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.
Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian women played a major role in the struggle to end French rule in one of the most violent wars of decolonisation of the 20th century. This book presents an in-depth ...exploration of what happened to these women after independence in 1962.
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.
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.
Torture and the Twilight of Empirelooks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war ...from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture--its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central toguerre révolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements. Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population--especially women--and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even acceptable.
Written by a preeminent historical sociologist,Torture and the Twilight of Empireholds particularly disturbing lessons for us today as we carry out the War on Terror.
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.
Algerian Chronicles Camus, Albert; Goldhammer, Arthur; Kaplan, Alice
05/2013
eBook
More than 50 years after independence, Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958-the year ...the war caused the collapse of the Fourth French Republic-it is one of Albert Camus' most political works: an exploration of his commitment to Algeria.
The first full account for a generation of the war against French colonialism in Algeria, setting out the long-term causes of the war from the French occupation of Algeria in 1830 onwards.
