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Abstract This article analyses how certain former European settlers of Algeria (pieds-noirs) have created a digital space of remembrance online using scans of colonial-era postcards. Tracing the role of colonial-era postcards in pied-noir memory narratives, from the phototexts of the 1980s to websites from the mid-2000s onwards, I suggest these digital sites of memory attempt to maintain a connection to an imagined Algerian homeland during the so-called ‘memory wars’. By collecting, scanning, and reproducing postcards and photographs of colonial landscapes, pieds-noirs websites aim to reconstruct a lost topography of houses, shops, streets, and towns that have been renamed and rebuilt since independence. These ‘virtual returns’ to Algerian urban topographies rely predominantly on affective responses to ‘nostalgérie’ or nostalgia for Algeria. However, in relying on colonial-era postcards they ultimately recreate the ‘visual economy’ (Welch and McGonagle) of French Algeria in the early 20th century. I argue that, despite the radical ‘connectivity’ presented by the internet, these websites remain primarily focused on creating a homogenous collective memory for an imagined audience of pieds-noirs online. Nonetheless, I conclude by suggesting that this online model of colonial nostalgia has permeated, in limited but influential ways, how other groups interpret visual ‘nostalgérie’.

This article suggests that gender and cultural memory are both performative acts and that memories of the colonial re-enact certain gender codes associated with the act of colonisation. Colonialism can be understood in terms of a gendered hierarchy: that the colonisers were imagined as virile and male, violating the virgin, ‘feminine’ territory of the colonised land. In this way, colonised peoples were gendered as feminine in order justify European rhetoric of racial superiority. However, the narratives of anti-colonial writers and thinkers who condemn colonialism, such as Frantz Fanon, are ‘haunted’ by gendered tropes of the colonialism – that colonisation is a rape, and that the colonised people are feminised victims. This article uses Ahmed Kalouaz’s 1986 novel Point Kilométrique 190 as an example of trans-national memory which successfully transcends these gendered stereotypes. The short novel functions as a mnemonic device (a commemoration to Habib Grimzi, a victim of anti- Algerian violence) which makes connections between racist violence in France during the 1980s with the history of the Algerian war. However, simultaneously, the narrative avoids gendered stereotypes associated with French and Algerian men and women. Using a French woman to posthumously voice a murdered Algerian man, Kalouaz creates a pluralistic narrative which shatters Algerian/French, Feminine/Masculine binaries and allows for the transfer of traumatic memory across boundaries assigned to gender identities, as well as national groups.

This article suggests that gender and cultural memory are both performative acts and that memories of the colonial re-enact certain gender codes associated with the act of colonisation. Colonialism can be understood in terms of a gendered hierarchy: that the colonisers were imagined as virile and male, violating the virgin, ‘feminine’ territory of the colonised land. In this way, colonised peoples were gendered as feminine in order justify European rhetoric of racial superiority. However, the narratives of anti-colonial writers and thinkers who condemn colonialism, such as Frantz Fanon, are ‘haunted’ by gendered tropes of the colonialism – that colonisation is a rape, and that the colonised people are feminised victims. This article uses Ahmed Kalouaz’s 1986 novel Point Kilométrique 190 as an example of trans-national memory which successfully transcends these gendered stereotypes. The short novel functions as a mnemonic device (a commemoration to Habib Grimzi, a victim of anti- Algerian violence) which makes connections between racist violence in France during the 1980s with the history of the Algerian war. However, simultaneously, the narrative avoids gendered stereotypes associated with French and Algerian men and women. Using a French woman to posthumously voice a murdered Algerian man, Kalouaz creates a pluralistic narrative which shatters Algerian/French, Feminine/Masculine binaries and allows for the transfer of traumatic memory across boundaries assigned to gender identities, as well as national groups.