic Literature, Philosophy, French and English at the Ecole normale supérieure in Bouzaréah, Algiers. It explores what image students have of the mujahidat and how this image is formed through the filters of school textbooks, family stories, films, books and current affairs. As recipients of narratives constructed at different times and with different aims, it is argued that students have fused the local, national and transnational frames of reference available to them, creating new readings of the past which sidestep easy categorisation into ‘official’ and ‘oppositional’ versions. The article thus highlights the importance of not only paying close attention to how the past is read through the present, but also to how the past is read through a series of more recent, post-independence pasts.

France, Islam and laïcité: colonial exceptions, contemporary reinventions and European convergence

The 2004 law banning ‘ostentatious’ symbols of religious belonging from being worn in French state schools claimed to reaffirm the principle of laicite and put an end to two decades of controversy and inconsistent approaches. Whilst hijabs, turbans, skullcaps and large crosses were all prohibited, it is clear that the Muslim headscarf was the main target. The passionate debate which the ‘law on the veil’ provoked was followed by a relatively uneventful implementation, but the place of Islam within the ‘Republican model’ continues to be a burning topic of intellectual, political and popular discussion. Despite occasional concerns about Evangelical attempts to find new adherents in the banlieue and a small media furore in 2004 when then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy met movie star and Scientologist Tom Cruise, when the cry of ‘laiicite in danger’ goes out in 21st century France, the menace is usually a Muslim one.1

From empire to exile: history and memory within the pied-noir and harki communities, 1962–2012

In 2012 a host of commemorative events took place in France to mark the 50th anniversary of Algeria’s independence, an indication for some that decades of imposed silence and reticence on the part of those who experienced the pangs of decolonization were finally drawing to an end. Particularly lively throughout 2012 were media debates about the Algerian War and the plight of the French inhabitants who left in its wake, namely the settlers known as pieds noirs and the Muslim soldiers or harkis who fought on the French side during the conflict. Had France finally moved into the ultimate ‘hyper-memory’ phase of the memory syndrome as delineated by Henry Rousso? Is France now cured of its amnesia with regard to its Algerian past? Experts would certainly have us believe so.

Algeria and France: beyond the Franco-Algerian lens

Vince challenges the oft-repeated idea that Franco-Algerian relations were ‘exceptional’ both during the period of colonial rule and after independence. Although Algeria held a distinct place within the French empire (considered three departements of France and with a large settler population), there were many connections and parallels between Algeria and other parts of the French empire—in terms of people, colonial ideas and policies, the experiences and activism of colonized peoples and intertwined chains of events. In the post-independence period, a confrontational rhetoric between the two countries has masked pragmatic collaboration. Franco-Algerian ‘memory wars’ are often more Franco-French and Algero-Algerian than they initially seem. Moreover, rather than being locked in a suffocating embrace, Franco-Algerian relations have always existed and functioned in broader global contexts.

Le dernier tabou: les ‘harkis’ restés en Algérie après l’indépendance

ing indiscriminate terrorism was nothing but ‘revisionism’ and an attempt to ‘delegitimize la guerre de libération nationale’ (Liberté, 5 April 2012). The form and content of Drif’s memoir differ considerably from Mohammed Harbi’s Une vie debout: Mémoires politiques (1945–1962) (Paris: La Découverte, 2001), which is one of the most profound memoirs to date on the Algerian national movement. Despite all this, Drif’s book is useful in analysing the strategy of legitimation and disqualification in a violent context, and is a precious narrative about the radicalisation of an otherwise privileged young woman living under oppressive colonial rule.

Remembering French Algeria: pieds-noirs, identity, and exile

focus on memory in the programmes (which can lead to a case study of France’s relationship to its past relating to World War two or to the algerian War). the detailed focus on comics examines issues such as the role of extra-diegetic material and paratextual elements in providing legitimacy for comic narratives, the place of colonial iconography and orientalist tropes in comics and how the authors negotiate the ‘postcolonial paradox’ (‘the ambiguous relationship established between postcolonial cartoonists and colonialist aesthetics results in irreconcilable narrative tensions’, 149), and the representation and place of landscapes in the comics. Howell conducts detailed literary analysis of the books, and also draws on a number of interviews with authors (and a few teachers). as the author states herself, her background is as a literary scholar, so there is not much discussion of the visual style of the comics. It would also have been interesting to hear more about the reception of these comics—how they have been reviewed, and how many copies have been sold. Within the corpus—which is wide-ranging, but could do with being discussed and presented early on so that the reader can better grasp its scope—there is a particularly strong representation from writers that can be referred to as ‘frontaliers’, and also from writers engaged in ‘postmemory’. this is because a number of the authors have family ties to algeria—as children of soldiers who fought in the war, or children of settlers etc. they are able to negotiate the boundaries between France and algeria. and what often motivates them to research their comics and write or draw about this period is a desire to learn more about this aspect of their family history. this book will be of interest to students of literature in particular who are interested in this genre, which traditionally has had a ‘marginal/paraliterary status’, and who are interested in French representations of algeria in contemporary France.

Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France

research in thefield.Thebibliography is too short for a book of his undertaking and omits a range of significant contributions, notably in Anglo-American scholarship. This shortcoming is amplified by a complete lack of references to secondary sources and a rather eccentric disregard of a number of recent currents that have substantially revised our understanding of the movement. Foremost amongst these is the absence of any sustained discussion of the Surrealists’ highly problematic cult of woman as well as the many contributions made by the movement’s female participants. Arguably the most controversial point of debate in recent decades, the enormous impact of feminist interventions in Surrealism scholarship should have been treated in adequate detail, rather than confined to a single paragraph. Another aspect that is dealt with rather vaguely is the transnational nature of the movement. The chapter on the internationalisation of Surrealism briefly considers satellite groups in Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Belgium and Mexico, but insufficiently addresses the critical relationship between centre and periphery. And while Murat claims at several instances that this was never a one-way power relation, he elsewhere maintains that Surrealism was essentially Parisian, and misleadingly contrasts its supposedlymonolithic homogeneity with Dada’s transnational diversity. Finally, Murat presents an overly rigid evaluation of Surrealism’s own history, whose relevance he sees in constant decline from 1938 onwards. Recent studies by Gérard Durozoi, Alyce Mahon, Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (all missing from Murat’s bibliography) have convincingly deconstructed this traditional paradigm and re-evaluated the Surrealists’ relevance as an arm of cultural resistance in post-1945 Europe. While the work thus provides students and lay readers with a solid first introduction to the movement, Surrealism scholars are likely to find its approach somewhat outdated.