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Albert Camus has been at the centre of a long and bitter controversy for his positions on the Algerian war. Accused of being a colonialist, marked by Eurocentrism and/or a de facto supporter of imperialism, he in fact joined the struggle for decolonization from his earliest steps in politics, untethering it, however, from any nationalist perspective. This essay delineates the formation of Camusian position on the Algerian crisis, its turning points and the path followed in this regard from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, seeking to reveal his perspective of a decolonial federalism that would simultaneously transform Europe and Africa in order to establish a political community in which there would be neither dominant nor dominated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basing on primary sources from Italian and French archives, this article analyses the complex relationship between Italian migration policies and French colonialism in Africa in the crucial period between the mid-1940s and late 1950s. The first part deals with the Italian attempts to send a significant part of its surplus manpower to French colonies in Africa. Against the backdrop of mass unemployment and return from former colonies, the Italian government thought that British and especially French colonies could provide a major outlet for national migrants. The French government, too, took into serious consideration this possibility; at the end, however, colonial interests prevailed over the parallel aims to contribute to Western stabilisation and strengthen bilateral relations with Italy. The second part discusses the Italian preoccupations with the Algerian migration to France: while failing to allow mass migration to French colonies, the government in Rome realized that the French colonial policy could even challenge Italian migration to metropolitan France. The third part, finally, examines the expectations raised in Italy by the Algerian War; after some initial positive effects, the conflict did not help to significantly relaunch Italian migration to France and even led to a further deterioration of the already precarious conditions of Italian migrants. Italian workers were in fact constrained to face animosity from Algerian migrants at a time when the latter were exposed to increasing hostility from the French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the approach of the sixtieth anniversary of the Evian Accords that brought an end to the Algerian War, France's president, Emmanuel Macron, commissioned the historian, Benjamin Stora, to prepare a report on the evolution of relations between the two countries since the independence of Algeria. Stora, born in Algeria in 1950, is one of the most productive French historians of the Algerian nationalist movement, author of many studies of the wartime period and its aftermath. Relations between the two countries have often been strained, and observers note that there has been little reconciliation of the traumas of colonisation and the exodus of the European pied-noir population in 1962. Predictably the Stora Report has proved controversial. The paper will analyse the context, the content, and the reception of the report on the two shores of the Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which explores the radiological legacy of the nuclear bomb detonations carried out by the French military in the early 1960s in the region now called the Algerian Sahara. Topics discussed include the construction of chemical and atomic weapons sites by the French military during the French-Algerian War, the independence from France gained by Algeria following the conflict, and the economic cost of the nuclear imperial violence in the region.

Commenting on the colonial setting in its twilight during the Algerian War of Independence, Frantz Fanon famously observed: "Le travail du colon est de rendre impossible jusqu'aux rêves de liberté du colonisé. Le travail du colonisé est d'imaginer toutes les combinaisons éventuelles pour anéantir le colon (the task of the colonizer is to make impossible even the dreams of liberty of the colonized. The task of the colonized is to conceive of every possible strategy to wipe out the colonizer)." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on author Albert Camus and his ambivalence toward French colonialism in Algeria. Topics discussed include Camus's outright condemnation of the Algerian War as an unequivocal endorsement of the French imperialist government; opposition to colonial oppression and injustice in Algeria in his anti-colonialism; and dominant narratives of history and memory.

In this essay I argue the French postcolonial corpus on colonialism, as quantitatively significant as it is, is not only a recollection of the colonial past, but also contains within itself an important dimension of forgetting. For, taking my lead from Henry Rousso and Paul Ricœur, I maintain forgetting is neither a dysfunction of memory nor an absence of recollection; rather, it is a way to reorganize memory. I further maintain such reorganizing of memory is neither accidental nor innocent, but a way to define the political present, to give meaning to specific events, to control their contingencies. Such a definition for the case at hand involves an articulating of a form of postcolonial citizenship whose individuals, because they cannot share our forgetting, cannot share our political present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a materialist approach to the so-called 'memory war' over France's colonial past especially the Algerian War of Independence, and its continuity in the present. It attempts to reinsert the 'memory war' within the larger context of the institutional materiality of French neo-colonial racism, in both its ideological and repressive modalities. By focusing on three specific aspects of the neo-colonial organization of the French state, the permanent state of emergency, the spatial organization of neo-colonial racism in France, and the politicization of the new French indigènes, this article argues that one cannot understand France's Algerian past may not necessarily be understood through a debate over French 'repentance', and nor could today's racism be understood solely as 'ideological' (in the commonplace sense of this term). It aims to show how French colonialism in Algeria, and the handling of the Algerian Revolution by the French state, have shaped the French state and its control of non-white people living in France today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), conflicts over the meaning of appearances, particularly in relation to the bodies of Algerian women, were a major locus for political conflict, subterfuge and violence. As demonstrated in the most famous representation of the war, Gillo Pontecorvo's widely celebrated film La bataille d'Alger (Pontecorvo, 1966), the strategic use of the veil and of unveiling was the mechanism that produced the Algerian woman as insurgent. What the eyes (or camera) saw was not always to be believed and nor was visual appearance akin, in any straightforward way, to truth. Drawing on key historical examples, including La bataille d'Alger, Marc Garanger's Femmes algériennes 1960 (1960) and Assia Djebar's 1979 essay 'Regard interdit, son coupé', as well as Zineb Sedira's contemporary film installation Gardiennes d'images (2010), this article proposes a theory of the documentary image in light of the political complexities over vision and appearance that have continued to haunt the historical representation of Algerian women. Placing an emphasis on the circulation of images and the mobility of meaning, the argument stresses communities of political belief rather than visual truth in establishing documentary meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the legacies of the Algerian War of Independence in the present? More specifically, how do the Algerian War of Independence and its subsequent memorializations force us to reconceptualize historical temporality itself (of which the 'legacy' is but one variation)? The following introduction to this special issue provides an overarching framework for multiple answers to these questions. The first half of the introduction focuses on the philosophical and conceptual afterlives of the Algerian War in contemporary French critical thought. In doing so, it attempts to delineate the significant political import of historical temporality as such, setting out a basic problematic to which the articles that follow can be seen variously to respond. In the second part of the introduction, the general cultural and historical legacies of the Algerian War of Independence, and the 'mnemonic forms' (Erll 2011) of rupture, repression and repetition that mediate them, come into focus: the 'rupture' from a colonial past, the Freudian 'repression' of traumatic history, and the ostensible 'repetition' of violence in the present. In general, the introduction hopes to open a dialogue with works conducted on these 'forms', scrutinizing the effects they have had on the various re-imaginings of the war and its transnational legacies, yet without foreclosing other forms this history may take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the short story "Le Renégat, ou, un esprit confus" by Albert Camus through the lens of his essay entitled "L'Homme révolté." It examines the author's depiction of terrorism and repression and discusses topics including terrorism in the contemporary era, radicalization, the Algerian War, and colonialism.

The term "guerre des mémoires" ("memory battles") has been used by historians in an attempt to describe the debate that arose in French society concerning the "legacy" of colonialism. This debate expressed the efforts of different groups to articulate alternative discourses that challenged the authorized, official narrative of history. Theatre has often hosted these competing narratives. The performance of fragmented personal memories and the presentation of alternative viewpoints of historical events has often been the focus of both playwrights and theatre artists. The Algerian War of Independence, being among the most traumatic chapters in recent French history and involving many different social and ethnic groups that claimed their own version of its narrative, has undoubtedly dominated these "memory battles." As such, it has attracted the interest of many French and francophone playwrights. Experimenting with different dramatic devices and techniques, playwrights such as Richard Demarcy, Eugène Durif, Jean Magnan, Mohamed Kacimi, Mehdi Charef, Aziz Chouaki, among others, present the permutations of memory as these shed light to the "hidden" details of historical events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of an ongoing debate about the role of human rights in the age of decolonisation this essay approaches the issue from two different angles. It concentrates on the paradoxical situation that anti-colonial movements as well as colonial powers instrumentalised international human rights documents such as the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the European Conventions on Human Rights for achieving their political goals. In combining legal and public discourses in a significant way both sides accused each other of gross human rights violations while at the same time presenting themselves as respecting and even guaranteeing fundamental human rights. Especially during the course of the wars of decolonisation after 1945 this phenomenon became obvious in various diplomatic debates at the United Nations and made universal rights a diplomatic pawn in international debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abdelkebir Khatibi asserted in his 1968Le Roman maghrébinthat the Algerian War of Independence occupied the imagination of mid-twentieth-century writers and encapsulated an era; this essay argues that the twenty-first century lightning rod for theroman maghrébinis clandestine emigration—l'hrig,or “burning.” This “soft war” that is both the legacy of colonialism and a byproduct of globalization is becoming as imaginatively all-encompassing to North African writers today as the Algerian war was to writers of that era. This essay briefly touches upon six texts to demonstrate that authors concentrate on humanizing the individualharragas(“burners” or clandestine emigrants) both to bear witness to and to challenge globalization's false rhetoric of free circulation as well as the inhuman indifference of North African states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1958 and 1960, the French domestic security and intelligence services came to establish a close, multi-layered, and secret working relationship with their German counterparts. The purpose of this collaborative arrangement was to enlist German support in combating the subversive activities of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, whose members had taken refuge in Germany. In particular, the metropolitan authorities sought to impose on their German counterparts some of the same methods of colonial policing and intelligence that characterized their own counter-insurgency in France. These efforts proved counter-productive, however, for in internationalizing the Algerian war, they drew public attention to the colonial nature of France's hold over Algeria. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, focusing on his relationship with Islam in his time in Algeria. It comments on anti-colonialism in Islam and the concept of jihad, or holy war or struggle. The author reflects on the Islamic tradition in Fanon's book "The Wretched of the Earth." Other topics include race relations and segregation in Algeria and the Algerian Revolution of 1954-1962.

The traumatic decolonisation of Algeria has tended to overshadow more peaceful transfers of power elsewhere in the French African Empire. This is particularly so in the case of the Sahara, where local populations accommodated themselves exceptionally well to colonial rule after the First World War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the political stability of the region, combined with its newly discovered energetic resources and strategic value as a nuclear testing site, led the French to reflect upon ways of preparing for the Sahara a future separate from the rest of Algeria, the fate of which was increasingly clear as de Gaulle had no choice but to gear his policy towards self-determination. The Common Organisation of Saharan Regions (OCRS) intended to merge all French territories in the Sahara, in an attempt to guarantee prolonged French control over the region while justifying it on the grounds that oil revenue was to finance the development of the areas where extraction took place. The widely publicised developmental concerns of the initiative were at odds with its neo-colonial undertones, and it could not have escaped the attention of the two successive US administrations that had to deal with the controversial question of their position vis-a-vis a NATO ally embattled in what seemed a lost colonial cause. The role of the US in post-war decolonisation processes has been given more prominence in recent historiography, but it had never been studied in the case of the Sahara, in spite of repeated French fears of American interest in Saharan oil resources at the time of the Algerian war. Based on State Department archives, this paper throws lights upon an often-forgotten aspect of Franco-American relations in the context of the decolonisation of European empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing in the midst of one of bloodiest conflicts in the history of postcolonial Algeria, Mohammed Dib probes the brutalities of war, exploitation and the isolation of economic marginalization, and the complexities of postcolonality in his "The Savage Night." For Dib violence is not an inexplicable component of human society, but the outcome of systemic conditions that continually work against the concept of humanity itself. The relationship between writer and society for Dib is less a process of conscious alignment than it is a means of nurturing the dialectical relation that emerges when texts collide with history. In this collection of stories, Mohammed Dib overcomes the existentialist abandonment of the uncommitted writer to confront what he calls the "invisible prison" of systemic violence by offering a model for aesthetic confrontation based on intellectual engagement and the awakening of the reader to the accountability of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu's early fieldwork which included field observation, statistical analysis, and the use of photography to capture, represent, and analyse Algerian society in its complexity, took place within the unusual context of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). A number of his photographs of Algerian life depict the physical dislocation of Algerian peasantry into shanty towns largely as the result of rapid socio-economic and cultural change introduced by French colonisation and war. Although this fieldwork was to fundamentally shape his subsequent oeuvre, substantive issues which arose out of this research including colonialism, racism, and migration, tended to disappear in his later writings. This paper will argue that Bourdieu's discussion of colonialism in his early work, together with arguments developed by his student and co-author, Abdelmalek Sayad, provide a basis for understanding contemporary processes of ethno-racial domination and migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fanon, Beauvoir: two writers, two theorists, who embodied the battles that they fought decolonization and feminism. Although distinct, these two struggles are linked. They share a situatedness: the absolute otherness of women in relation to men and of the colonized in relation to the colonizer. They share a project: to change the future through the liberation of revolution. In fact, Beauvoir and Fanon met: their struggles and the story of their meeting in 1961 are recounted in Beauvoir's La Force des choses, which links French feminism to the project for decolonization. The international visibility of The Second Sex overshadowed Beauvoir's other political projects, notably, her significant role during the Algerian war of independence. The crucial place Fanon accorded to women in his theory of decolonization has been overlooked. In a re-reading of texts by Beauvoir and Fanon, this article explores how these struggles are interconnected at the moment of the Algerian war, and how, in the contemporary postcolonial context, Beauvoir and Fanon can both be read as postcolonial authors. Fanon. Beauvoir. Deux crivains, deux thoriciens, qui ont incarn les luttes qu'ils ont portes: la lutte pour la dcolonisation et le fminisme. Originellement spares, comment ces luttes pourraient-elles se rejoindre? A travers une communaut de situation: l'altrit absolue de la femme par rapport l'homme et du colonis par rapport au colon. A travers des enjeux communs: forger un avenir nouveau par une rvolution libratrice. La rencontre Beauvoir-Fanon a-t-elle eu lieu? Le rcit de leur rencontre en 1961, dans la Force des choses, est mise en prsence littraire des luttes de Beauvoir et de Fanon, et permet d'tablir le lien qui unit le fminisme franais et les revendications de la dcolonisation. Le retentissement universel du Deuxime sexe a laiss dans l'ombre une partie de l'engagement politique de Beauvoir, notamment, son rle remarquable pendant la guerre d'Algrie. Dans la thorie de la dcolonisation de Fanon, la place essentielle faite aux femmes, reste peu connue. A partir d'une relecture des textes de Beauvoir et de Fanon, il s'agit de comprendre comment ces luttes s'interpntrent au moment de la guerre d'Algrie, et comment dans le contexte postcolonial actuel, Beauvoir et Fanon peuvent tre lus comme des auteurs postcoloniaux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French War in Algeria (1954-1962) deserves attention, above all, because of the remarkable divorce between France's military success and the failure to secure her preferred political results. This article identifies the agent responsible for that discrepancy and for the eventual French capitulation as essentially social, explaining how the defining struggle over Algeria's future revolved round issues of purpose and identity. Specifically, the article explains how the French opposition to the war stirred France in its direction by gaining control over the domestic marketplace of ideas and inadvertently escalating a process of wrenching radicalization. This process was critical because it forced the French people and leaders to choose between the mutually exclusive options of retaining Algeria as French or preserving France as democratic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of H.-I. Marrou is important in historiographic accounts of the development of patristic studies and late antiquity. From the 1930s onwards, Marrou and his peers made use of material evidence from North Africa produced by the rapidly professionalizing discipline of archaeology. Archaeological engagement with the past was determined by the wider colonial context in which these excavations took place and this shaped the representation of late ancient Christianity, particularly the life and work of Augustine of Hippo. At the same time, however, Augustine's work gave Marrou the means to challenge France's prosecution of the Algerian War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]