Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations. The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb (original) (raw)
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IMAGO, 2024
Stories are vital in trying times as they are testimonies of lived experiences. Among these tales, the Algerian exilic practices, with all their complexities during and after the French colonisation, offer an intriguing setting to explore the historical ties between different cultures. To illustrate, we first look into Kassa Houari's Confessions d'un Immigré, which delves into the emotional depth of Algerian immigrant workers’ experiences in France while recounting their challenges of assimilation. In the second narrative of mobility, Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine Était Rouge, we analyse the quest for belonging among Algerians in France during a period of historical pain and political turmoil. Les Balcons de la Mer du Nord, by Wassiny Laredj, is the third story that accentuates the emotional upheaval in a foreign distant land. These three exilic discourses showcase different facets of memory displacement, converging on the emotional difficulties faced by Algerian immigrants at different times, especially during the Algerian War of Independence. This paper reveals three complex perspectives on memory and exile within the Algerian diaspora under the shade of the Algerian War of Independence
2013
This is a master thesis History (Erasmus University), researched and written by Manon Chauveau. Supervisor was Maria Grever. ABSTRACT The representation of controversial or painful events is always difficult. One cannot consider the feelings and perspectives of all people that were involved in a given occurrence. This difficulty is felt in any sort of media. Hence, journalists or politicians when speaking publicly or writing an article or speech have the obligation to choose the right words and to state the right facts in order to not only be taken seriously but also to be respected as authorities. When such past events have to be represented in media such as history textbooks the matter becomes even more complex. History textbooks are seen as crucial tools in the creation of the future model citizens. Although some might argue that this medium is slowly losing ground to tools such as the internet, the textbook still plays a fundamental role in the daily routine of a classroom. The role of explaining and justifying the occurrence of controversial or horrific past events to the students is not solely held by the teacher but also by the authors of history textbooks. Hence, these authors have the responsibility to represent a fair and impartial version of what truly did happen in the past. However, this task becomes difficult when the historical occurrence happens to severely put in jeopardy the image of the country in which the textbook is published. The authors are then faced with the difficult choice to either be loyal to their belief in impartiality, which is part of their history profession, or to their obligation of to form faithful future citizens. In a country such as France the choice seems often easily made and the representation of controversial historical topics is often known to be either avoided or distorted. With respect to my Master Thesis research I have formulated the following main question: How is colonial Algerian history represented in French history textbooks between 1970 and 2012? To what extent can we link possible changes in these representations to public debates on this history in France? I have investigated how one of the most controversial French historical events was and is still represented. The goal of this Master thesis is not only to describe the possible changes, but to link these to one of the most heated French public debate of the new millennium: the connection between the colonial past and the present situation of immigrants. Hence, the occurring of highly covered public events such as the riots of 2005 by the youth of the French banlieux, which were mostly organized by second generation North African immigrants, stirred not only academic debates but also public frenzy. This study does not only touch upon area such as education and history didactics, it also highlights contemporary public issues that are now being addressed all over the world.
Unsettling Intercultural Communication: Rethinking Colonialism through Indigeneity, 2024
Globalization, migration, and multiculturalism are inseparable constituents of the current century. So are the myriad of-isms and-phobias. Whether in forms of racism, xenophobia, or Islamophobia, cultural Othering is, sadly, another social Zeitgeist, rooted in the dark pages of history, such as slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and colonialism. The ruthless duality of the West and the Rest, synonymous with the strategically created dichotomy of the dominant colonizer, the Occident, and the historically colonized Orient, has frequently justified and normalized discriminatory practices of the arguably multicultural Western societies towards their cultural Others. Paradoxically, cultural legacies of colonialism are almost as brutal as colonialism itself: while power, privilege, and agency remain the features of the mighty First World, cultural amnesia, invisibility, and misrepresentation, combined with denial of memory, remain the signifiers of the previously colonized, non-Western Others. A complex phenomenon of land expropriation contributed to a special type of colonialism-colonialism of the white, predominantly European settlers. Settler colonialism happened all over the world, on Native lands-in the Americas, in Asia, Africa, and Australia. Rooted in the centuries of French settler colonialism of Northern Africa, French-Algerian interculturality is highly problematic. In 2006, the Algerian Foreign Ministry declared: “Le colonialisme a été une longue, longue nuit. Mais nous sommes indépendants depuis quarante-cinq ans, et la page n’est pas encore complètement tournée malgré les efforts de nos dirigeants respectifs./ Colonialism has been a long, long night. But we have been independent for forty-five years, and the page has not yet been completely turned despite the efforts of our respective leaders”1 (Stora and Jenni 199). I argue that decades after the War of Algerian Independence that officially ended the French colonial rule, the aftermath of colonialism still plays a crucial role in both the identity politics of the respective nations, and their understanding and interpretation of history, responsibility, and cultural memory.
The post always rings twice? The Algerian War, poststructuralism and the postcolonial in IR theory
Review of International Studies, 2012
This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I choose to examine narratives of theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Cixous because not only they provide the link between colonial violence, the poststructuralist project that ensued, and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much poststructuralist work in International Relations (IR). I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealisation of the marginalised, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Bringing these theories together aims to highlight the need for a dialogue, within IR, between poststructuralism's desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialism's potential to transcend the self-referential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere.
In 1977, a group of North African intellectuals produced a special volume for the prestigious French journal Les temps modernes. Led by Abdelkebir Khatibi, they sought to ‘rethink the Maghreb’ as a way to counter the poisoned, divided and belligerent climate of the region, and to offer an alternative to the authoritarian models of the nation-state that took hold after political independence. When read through the lens of Rancière’s concept of the ‘dissensus’ concerning the interplay between culture and politics, this collective volume of Les Temps Modernes reveals the plight of a generation of post-independence Maghrebi intellectuals who questioned their own purpose in light of their countries’ national projects. This article claims that this group intervened in the public sphere as a way to reconfigure the intellectual’s purpose in their respective societies and political systems. Their case highlights an important chapter in the region’s social and intellectual history and demonstrates how intellectual actors seek re-integration in the national community after a painful period of exclusion.
Franco-Algerian memory and questions of gender in Ahmed Kalouaz's Point Kilométrique 190 (1986)
This article suggests that gender and cultural memory are both performative acts and that memories of the colonial re-enact certain gender codes associated with the act of colonisation. Colonialism can be understood in terms of a gendered hierarchy: that the colonisers were imagined as virile and male, violating the virgin, 'feminine' territory of the colonised land. In this way, colonised peoples were gendered as feminine in order justify European rhetoric of racial superiority. However, the narratives of anti-colonial writers and thinkers who condemn colonialism, such as Frantz Fanon, are 'haunted' by gendered tropes of the colonialism – that colonisation is a rape, and that the colonised people are feminised victims. This article uses Ahmed Kalouaz's 1986 novel Point Kilométrique 190 as an example of trans-national memory which successfully transcends these gendered stereotypes. The short novel functions as a mnemonic device (a commemoration to Habib Grimzi, a victim of anti-Algerian violence) which makes connections between racist violence in France during the 1980s with the history of the Algerian war. However, simultaneously, the narrative avoids gendered stereotypes associated with French and Algerian men and women. Using a French woman to posthumously voice a murdered Algerian man, Kalouaz creates a pluralistic narrative which shatters Algerian/French, Feminine/Masculine binaries and allows for the transfer of traumatic memory across boundaries assigned to gender identities, as well as national groups.