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This essay is an Algerian-French poet-translator's personal reflection on the indispensable role that translation has played in his poetic creativity. Emphasizing in particular his bilingual education in the colonial Algerian context, he observes that his translation of poets from English, Arabic, and German into French is thus "doubly foreign" because his French is steeped in his Arabic culture and language. The essay advocates for the peaceful coexistence of any two languages, and especially the postcolonial coexistence of Arabic and French, as one of mutual enrichment. Tengour shows how this inclusive translational approach to Algerian bilinguality informs not only his creative process but also his editorial work, including Diwân ifriqiya, volume 4 of the Poems for the Millennium series from the University of California Press, and Poèmes du monde, a series of poetry in translation from Éditions Apic in Algeria, which has published over twenty poets from at least a dozen countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

France's colonial history in Algeria has been the subject of "Memory Wars" since the end of the 1990s. Culminating in 2012 at the fiftieth anniversary of the Algerian War (1954–1962), these Memory Wars contributed to numerous publications about every aspect of Algeria. Large format coffee-table photographic books (beaux livres), as well as paperbacks full of collected memories of the colonial years and the war, from both French and Algerians, flooded French bookshops. In this article, I engage with the concepts of competitive, hoarded, and multidirectional memory to demonstrate how French memorial books that are especially photo driven appear to place war on display, but, at the same time, bury difficult and traumatic memory. The research examines three French memorial books published between 2010 and 2012, leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, and addresses how traumatic memories are recuperated and still hidden within texts that attempt to fill a memorial void. Despite book titles that claim to examine the memories of war, within the books, Algeria often remains a beautiful, peaceful, and nostalgic backdrop. War is not clearly depicted in the images but emerges in accompanying descriptive texts. In light of France's establishment of the Truth and Memory Commission on the Algerian War in 2022, I examine how diverse versions of the past come into dialogue with each other, while individual memorial books continue to crowd out unspeakable violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the conceptual foundations on which scholars of modern Islam have built their narratives for decades, ideas such as "reform" and "reformism" have been singled out for charges of Eurocentricism and Orientalism. At the same time, research on early modern Islam leads us to question the specificities of these nineteenth and twentieth-century concepts. Building on this scholarship, this article examines the case of Algerian Ibadi reform (iṣlāḥ) in order to reassert the specificity of the early twentieth century as a moment when Islamic concepts acquired new meanings, but also as a moment of deep entanglements between Islamic and colonial knowledge production. It shows that a systematic understanding of iṣlāḥ as social and religious reform linked to the idea of progress developed only during the interwar period. It also demonstrates that the emic and etic uses of iṣlāḥ and "reform" developed together, a result of the confluence between modern Islamic scholarship and scholarship about Islam in the early twentieth-century Algerian colonial public sphere. Thus, the conceptual history of iṣlāḥ warns us against approaches that consider emic and etic categories bounded entities and invites us instead to unravel their complexities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines anticolonial crime in interwar French Algeria. Faced with European attempts at political, economic, and cultural hegemony, and battered by poverty, legal discrimination, and official/police intransigence, Algerians often used criminal acts in an effort to destabilize and undermine French authority. This article examines the case study of the Department of Constantine, where Arab/Kabyle inhabitants regularly engaged in anticolonial crime and violence, including the robbery of arms and explosives from government buildings and mines, train derailments, and football hooliganism. More seriously, certain "criminals" engaged in the murder of settlers and attacked or killed police officers and administrative officials. In both city and countryside the official response was brutal: the violation of suspects' rights, excessive force in lieu of arrests, vigilante killings of suspects, and the forced removal of the families of anyone deemed outside the law. In this way, administrators and law enforcement tried to restore European predominance, yet the increasing prevalence of anticolonial crime effectively helped pave the way for popular nationalist movements in the post-1945 era and the 1954-62 AlgerianWar of Independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]