Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violenceexplores the relationship between the human rights movement emerging after 1945 and the increasing violence of decolonization. Based on material ...previously inaccessible in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, this comparative study uses the Mau Mau War (1952-1956) and the Algerian War (1954-1962) to examine the policies of two major imperial powers, Britain and France. Historian Fabian Klose considers the significance of declared states of emergency, counterinsurgency strategy, and the significance of humanitarian international law in both conflicts. Klose's findings from these previously confidential archives reveal the escalating violence and oppressive tactics used by the British and French military during these anticolonial conflicts in North and East Africa, where Western powers that promoted human rights in other areas of the world were opposed to the growing global acceptance of freedom, equality, self-determination, and other postwar ideals. Practices such as collective punishment, torture, and extrajudicial killings did lasting damage to international human rights efforts until the end of decolonization. Clearly argued and meticulously researched,Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violencedemonstrates the mutually impacting histories of international human rights and decolonization, expanding our understanding of political violence in human rights discourse.
Hoarding Memory looks at the ways the stories of the
Algerian War (1954-62) have proliferated among the former French
citizens of Algeria. By engaging hoarding as a model, Amy L.
Hubbell demonstrates ...the simultaneously productive and destructive
nature of clinging to memory. These memories present massive
amounts of material, akin to the stored objects in a hoarder's
house. Through analysis of fiction, autobiography, art, and history
that extensively use collecting, layering, and repetition to
address painful war memories, Hubbell shows trauma can be hidden
within its own representation. Hoarding Memory dedicates
chapters to specific authors and artists who use this hoarding
technique: Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora in
writing and Nicole Guiraud and Patrick Altes in art. All were born
in Algeria during colonial French rule but in vastly different
contexts; each suffered personal or inherited trauma from racism,
physical or psychological abuse, terrorist or other violent acts of
war, and exile in France. Zineb Sedira's artwork is also included
as an example of traumatic memory inherited from her parents.
Ultimately this book shows how traumatic experience can be conveyed
in a seemingly open account that is compounded and compacted by the
volume of words, images, and other memorial debris that testify to
the pain.
InThe Battle for AlgeriaJennifer Johnson reinterprets one of the most violent wars of decolonization: the Algerian War (1954-1962). Johnson argues that the conflict was about who-France or the ...National Liberation Front (FLN)-would exercise sovereignty of Algeria. The fight between the two sides was not simply a military affair; it also involved diverse and competing claims about who was positioned to better care for the Algerian people's health and welfare. Johnson focuses on French and Algerian efforts to engage one another off the physical battlefield and highlights the social dimensions of the FLN's winning strategy, which targeted the local and international arenas. Relying on Algerian sources, which make clear the centrality of health and humanitarianism to the nationalists' war effort, Johnson shows how the FLN leadership constructed national health care institutions that provided critical care for the population and functioned as a protostate. Moreover, Johnson demonstrates how the FLN's representatives used postwar rhetoric about rights and national self-determination to legitimize their claims, which led to international recognition of Algerian sovereignty.
By examining the local context of the war as well as its international dimensions, Johnson deprovincializes North Africa and proposes a new way to analyze how newly independent countries and nationalist movements engage with the international order. The Algerian case exposed the hypocrisy of selectively applying universal discourse and provided a blueprint for claim-making that nonstate actors and anticolonial leaders throughout the Third World emulated. Consequently,The Battle for Algeriaexplains the FLN's broad appeal and offers new directions for studying nationalism, decolonization, human rights, public health movements, and concepts of sovereignty.
An illuminating and provocative account of Germany's role as sanctuary for Algerian nationalists during their fight for independence from France between 1954 and 1962. The book explores key issues ...such as the impact of external sanctuaries on French counterinsurgency efforts; the part played by security and intelligence services in efforts to eliminate these sanctuaries; the Algerian War's influence on West German foreign and security policy; and finally, the emergence of West German civic engagement in support of Algeria's independence struggle, which served to shape the newly independent country's perception of its role and place in international society. Mathilde von Bulow sheds new light on the impact of FLN activities, the role of anti-colonial movements and insurgencies in the developing world in shaping the dynamics of the Cold War as well as the manner in which the Algerian War was fought and won.
Deploying the term 'late-colonial' to describe a body of largely French films made during, and in response to, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), this book revolves around one question - ...what is late-colonial French cinema? - generating two answers. Firstly, Sharpe argues that late-colonial cinema represents a formally and thematically important, yet unappreciated tendency in French cinema; one that has largely been overshadowed by a scholarly focus on the French New Wave. Secondly, Sharpe contends that whilst late-colonial French cinema cannot be seen as a coherent cinematic movement, school of filmmaking, or genre, it can be seen as a coherent ethical trend, with many of the fifteen central case studies explored in Late-colonial French Cinema filtering the Algerian War of Independence through a discourse of 'redemptive pacifism'.
Situated at the crossroads of queer theory and postcolonial
studies, Hybrid Anxieties analyzes the intertwined and
composite aspects of identities and textual forms in the wake of
the French-Algerian ...War (1954-1962). C. L. Quinan argues that the
war precipitated a dynamic in which a contestation of hegemonic
masculinity occurred alongside a production of queer modes of
subjectivity, embodiment, and memory that subvert norms.
Innovations in literature and cinema were also directly impacted by
the long and difficult process of decolonization, as the war
provoked a rethinking of politics and aesthetics. The novels,
films, and poetry analyzed in Hybrid Anxieties trace this
imbrication of content and form, demonstrating how a postwar
fracturing had both salutary and injurious effects, not only on
bodies and psyches but also on artistic forms. Adopting a queer
postcolonial perspective, Hybrid Anxieties adds a new
impulse to the question of how to rethink hegemonic notions of
gender, sexuality, and nationality, thereby opening up new spaces
for considering the redemptive and productive possibilities of
negotiating life in a postcolonial context. Without losing sight of
the trauma of this particularly violent chapter in history,
Hybrid Anxieties proposes a new kind of hybridity that,
however anxious and anticipatory, emphasizes the productive forces
of a queer desire to deconstruct teleological relationships between
past, present, and future.
This book explores the memory of the war of independence in France as viewed by the former European settlers (pieds-noirs) and the harkis, those Algerians who worked for the French security forces. ...It examines how the memorial dynamics of the two groups are related both to each other and to other memories of the war.
Today the Algerian War of Independence remains a powerful symbol for both the former empire and its last colony. Many Algerian guerrilla soldiers were tortured and murdered during the eight-year ...conflict that ended more than a century of colonization, while in France the events became emblematic of a national failure. Cinema played an active role in representing and re-forming the public’s understanding of the conflict. The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens probes this cinematic discourse to shed light on topics such as immigration and national identity as shown in recent depictions of the war from both sides of the Mediterranean. This involves following the sons of draftees reconstructing the war to understand their fathers (Mon Colonel, L’Ennemi Intime) and Algerian immigrant directors filming in their ancestral homeland (Cartouches Gauloises, Hors-la-loi). Nicole Beth Wallenbrock examines production details, box office figures, and narrative analogy to demonstrate the relevance of the Algerian War of Independence to historical and contemporary questions of Algerian and French national identity. This book is essential for academics and students interested in the history of war and historical representation.
The aftermath of Algeria's revolutionary war for independence coincided with the sexual revolution in France, and in this book Todd Shepard argues that these two movements are inextricably linked.? ...Sex, France, and Arab Men is a history of how and why—from the upheavals of French Algeria in 1962 through the 1970s—highly sexualized claims about Arabs were omnipresent in important public French discussions, both those that dealt with sex and those that spoke of Arabs. Shepard explores how the so-called sexual revolution took shape in a France profoundly influenced by the ongoing effects of the Algerian revolution. Shepard's analysis of both events alongside one another provides a frame that renders visible the ways that the fight for sexual liberation, usually explained as an American and European invention, developed out of the worldwide anticolonial movement of the mid-twentieth century.
Today, the "fight to write"-the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one's own story-is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well ...beyond a single cultural moment.
In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women's individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades-from Assia Djebar's 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif's 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter-Women Fight, Women Writetraces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women's writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women's political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir.
Algeria's patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country's dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write.Women Fight, Women Writeadvances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.
