Search

The engagement in the French army during the Algerian war condemned the harkis to a silent existence. Considered as traitors in their country of birth, and undesirable in their country of exile, they strive to remain invisible and silent. In the writings of their descendants, who decided one day to tell the traumatic Hi/story of their community, a character inevitably stands out: the father walled in silence, leading his life alone, for fear of disappointing or not being able to give the best explanations for a “shameful” past. To illustrate the different “configurations” and values of the “entrenched words” that the descendants of harkis inscribe in their literary works, we will base our analysis on the novels Mon père, ce harki (2003) by Dalila Kerchouche, Mohand, le harki (2003) by Hadjila Kemoum and L’Art de perdre (2017) by Alice Zeniter.

During the Algerian war (1954-62), the French Armed Forces resorted to torture, provoking a national debate on the topic. This article focuses on Catholic military chaplains, who on the one hand had to obey their ecclesiastical superiors and on the other acted as confessors and advisors to the military personnel conducting interrogations. The complexity of their position is revealed by the public and private writings these clergymen devoted to torture, showing an ambiguous and sometimes reticent attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 60th anniversary of 1960, the «year of Africa», which embraces events spanning the five-year period from 1957-1962, has received only superficial attention in the media and in the academic world. This neglect applies above all, but is certainly not limited, to Italy, and is surprising for a number of reasons. That pivotal moment has become more and more significant within the context of contemporary phenomena and processes -- namely decolonisation and globalisation -- as well as the emergence of new political and institutional priorities. To these we need to add the impact of the events on the pre-1968 generations. In this light we have asked four Italian academics, with different age and research profiles, to reflect on how those events influenced their life and work choices, as well as what responses they elicit today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is principally known as a great theoretician of race relations and decolonization, in particular through the two main books he published during his lifetime Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). What is less known is that he was in parallel a pioneering psychiatrist and an early and recognized theoretician of ethnopsychiatry. A volume of about a thousand pages of texts either difficult to access or presumed lost was recently published, following more than a decade of research in archives located in different parts of the world. It reveals first the importance and originality of his thought as a scientist, and secondly the importance of this dimension of his work for the understanding of his political texts. This is shown on two points: 1) the role of violence in the decolonization process, when compared with Fanon’s texts on psychiatric internment, the phenomenon of agitation and the alternative model of social therapy and 2) the use of «identity» as cultural foundation for newly decolonized states, which he strongly criticised, when compared with Fanon’s systematic questioning of any personal «constitution» in his psychiatric and ethnopsychiatric work.

L’Art de perdre (Flammarion, 2017) is the fifth and latest novel of Alice Zeniter, French novelist and dramatist. She published her first novel at the age of sixteen. In this paper I will present L’Art de perdreas a novel related to the common history of France and Algeria. My main goal is to analyze the issues of memory according to the concepts of postmemory by Marianne Hirsch and archaeological novel by Dominique Viart. The article aims also at following a comparative study of L’Art de perdre and previous novels by Alice Zeniter: Jusque dans nos bras and Juste avant l’Oubli.

On 24 July 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned historian Benjamin Stora to report on the «questions regarding the memory of colonisation and the Algerian War». This article begins with an analysis of the report and its reception in France and Algeria, and it has two objectives. On the one hand, it examines the French debate on the memory of the Algerian War and colonization more generally. However, it also intervenes in a broader theoretical debate, asking whether memory studies have not unwittingly led to a discursive shift and replaced politics - understood as conflicts inscribed in social relations - with a distorted conception of «memory» as an ideology of «capitalist realism» (Fisher). To use the provocative title of a recent study (Gensburger and Lefranc, 2017), we might ask: are memory politics really useful? Do they shape reality? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recent years the only scholarly reference about women in the Algerian revolution was Les femmes algériennes dans la guerre (Paris, Plon, 1991) by former fighter Djamila Amrane. Starting from 2000, a great deal of memoirs, books and essays have been published, authored by women and focusing both on women’s role and experience during the battle of Algiers, and on the revolutionary process in a broader sense. This paper focuses on some of these women’s narratives, underlying the difference between their narrations and the State discourse. Though tackling taboo subjects like torture and sexual violence, women authors are nevertheless aware of the social and political implication of their struggle; today, after sixty years of independence, they still struggle for their right to be full citizens of Algeria.

Decades after Henri Alleg's testimony La Question and Pierre Guyotat's unclassifiable lyrical epic Eden, Eden, Eden, two autobiographies about the Algerian War, were censored, Laurent Mauvignier's Des Hommes was published by Editions de Minuit in 2010 and the press was unanimous in its praise of the novel. Yet, of these three books which all deal with history's identical silences, only one seems to resonate with the current times and be legible. Beyond analysing the relationships between time, memory and narrative, the primary issue is to examine the authorial ethos that orchestrates the narration. What is the position to adopt and the scenario to invent on the writing stage to succeed in "inhabiting the social space" and being granted a place in the repertoire of the common tales of a specific time?

This article focuses on the question to what extent Laurent Mauvignier's Des hommes is not simply a novel on the Algerian War but also an enquiry into how past experiences inform the present, making it a symptom of the past. The novel's characters are both subjects and objects, caught up in the remorseless mechanism of repressing, remembering and forgetting. The questions that arise in view of the novel's major themes help to make sense of Laurent Mauvignier's poetic choices in approximating the past: how and to what extent does literature make it possible to remedy the absolute absence of the past? Does literature enable us to reconsider the logic of historiography's dominant knowledge about the past? How does literature proceed in order to link the intimate and individual to collective history, thereby signalling that the intimate is inextricably tied to the collective and vice versa? Laurent Mauvignier's novel shows that collective memory, which is always polyphonic, may be the best means to reactualise a complex past and that perhaps this is only possible in fiction.

While the novel' relationships to history is the subject of increasing interest, the ability of poetry to tell history in the twentieth century, however, is almost never an issue. This article analyzes Franck Venaille's writing of the Algerian war. Related to intense formal experimentation as well as to a movement back to the "intimate", the presence of the Algerian war leads to "a terrible game with the truth", in a poetry which key words are hermeticism and acceleration.