Lecture empathique et trauma de la guerre d’Algérie chez Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal et Leila Sebbar

This article analyses the narrative processes and literary strategies that seek to engender the reader’s empathy for the main characters in three Francophone texts that depict the trauma of the Algerian War of independence. Each text starts from a real event by intertwining historical facts and the present with fiction, allowing for a better understanding of the postcolonial situation. These expectations are reinforced by Djebar’s and Sansal’s paratexts. Drawing on the theories of Suzanne Keen and Fritz Breithaupt empathy can especially be favoured by internal focalization, the characters’ empathic interpersonal relationships as well as polyphony. The imaginative construction of the other is emphasized as necessary, while the detailed description of historical facts may rather provoke feelings of pity. A fortiori, empathy can decline or be blocked in the passages, which go against the moral convictions of the reader. This imaginative resistance is due to the fact that these passages concern reality and not fiction

Layering memories: Frank Chiche’s Je vous ai compris (2012)

This article discusses Frank Chiche’s 2012 film Je vous ai compris and sheds light on the way rotoscoping complicates memorial discourses on the Algerian War of Independence. I argue that the superposition of different media and the changing allegiances of the film’s characters unsettle binary understandings of the conflict and challenge generic expectations. As the first ever BD-movie, it suggests that historical remembrance is akin to a constantly changing sculpture, defined not only by the memorial constraints of characters, but also by the perspectives of its viewers. Through an analysis of the genres and media, the construction of characters, and the description of memory as layered, I show that Je vous ai compris offers a sophisticated representation of a memorial quagmire that continues to inspire historians and artists alike.

Religion, Multiculturalism, and Phenomenology as a Critical Practice: Lessons from the Algerian War of Independence

In the Algerian War of Independence, women famously used both traditional and modern clothing as part of their revolutionary efforts against French colonialism. This paper uncovers some of the principal lessons of this historical episode through a phenomenological exploration of agency, religion, and political transformation. Part I draws primarily on the philosophical insights of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty alongside the memoirs of Zohra Drif, a young woman member of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, in order to explore the worldly and habitual nature of human agency in contrast to the Enlightenment stress on individual rationality and autonomy. Part II turns to John Russon’s phenomenological interpretation of religion in order to argue for the ineluctable significance of religion on human existence, in contrast to the modern tendency to oppose religious tradition and secular modernity. Part III analyzes the dynamics of intercultural communication, and argues for the political power of phenomenology as a critical enterprise that enables more just and emancipatory visions of collective human life and political transformation to come to the fore.

6. Hybridity

‘Hybridity’ explains that cultural hybridity can be seen as an expansion of W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’: a painful incompatibility between how people see themselves and how society sees them only in terms of their race. Nevertheless, this has also formed the basis of the extraordinary cultural creativity of African-Americans. Drawing on cultural memory of their African roots, African-Americans have adapted and transformed aspects of European culture encountered in the US, particularly noticeable in the realm of African-American music. A comparable development of a hybridized culture is considered by tracing the emergence of raï music in 1970s Algeria, following the traumatic experiences of the Algerian War of Independence.

Beckett’s Safe Words: Normalising Torture in How It Is

Samuel Beckett excused himself from his affair with Pamela Mitchell with a syntactically evocative phrase: ‘It is I the hurter of the two’. The definite article is telling: How it is (1964 [1961]) universalises one cruel, asymmetric, pseudo-amorous relationship, deducing from it ‘billions’ of similarly helpless, prostrate, mud-bound ‘creatures’, exchanging roles as torturers and victims in a leniently egalitarian distribution of suffering. Titled ‘Pim’ from 1958 until its publication, Beckett’s last, long, prose-like work happened to coincide with the Algerian War of Independence, during which the French authorities tortured captured revolutionary fighters with scant concern for the European Convention on Human Rights. Their pretext was semantic: a novel legal category was invented, ‘pris les armes à la main’, or PAM—a likely homophone both of How it is’s protagonist and of Beckett’s recent ex. Using contemporaneous news reports and recent feminist historical scholarship, ‘Safe Words’ argues that the author’s biographic reminiscences have been transposed onto documented examples of state-sanctioned torture of Algerian women in particular. The essay tentatively concludes that everyday, prosaic acts of gendered domination might not be quite as qualitatively different from official violence as certain readers would wish to believe.

War in the Mountains

The role of the peasantry during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) has been long neglected by historians, in part because they have been viewed as a ‘primitive’ mass devoid of political consciousness. This ground-breaking social history challenges this conventional understanding by tracing the ability of the peasant community to sustain an autonomous political culture through family, clan, and village assemblies (djemâa), organizations that were eventually harnessed by emerging guerrilla forces. The long-established system of indirect rule by which the colonial state controlled and policed the vast mountainous interior through an ‘intelligence state’ began to break down after the 1920s as the djemâas formed a pole of opposition to the patron-client relations of the rural élites. Clandestine urban-rural networks emerged that prepared the way for armed resistance and a system of rebel governance. The anthropologist Jean Servier, recognizing the dynamics of the peasant community, in 1957 masterminded a major counterinsurgency experiment, Opération Pilote, that sought to defeat the guerilla forces by constructing a parallel ‘hearts and minds’ strategy. The army, unable to implement a programme of ‘pacification’ of dispersed mountain populations, reversed its policy by the forced evacuation of the peasants into regroupement camps. Contrary to the accepted historical analysis of Pierre Bourdieu and others that rural society was massively uprooted and dislocated, the peasantry continued to demonstrate a high level of social cohesion and resistance based on powerful family and kin networks.