French Algeria

The battle for Algerian Independence was from 1954-1962

The barricades were constructed in 1960

The 8 years of war caused 1.5 million deaths.

5,000 died in the café bombings

153,000 rebel insurants were killed by French security sources

Identity

“The Algerians had become just another material source to be exploited along with the minerals and the cows. But colonization had done much more than that; it had also robbed them of their souls, their being. Hence the fight against the colonial system was really a struggle to regain true selfhood.” (p.324)

Discussion Question: Is it possible to have a major revolution without violence? Can violence ever be legitimated or defended as necessary?

Reconciliation

Jacques Berque

-Felt Orientalism was outdated and that the attempts of France to reconcile with Algeria disregarded the ‘soul’ or identity of Algerians

-Like Massignon used genealogy (the shared Hellenistic heritage) the common monotheistic religions of Algerians and Europeans to justify reconciliation

Pierre Bourdieu

-Saw Algerian identity as performative. Individuals put on a ‘stage personage’ and despite own uniqueness joined with larger nationalist cause inspired by sense of communalism.

Nationalism and Culture

Fanon

-Was born in the French controlled colony of Martinique in which his influence of growing up in a colony effected his later thought on the colonized right to achieve a state of nationalism. He believed that the only way for this to happen was through violence. He went to work in Algeria to practice psychiatry. There he learned a lot about the Algerian people.

-defended revolutionary violence (saw similarity with France’s own revolution) and applies the Maoist model of a peasant rebellion

-saw no point in continued ties between Europe and Algeria

-people want to attach to a larger ‘cultural matrix’ even when the only thing linking them together is struggle, cultures are too different to coalesce (African-American and Africans, Ghana and Algeria)

-proposed the idea of a ‘new’ Algerian man who rejected all Western influence

-praised the possibility of a fluidity and openness of culture

-violence is necessary for a cultural clean slate (tabula rasa)

-It was thought that orientlism and violence was actually constructed and fed by the views of intellectuals such as Sahat and Fanon. Violence was necessary to achieve nationalism. Fanon differed from Pierre Bourdieu in the fact that Bourdieus saw Algerians as mixed diverse group of tribes not united while Fanon saw a much stronger association between the Algerians and the capability for them to unify as one body to achieve nationalism.

“Fanon thought that is was possible to erase colonial identity for anti-colonial violence.” (243)

“A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.”

“This is why we arrive at a proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a colonized country the most elementary, most savage and the most undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending national culture.” (2^nd to last page of Fanon)

*Example: Maoist China

Discussion Question: Do you see a contradiction between Fanon’s idea of cultural fluidity and his desire for “a veritable creation of new men” in Algeria?

French colonization succeeded when France was driven out of Algeries and Algeria became a nation state for that achieved the truly idealized French notion of a nation state.

Pied Noir-The French from Algeria who were kicked out of Algeries and returned back to France were not received well. The resentment still stands in modern times with cultural and racial issues such as the current riots of France

Closing questions

* “What is surprising is that the leaders who had suffered the agony of torture at the hands of a desperate France now practice many of the same ‘antiterrorist’ tactics against the very forces that had been so blindly overlooked in the formulation of the new man” (258)

How does one identity change under colonization? Once it is over do they reclaim the colonial identity or get a new one? Is it possible for the colonized to completely dissolve the influence of colonial culture?