Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-1992 by Natalya Vince (original) (raw)

Building the Nation: Narrating Women and the Algerian War

Gender Forum 5, 2003

Traditional accounts of war define it as a masculine enterprise and war narratives thus as the work of men. Such accounts have also been used to justify a special role for men within the nation, as wartime experience supposedly makes them eminently qualified to be leaders. Within European literatures, critics have begun to challenge this picture, as they rediscover and re-place women’s narratives of war within the canon of war literature, focusing in particular on redrawing the boundaries between the frontlines and the home front. In contexts where women have joined in opposing colonial occupation of their homes and land, such as in the Algerian Independence War, one might expect that such conflicts would necessarily accord a larger place to women’s narratives. After all, the “frontline” involved entire regions, and women were often in the middle of combat. Algerian national memory of the war, however, almost completely erases women. As she intertwines both formal written histories of the war and oral narratives of women who participated in the war, Algerian writer Assia Djebar places women as central to the wartime construction of the nation, thus also according them space within the current national community.

Flood, Maria. 'Women Resisting Terror: Imaginaries of Violence in Algeria (1966–2002)', Journal of North African Studies.

This article charts the roles and representations of Algerian Women as both agents and victims of violence in the War of Independence (1956-1962) and the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s in which the role of women has emerged as a significant site of ideological, religious, and political struggle. This vision of Algerian Women, caught between models of participation and passivity, can be charted through a long imaginary of Algerian women as exposed to colonial, patriarchal, state or terrorist violence, but also possessing fortitude and resilience in the face of conflict. I examine the model of female agency through the figure of the bomb carrier in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), illuminating the gap between the freedom depicted, and promised, and the reality of women’s experience after the war. I then turn to the Algerian Civil War, considering one of the most enduring photographs to emerge from the conflict, Hocine Zaourar’s La Madone de Benthala (1997), an image that inscribes a quasi-universal image of female victimhood. Finally, an exploration of Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (2002) reveals a more complex staging of female resistance in times of terror. The film offers a delicate exploration of the emotional and psychological effects of political and symbolic violence, which troubles a more usual imaginary of Algerian women as noble, suffering and endlessly resistant or resilient figures.

Women, Violence, Trauma, and Hope in Algerian and French History

1969

Scholars of the French Empire who teach Algeria, France, and the manner in which their histories have collided, meshed, and interlocked since 1830, often rely upon certain primary sources.[1] These include Assia Djebar’s writings, such as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985), a book that like Ranjana Khanna’s Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present intersperses history with poetic narration, past with present, written with oral sources, and national with personal memories. Another such source is Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966), including the striking and oft-cited scene in which three Algerian women Europeanize themselves before crossing checkpoints in Algiers and planting bombs amidst the colons, or European settlers. Scholars also gravitate towards Simone de Beauvoir and the lawyer Gisèle Halimi’s accounts during the AlgerianWar of Independence of how the young Djamila Boupacha was tortured and raped with a bottle by French police officer...

Conference | Oxford, 10-12 May 2017: «The Algerian War of Independence: Global and Local Histories, 1954-62, and Beyond»

This conference will mark a major shift in the historiography of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Accounts of this war have largely remained confined within, and constrained by, the boundaries of the French and Algerian nation-states and the conflicting narratives of each. Recent work by Anglophone (especially American) scholars has broadened the field by offering international histories of the war, but such work has moved even further away from engaging with the realities of the conflict as it actually unfolded “on the ground” within Algeria and within the Algerian emigrant community in France. A fuller understanding of the war requires a marriage of both global and local scales of analysis, paying attention simultaneously to the global connections and significance of the Algerian revolution and France’s Cold War counter-insurgency, on the one hand, and to the complex, often very divisive, local experience of the war for Algerian men, women, and children, on the other. Inseparable from such rewriting is critical attention to the construction and voicing of individual, familial, and local memories and memorialisations (and the concomitant forgetting, or silences) of the war, and its key role in social memory in Algeria and France since 1962. https://oxfordalgeriaconference2017.wordpress.com/

Women Writing War: The Life-writing of the Algerian moudjahidate

2019

Women Writing War focuses on the life-writing of the moudjahidate, the women veterans of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962). The author offers close readings of memoir, testimonial, poetry and drama by Jacqueline Guerroudj, Louisette Ighilahriz, Anna Gréki, Zhor Zerari and Myriam Ben, all of whom are documented moudjahidate and self-identify as Algerian. Reading their life-writing through the prism of theories of intertextuality, ‘minor’ literature and the dialectics of memory and trauma, the author explores the relationship between writing, resistance and political action. Since they compose their work in the first-person voice in the context of the Algerian war, this book argues that their writing operates collectively as a form of counterdiscourse, opening up a textual space where experiences that were previously silenced or marginalized might be expressed.

The Algerian Woman Issue: Struggles, Islamic Violence, and Co-optation

2016

This chapter examines the Algerian women's movement within a holistic and global approach to the process of political transformation and state-building, wherein the woman question is systematically manipulated to ultimately consolidate the legitimacy of the Islamo-conservative rule dominated by the military, to the detriment of accountability before the law and wide democratic participation in the management of politics. The chapter examines the relationship between Islam as a state religion and domestic violence against women, and it considers the manifold resistance of women against this Islamic violence during the post-colonial period. Feminist activists have used the political opening of autocratic rule to set up NGOs and employ political activism to wage struggles against gender discrimination.