Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Lia Brozgal
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
Subway Station ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Critical Information ◽  
War For Independence ◽  
October 17 ◽  
Scholarly Discourse

The introduction provides critical information on the history and stakes of the October 17 massacre, situating it within the context of the Algerian War for Independence and the French imperial project more generally. It is invested in tracing the evolution of the massacre’s representation in political, popular, and scholarly discourse, and in exploring the ways in which the massacre has been rendered both visible and invisible. Comparisons with Vichy (briefly) and with another episode of state violence (the 1962 police murder of protesters at the Charonne subway station) help to contextualize October 17’s ambivalent status in the French national narrative. Arguing that October 17 should be read as a signal event whose putative invisibility has been both metaphorical and a result of historical conjuncture, the introduction also lays out the book’s critical commitments, surveys the landscape of existing scholarship, and establishes the concept of the anarchive.

17 October 1961

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-118
Author(s):  
Michel Laronde
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Institutional Violence ◽  
Fortieth Anniversary ◽  
Ongoing Effort ◽  
October 17 ◽  
The Many

This entry focuses on the resistance against the erasure of institutional violence from collective memory during the Algerian War in France with the example of the 17 October 1961 massacre of North Africans in Paris. As part of an ongoing effort to correct the state’s misrepresentation of the event to the nation, a plaque was inaugurated by the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, on October 17, 2001, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the event. The image of the plaque that reads ‘In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961’ resonates also in other cities around Paris as a corrective act of the great national narrative. Plaques and the renaming of streets, squares and public loci as ‘17 October 1961’ are memory initiatives that ensure the transition from state lie to the historical transformation of one of the traumatic situations embedded along the fractured lines between the colonial and the post-colonial. Plaques are akin to sites of memory, part of the process of healing traumas by keeping them alive in the present and represent the engagement of the post-colonial period towards correcting the distortions of silenced history.

Reembodying Our Occupied Geographies: Boyd Cothran's Remembering the Modoc War, Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide, and the Future of Native American Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaiah Lorado Wilner
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Native American Studies ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Blood Meridian ◽  
Wounded Knee

Narratives of innocence are stories born of the dispossession of bodies from lands that continue to serve as vectors of violence, reenacting the scene that created them. The term was introduced by Boyd Cothran to describe the cunning afterlife of conflicts between settler states and indigenous peoples: state violence yields stories that reiterate erasure, weaponizing memory to forget the lessons of colonization. In a situation of violence that produces silence, names resonate as instruments of clarity, cutting through erasure. Genocide is a name historians are now using to describe a process of erasure that created modern California, a process indigenous people have long discussed that narratives of innocence have silenced. Through a reading of Cothran's book Remembering the Modoc War and Benjamin Madley's book An American Genocide against an older literary genre on violence ranging from Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I take California as an emblem of a profound alteration in the way the United States processes the trace memory of indigenous erasure. A historical reckoning is now underway as indigenous people reembody their occupied geographies, returning their stories to the land and, in the process, reconfiguring the national narrative.

“How Lucky Were the Blond Kabyles”

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-264
Author(s):  
Lia Brozgal
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
War For Independence ◽  
October 17 ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 tackles the issues of race and racism as they relate to the October 17 massacre itself, the way it was documented in police archives, and the anarchive. When read for its representations of race and racism, the anarchive produces a transhistorical discourse that is as instructive in its moments of ambivalence as it is in its most pointed critiques. The chapter begins with a discussion of the difficulties of talking about race in a French context, and then goes on to excavate discourses of race and racism as they have been produced, implicitly or explicitly, in over 50 years’ worth of cultural productions, ranging from documentary and feature film to historical and graphic novels. In each section, cultural productions are read against their specific micro-historical context, conditions of publication or production, and other epiphenomena. At stake in reading race in the anarchive is a process of “race-ing” October 17, that is, of understanding the repression as not simply an inevitable skirmish in a war for independence, but as the fallout of a colonial ideology invested, tacitly but profoundly, in a racialized worldview.

The Seine’s Exceptional Bodies

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-212
Author(s):  
Lia Brozgal
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Burial Site ◽  
Seine River ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Killing Fields ◽  
History Of ◽  
October 17 ◽  
A Site

Chapter 4 analyzes the anarchive’s representations of the Seine River. The notion of the iconic Parisian river as a mass burial site remains one of the most gruesome aspects of the massacre. While not all of the dead on October 17 fell victim to the river, it is nonetheless true that the Seine has come to occupy significant symbolic territory in the realm of representation, to a degree that perhaps surpasses the representation of analogous “killing fields” or “technologies” of destruction in other episodes of state violence. The anarchive is replete with images of the Seine and of the experience of what Sidi Mohammed Barakat calls “exceptional bodies,” all of which participate in an implicit project of re-signifying the river. In exploring representations of the Seine in novels, documentary and fiction film, and visual art, this chapter makes visible a poetic and political discourse about the nature of the violence on October 17. It also explores how culture has dealt with the weighty implications of a state hiding evidence of its crimes in a site so geographically, affectively, and symbolically central. Alongside cultural productions, this chapter engages archival material from the files of the Parisian police and the history of the Seine.

scholarly journals (In)Edible Algeria: Transmitting Pied-Noir Nostalgia Through Food

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy L. Hubbell
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Marie Cardinal ◽  
War For Independence ◽  
French Family ◽  
Collective Autobiography ◽  
A Site

For those exiled from Algeria during and after the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962), sustaining memories of the homeland has been a consuming pastime. Food has especially played a large part in reconnecting Algeria’s former French citizens, the Pieds-Noirs, to their past. Annual gatherings feature typical dishes such as couscous, merguez, méchoui, mouna, which like the Proustian madeleine, transport the Pieds-Noirs to a preceding time of wholeness and comfort, allowing them to experience, if only fleetingly, a sense of immortality. While food has a reparative quality for the community’s memory, it is also the site of rejection and pain for some. Marie Cardinal writes about food as a site of unity with the indigenous Algerian community and rejection from her colonial French family. Similarly, in the collective autobiography Quatre soeurs: Hier, en Algérie, aujourd’hui en France, Frédérique Boblin, Eve Calo, Nelly Collet and Fabienne Rozotte explain their shared eating disorders as tied to their expulsion from Algeria. This essay demonstrates that the Pieds-Noirs can eat to remember Algeria, but the Algeria they knew can also prove to be inedible.

Narrativizing foreclosed history in ‘postmemorial’ fiction of the Algerian War in France: October 17, 1961, a case in point

2018 ◽  
pp. 134-152
Author(s):  
Michel Laronde
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Repressed Memory ◽  
Institutional Violence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Official History ◽  
History Of ◽  
October 17

This chapter presents the resistance against the erasure of institutional violence from collective history during the Algerian War in France with the example of the 17 October 1961 massacre of North Africans in Paris. The political foreclosure of the event resulting in a collective trauma tied to the war resurfaces in beur literature and mainstream French fiction from the 1980s onward as memorial fragments naturalized in the novels. The traces of the October 17 event narrativized in postcolonial writing signal a postmemorial mentality where the past bears on the present of the nation’s postcolonial process of correcting the distortions of silenced history. The next section of the chapter briefly outlines ways to generate the reparative potential of postmemorial writing reflected in the ekphrases of the event present in more than twenty novels. The last section explains how this situation of repressed memory spanning more than one generation and repeated in literature resonates with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, as a call to revisit the official history of the traumas of the Algerian War in an unending process of healing and repair of the colonial past. .

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