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This article explores ‘ecologies of affect’ in literary representations of disaster—earthquakes, flash floods and cyclones—with reference to Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du seisme (1999) and Nathacha Ap...

This article explores the affective and gendered transmission of ‘postmemory’ in Garcon manque (2000) and Sauvages (2010) by Nina Bouraoui. These two narratives take place at the end of the 1970s in Algiers, a transitional period in Algerian history, but also a key moment where the generation born after independence in 1962 express and create their own memories of colonialism and the Algerian Revolution. The focus of the article will be to reveal the representation of postmemorial transmission across forms of mediation that are simultaneously affective, embodied and gendered. From this perspective, it analyses generational memory as a ‘mauvais cadeau’, photographs and other affective objects, and gendered multidirectional memory to show how Bouraoui’s novels trouble singular, normative expressions of gendered and national identity. Bouraoui’s protagonists from the post-generation are thus characterized as ‘mnemonic agents’ who cross gendered and national borders.

What are the legacies of the Algerian War of Independence in the present? More specifically, how do the Algerian War of Independence and its subsequent memorializations force us to reconceptualize historical temporality itself (of which the ‘legacy’ is but one variation)? The following introduction to this special issue provides an overarching framework for multiple answers to these questions. The first half of the introduction focuses on the philosophical and conceptual afterlives of the Algerian War in contemporary French critical thought. In doing so, it attempts to delineate the significant political import of historical temporality as such, setting out a basic problematic to which the articles that follow can be seen variously to respond. In the second part of the introduction, the general cultural and historical legacies of the Algerian War of Independence, and the ‘mnemonic forms’ (Erll 2011) of rupture, repression and repetition that mediate them, come into focus: the ‘rupture’ from a colonial past, the Freudian ‘repression’ of traumatic history, and the ostensible ‘repetition’ of violence in the present. In general, the introduction hopes to open a dialogue with works conducted on these ‘forms’, scrutinizing the effects they have had on the various re-imaginings of the war and its transnational legacies, yet without foreclosing other forms this history may take.