Algerian Chronicles

Algerian Chronicles

By Albert Camus

Edited by Alice Kaplan & translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 224pp £16.95)

Camus: conflicting opinions

Reviewed by Andrew Hussey, Literary Review

  

For a long time, the accepted wisdom on Albert Camus's response to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) has been that he was a coward. This was the view first promulgated by his former friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre, who accused Camus of having the 'morality of a boy scout' for refusing to praise the terrorist actions of the Algerian nationalists, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1957, Camus famously stated: 'People are now planting bombs on the tramway of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.' Since then this impassioned statement has been held up by generations of anti-colonialists and academic post-colonialist theorists - including the likes of Edward Said - as proof of Camus's weak-mindedness and vacillating nature and, by extension, colonial arrogance towards Algeria, the land where he was born and grew up in the poorest kind of pied-noir family (pied-noir, 'blackfoot', was the term used to describe French settlers in Algeria on the grounds that they wore 'black shoes').

Olivia Harrison on Parting Ways: Judith Butler and the Cause of the Other

Los Angeles Review of Books

ISRAEL'S RECENT MILITARY ASSAULT on Gaza serves as a reminder of the continuing urgency of the Palestinian question, which has been a topic of worldwide debate since the June 1967 war and returns to the center stage of global politics whenever Palestinian or Israeli blood is spilt. Something has changed in recent years, however, particularly after conflicts so disproportionate (the 2006 Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon, the 2008-2009 Gaza war) that it becomes difficult to speak of two “sides” in a conflict involving a military force, on the one hand, and a majority of unarmed civilians on the other.

Fifty years after Algeria's independence, France is still in denial

An exhibition in Paris marking the years of colonial rule in Algeria whitewashes the crimes of France's erstwhile empire 

by Nabila Ramdani, The Guardian 

In 1962, Bob Dylan released his first album, Brigitte Bardot was at the height of her fame, and the James Bond film Dr No was made. It was the start of a decade which would forever be associated with creativity and entertainment.

50 Years Later: Fanon's Legacy

50 Years Later: Fanon's Legacy

by Nigel C Gibson

Keynote address at the Critical Caribbean Symposium Series “50 Years Later: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and the Bahamas,” Friday December 2^nd, The College of the Bahamas

Frantz Fanon: Prophet of African liberation

by Cameron Duodu, Pambazuka

The late 1950s, the era in which Ghana achieved its independence and took its place as the first British territory south of the Sahara to attain the nationhood that the visionaries of Pan-Africanism had demanded for Africa decades earlier, were heady days. Signs of the impending surrender of power to the African populations of the British and French colonies were in the air, and the atmosphere in our part of Africa was quite intoxicating. Of course, few of us knew very much about what was happening elsewhere in Africa.

Outside the Law – review

Philip French, The Observer 

The still highly controversial colonial war that France fought in Algeria from the mid-1950s until the granting of independence in 1962 has only been patchily reflected in the cinema. It figures significantly in the background in films as different as Alain Resnais' Muriel and Michael Haneke's Hidden, and in 1966 there was Lost Command, a Hollywood version of Jean Lartéguy's French bestseller The Centurions about a battalion of Indo-China veterans reassembling for another bitter colonial conflict in Algeria. The only truly memorable movie is the Marxist The Battle of Algiers (1966), set in the early days of the revolution, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and initiated by Yacef Saadi, a leader of the FLN (National Liberation Front). Banned in France for several years and regarded as one of the greatest political movies ever made, The Battle of Algiers was shown by the Pentagon to all senior officers and civil advisers going to Iraq and Afghanistan to show "how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas".

Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, women, veils, and land.

by Ria Faulkner, World Literature Today, 1996

Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" and in the "Postface" to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation. Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of women in Algeria under the patriarchal nationalists, finding women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the voices which emanate from their material bodies.

Colonialism and Neocolonialism

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic Wretched of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

The Battle of Algiers (film)

Algeria and the defeat of French Humanism

Chapter six of The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, by James Heartfield, Sheffield Hallam University, 2002. Marxists Internet Archive 

The founding of the modern French state is unique in history. The state is created in the name not just of the French citizen, but of all mankind. The document adopted by the Constituent Assembly in June 1789 is headed Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The declaration is a sincere expression of the sentiments of the revolutionaries who created the state. It was also a beacon to liberals across Europe,^[1] and as far afield as Haiti in the West Indies, where the ‘black Jacobin’ Toussaint L’Ouverture was inspired to lead a slave revolt.^[2] The most adamant of the French revolutionaries deplored slavery as they deplored feudal privileges. ‘The moment you pronounce the word “slave” you pronounce your own dishonour’, said Robespierre, who also defended the civil and voting rights of free blacks in the West Indian colonies.^[3] Even after the restoration of a more centralised power under Napoleon Bonaparte’s military leadership, France remained a beacon of the universal rights of man to radicals and liberals across Europe. Napoleon’s army swept through Europe welcomed by some as an army of liberation. The Jewish ghettoes were emancipated. The Code Napoleon is, to this day, the basis of many countries’ civil law. Revolutionary France represented the hopes of the Enlightenment, of reason and of humanism for progressive Europe.

Colonialism, Nationalism and Fundamentalism: Liberating Algeria

'Colonialism, Nationalism and Fundamentalism: Liberating Algeria', the third chapter of T. Deanen Sharpley-Whiting's book Fanon, Conflicts and Feminisms (1998) is online here.

History of Algerian Independence

From the Marxists Internet Archive

French Colonization: For over 300 years Algeria was an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire – after the empire helped overthrow Spanish captivity of Algeria in 1518. The autonomous Algeria was very powerful, with a fleet that ruled all the Mediterranean while European nations payed taxes to cross it – those who refused to recognize Algeria’s claim to the sea would have their ships captured and ransomed off. As capitalism advanced throughout Europe, international trade began to slowly develop in earnest, and property claims over water was a fundamental enemy. In 1815, the United States sent a fleet across the Atlantic to battle Algeria, with mixed results. The following year the English and Dutch sent a second, combined fleet to crush Algerian might – but were unable to beat algerian tactical supremacy. In 1830, the French invaded and successfully suppressed Algeria, capturing the capital port city of Algeirs and by 1834, Algeria was annexed as a colony of France.

The Algerian War 1954-1962

An archive of documents at The Marxists Internet Archive

Long Live Free Algeria, Confederation Communiste Libertaire 1954

Why the Communist Voted in Favor of the Government, Jacques Duclos, March 1956

Declaration of Pierre Frank at His Trial, Pierre Frank, 1956

Letter to the Europeans of Algeria, Algerian Communist Party, October 1957

Minutes of a Meeting between the FLN and the PCF, 30 May 1958

Michael Pablo on The Arab Revolution, November 1958

The Manifesto of the 121, 1960

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

by Kristin Ross, 1996

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts - automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism - as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses.

Djamila Bouhired

 by Ma'n Abul' Husn, Al Shindagah

Djamila Bouhired is considered by many as the most powerful female freedom fighter of the twentieth century, but still for vague reasons, very little is known about this national cum international heroine. In fact, it seems as if a veil is thrown over and around Djamila in an attempt to obscure her name and force her into oblivion.

The History of Algerian Independence

This introduction to the history of the Algerian struggle for independence is hosted by the Marxists Internet Archive.

May '68 and Its Afterlives

May '68 & its Afterlives

by Kristin Ross, 2002

During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.

Frantz Fanon: A Portrait by Alice Cherki

"Fanon was consummately incapable of telling the story of himself. He lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he evoked. Fanon’s discourse pertained to a present tense that was unburdened by its narrative past. The little we knew about his personal life had been gleaned from passing allusions, brief glimpses that vanished as quickly as they appeared. . . . Fanon had a profound talent for life; he was a man who wanted to be the subject and actor of his own life, and it was for this reason that he was so engaging and disarming—so alive."— from the Introduction