Search

This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.

The Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), which brought an end to over a century of French colonial dominance in Algeria, is widely viewed as one of the most violent wars of decolonisation, the repercussions of which continue to prove pertinent to contemporary French society. After a thirty-seven year period of widely acknowledged state amnesia in France, the French government finally recognised the Franco-Algerian conflict as a war in 1999. This phase of forgetting persisted in spite of the visible reminder constituted by the sizeable population of Algerian origin living in France: a population that bears the legacy and memory of the war and transmits it to subsequent generations. The hesitation of the state to confront its colonial past in this way has exacerbated the sense of exclusion of France’s Algerian population, and has hindered its capacity to integrate into French society. Through a study of literature, this thesis addresses these issues of remembrance and exclusion. Taking as its primary corpus novels by four authors who embody the divisive past shared by France and Algeria – Azouz Begag, Mehdi Charef, Mounsi, and Leïla Sebbar – this study investigates the ways in which Franco-Algerian literature has represented the marginalisation of France’s ethnic Algerian population, and posited routes of escape from this marginalisation. Furthermore, it analyses the extent to which the primary texts challenge the history of silence maintained for so long by the French government, and bring to light instead a complex, plural historical narrative as opposed to the monolithic version of history put forward by the state. By examining texts published between 1981 and 1999, the thesis traces the increased presence of the children of Algerian migrants in French society during the 1980s, which leads into a greater attention to history and a wave of remembrance in the 1990s, prefiguring the eventual official acknowledgment of the Algerian War by the French government in 1999.

The object of this thesis is to study the attempts made by writers and filmmakers in two very different socio-cultural contexts to depict and elucidate the experience of political violence, particularly torture, in the periods 1954-1962 and 1976-1983. I seek to apply the hypotheses of Anglo-American and French theorists with an interest in historical representation, as well as trauma, to both 'realist' and experimental accounts of the widespread oppression that occurred during the Algerian war of independence and later during the so-called 'Dirty War' in Argentina. The texts analysed in detail include novels and short stories by Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela; the films I examine most closely are the Algerian-Italian 'docudrama' La Bataille d'Alger and the Argentine melodrama La historia oficial. However, the thesis also addresses other non-factual portrayals of brutality, such as the Nouvelle Vague's meditations on decolonization, and autobiographical writings, such as military memoirs and survivors' testimony, as a means of elaborating more fully on the issues at stake in the works cited above. It explores the difficulty - and the possibility - of giving voice to histories that simultaneously resist and demand articulation, and ultimately, of reconstituting the fragmented or 'disappeared' subject through narrative: of using fiction to summon the 'ghosts' of the past.

The Algerian War of Independencein Algerian bande dessin�ebyVeronica Katherine DeanDoctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone StudiesUniversity of California, Los Angeles, 2020Professor Lia N. Brozgal, Chair“The Algerian War of Independence in Algerian bande dessin�e” is animated by the question of how bande dessin�e from Algeria represent the nation’s struggle for independence from France. Although the war is represented extensively in bande dessin�e from France and Algeria, French texts are more well-known than their Algerian counterparts among scholars and b�d�philes alike. Catalysts behind this project are the disproportionate awareness and study of French bande dessin�e on the war and the fact that critical studies of Algerian bande dessin�e are rare and often superficial. This project nevertheless builds upon existing scholarship by problematizing its assumptions and conclusions, including the generalization that Algerian bande dessin�e that depict the war are in essence propagandistic in nature. Employing tools of comics analysis and inflecting my research with journalistic work coming out of Algeria, this project attempts to rectify the treatment of Algerian bande dessin�e in critical scholarship by illustrating the rich tradition of historical representation in the medium. Using the theoretical lens of genre theory, this project establishes and explores what I call the Algerian War Genre as a way to understand the corpus of texts on the war and to elevate Algerian bande dessin�e to the status of art that merits analysis. Each of the three chapters examine examples of the Algerian War Genre. The flexible and mutable criterion of the Algerian War Genre is a strength of this study because it encourages diversity among texts in terms of format, decade of publication, and content. The framework of genre spans the project, while individual chapters engage with genre theory and comics theory to different extents. The chapters are organized by b�d�iste in order to draw attention to their individual contributions to the medium and the genre as its pioneers.

“Crises of Postmemory: Deferred Postmemory in Second-Generation Novels after the Algerian War” examines the role of literature at the intersection of trauma, memory, transmission in the context of Franco-Algerian history. Expanding Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory investigates the relationship between the generation that lives through a traumatic event and the extent to which their traumatic memories can be inherited by the next generation. This theory is based on intergenerational communication and transmission, which often occur to such a great extent that the experiences of the second generation can appear to be dominated by the ‘memories’ inherited from the first generation. This dissertation expands on the idea of postmemory in the context of the Algerian War for independence and its afterlives in France. In this case, the second generation is often met with silence and avoidance from the first generation. Rather than being inundated with others’ memories as Hirsch described, these descendants must actively seek out the past on their own, often without the intervention of the first generation. Although delay can be inferred from the name “postmemory” the experiences explored in this project are further removed from the original trauma of the first generation and therefore represent what I term deferred postmemory.The six historically based francophone fictional texts studied in this project are constructed on the collective trauma experienced and retained by the first generation; a trauma, which although unexpressed, marked the second generation through its both internal and external censorship. Moving farther away traditional postmemory with each chapter, this project analyzes how the second-generation uses diverse scaffolds to gain access to the unshared traumatic past of the first generation. Each chapter presents a couplet of texts that engage with the same historical moment or depict the same method for discovering different traumatic pasts. Through testimonial experiences, retracing the first generation’s movements to historically significant locations, and finally visiting and creating archives, the second-generation characters depicted in each text are better able comprehend the first-generation’s traumatic past and its impact on future generations.

Empire has traditionally been viewed as a masculine endeavor. Only in the past few decades, along with the rise of gender history, have scholars to a meaningful extent taken up the study of women and gender in the context of empire. This thesis examines the complexity of French women’s intellectual thought about the colonies during the time period of 1900-1962, which includes both the climax and the breakdown of the French colonial empire. Many other studies of colonial fiction have prevailed in this field, addressing cultural history in particular, but women’s nonfiction remains to be examined in detail and in relation to intellectual history. This study thus consists of three chapters, each a case study of a different French woman’s nonfictional work. Through the lenses of gender and postcolonial theory, along with the aid of the literary theory of narratology, these women’s navigations between complicity and resistance with regard to colonial ideology in their writings can be articulated in a more detailed way.Grace Corneau, author of La femme aux colonies, published in 1900, is the first writer to be profiled. An American who married a French nobleman, she was a journalist and author who published this work after living in Indochina and Africa. Although Corneau was writing to recruit women to the colonies, she displays strategies of resistance related to her own gender ideology.Clotilde-Chivas Baron, wife of a colonial administrator who lived en brousse in Indochina, is the second case study. A successful and award-winning fictional author, she also authored a comprehensive history of women in the colonies titled La femme francaise aux colonies. Written in 1929, her work demonstrates a retreat into bourgeois gender roles even as she has a more polemic purpose in writing— to correct misconceptions about the role of women in the colonies.The third case study centers around Germaine Tillion, by far the most well-known and studied woman referenced in this thesis, who was involved in the French resistance, interned at Ravensbruck concentration camp, and then worked for the French government in Algeria during the Algerian War. A trained ethnologist who completed years of fieldwork in Algeria, she became an intellectual touchstone during the Algerian conflict for precisely this reason. Her works Les ennemis comple'mentaires and L’Afrique bascule vers l’avenir, published in 1960 and 1957 respectively, analyze the situation during the Algerian war and recommend a course of action for the future. Although she takes up the cause of the Algerians out of duty to fight for the oppressed (since she had been a Nazi concentration camp), she nevertheless fails to indict the system of colonialism for causing the Algerian conflict.The juxtaposition of these three writers helps bring to light the realities of French women who were directly implicated in the colonial enterprise’s complicity and/or resistance to colonial ideology, embedding these works into the context of colonial writing.

This dissertation proposes a new theory of translation to explain how trauma testimony is performed by survivors who have experienced a death of their selves. It shows that certain 20th century French and Francophone authors translate their voices across languages, literary genres, and bodies (both human and animal) in order to testify of trauma when they are no longer able to bear witness in the first-person. The two French works studied-- Journal (2008) by Helene Berr and La Douleur [The War] (1985) by Marguerite Duras-- exhibit translations by the authors to different subject-positions within themselves. Berr translates across languages to negotiate between different socio-linguistically constructed identities and cites English literature to speak in her stead when she is no longer able to voice her experiences. On the other hand, Duras translates across different literary genres (autobiography, auto-fiction, and fiction) in order to recreate a sense of self and increase her capacity for emotional expression. The two Francophone works studied--Djamila Boupacha (1962) by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi and Le passe devant soi [The Past Ahead] (2008) by Gilbert Gatore--exhibit translation movements across bodies. Djamila Boupacha translates her voice to Gisele Halimi, her Tunisian-French lawyer, and to Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist author, in order to testify of the torture she endured during the Algerian War. Each time that Boupacha's testimony is re-voiced, it is transformed due to differences in the three women's social positioning. Gatore translates his identity across a series of fictional selves (each of which exists in the imagination of the previous one) in order to verbalize the unsayable and the unknowable experiences of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While a translation to human bodies allows him to express the unsayable, translation onto animal bodies is necessary to express the unknowable. In all four works, the first translation movement creates a new self who approximates the original subject before it was destroyed; it is marked by strength, agency, and increased emotional expression. Afterwards, a second translation movement occurs to create a self who mirrors the destroyed being. The new self is characterized by vulnerability, destruction, and death. Importantly, however, from this vantage point, it is possible to express what remains inaccessible from the original subject-position. This tripartite configuration allows the survivor to recreate a stable identity, attribute meaning to the etiological event, and process trauma.

The Algerian War has been surrounded with historical amnesia, which the figure of Charles de Gaulle perpetuated by the creation of a national myth that included the concepts of a civilizing mission' and the need to revive its 'glorious past. The question of torture during that period proved discordant with the republican ideals of France and the construction of the myth, thus awkwardly moving the country back and forth between silence and commemoration. The official line of the state, mostly motivated by silence, excluded accounts of torture and resulted in a postcolonial conflict between fragmented memories and a monolithic vision of history, making the Algerian War a very contemporary debate despite a gap of fifty years.

La France a connu une histoire d’immigration et se trouve au carrefour des cultures divergentes. L’état français accueillit des coutumes, des traditions et des religions des immigrés tout en tenant aux piliers républicains de fraternité, égalité et liberté. Tout individu est égal devant cet état laïc qui protège le droit commun. Néanmoins, au centre de ce croisement existe un équilibre difficile à achever. Les déracinés se balancent entre deux cultures substantives de l’histoire de colonisation, de décolonisation et des guerres inhérentes. Quelque soit la méthode d’assimiler ou d’intégrer, ses bienvenues subissent des épreuves incessantes malgré l’époque malgré le pays d’origine. Donc, ce document tente à tracer, qualifier et adresser l’histoire et l’état des immigrés en France tout en étudiant le film, Inch’Allah Dimanche, qui sert d’analyse de l’immigration française dans le regroupement familial de 1974.

The 2003 American invasion of Iraq resulted in a violent insurgency that American forces were initially unable to counter. The United States military was shocked by its failure and was forced to consider what it had done wrong. Once the U.S. military looked into its past it was forced to admit it had wrongly ignored counterinsurgency. To correct this, it assigned many of its officers, along with other military experts, to create a new, updated doctrine that incorporated the lessons of Iraq and other recent, relevant historical precedent. Perhaps surprisingly to some, the United States military interpreted that the Algerian War was of particularly important value. This example, according to the interpretation of the U.S. military, demonstrated certain aspects of counterinsurgency, called 'laws' by some in the military, that could benefit current world powers. The two aspects of counterinsurgency the U.S. determined were especially important from the Algerian War are the primacy of the population--who must be genuinely convinced to participate on the side of the counterinsurgent force--above all else, including the destruction of the insurgent force and the necessity of the counterinsurgent force to only use methods that are consisted with its stated national ideals. Specifically, the French won the war militarily but still lost politically. This represents an extremely important conclusion for the U.S. military as it has had a history--as in Vietnam--of considering military victory to be the core of its strategy. The Algerian War, according to the American interpretation, was strong evidence that the old way of thinking was no longer possible. Therefore, the U.S. military studied the Algerian War and this 'lesson' has been directly applied to its current counterinsurgency doctrine. Also, the French use of torture represented another lesson that was particular to the Algerian War. The use of torture in France was of particular interest to the Americans because while it appeared to be working during the Algerian War, the U.S. military interpreted that its success was only a facade. The conspicuous use of torture had undermined French prestige both inside Algeria and around the world. Therefore, even though torture yielded positive, short-term results the long-term result was political failure as France discontinued its effort to retain Algeria. Both of these lessons appear in the current counterinsurgency field manual of the U.S. military, which indicate the direct causal link between the Algerian War and current U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine.