Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction i... more Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French. Ninette's author, Vitalis Danon, arrived in Tunisia under the aegis of the Franco-Jewish organization the Alliance Israélite Universelle and quickly adopted—and was adopted by—the local community. Ninette is an unlikely protagonist: Compelled by poverty to work as a prostitute, she dreams of a better life and an education for her son. Plucky and street-wise, she enrolls her son in the local school and the story unfolds as she narrates her life to the school's headmaster. Ninette's account is both a classic rags-to-riches tale and a subtle, incisive critique of French colonialism. That Ninette's story should still prove surprising today suggests how much we stand to learn from history, and from the secrets of Sin Street. This volume offers the first English translation of Danon's best-known work. A selection of his letters and an editors' introduction and notes provide context for this cornerstone of Judeo-Tunisian letters.
Au moment des faits et pendant des décennies, le 17 octobre 1961 se retrouvera exclu des rapports... more Au moment des faits et pendant des décennies, le 17 octobre 1961 se retrouvera exclu des rapports officiels et du discours public, relégué au statut d'événement oublié. À l'occasion du cinquantenaire des événements en 2011, deux documentaires – Octobre à Paris de Jacques Panijel et Ici on noie les Algériens de Yasmina Adi – sortent en salles. Ces documentaires se prêtent à une analyse en fonction de leurs stratégies de représentation. Nous proposons d'y saisir la représentation du sujet algérien.
Against autobiography: Albert Memmi and the production of theory / Lia Nicole Brozgal. pages cm I... more Against autobiography: Albert Memmi and the production of theory / Lia Nicole Brozgal. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
The introduction provides critical information on the history and stakes of the October 17 massac... more The introduction provides critical information on the history and stakes of the October 17 massacre, situating it within the context of the Algerian War for Independence and the French imperial project more generally. It is invested in tracing the evolution of the massacre’s representation in political, popular, and scholarly discourse, and in exploring the ways in which the massacre has been rendered both visible and invisible. Comparisons with Vichy (briefly) and with another episode of state violence (the 1962 police murder of protesters at the Charonne subway station) help to contextualize October 17’s ambivalent status in the French national narrative. Arguing that October 17 should be read as a signal event whose putative invisibility has been both metaphorical and a result of historical conjuncture, the introduction also lays out the book’s critical commitments, surveys the landscape of existing scholarship, and establishes the concept of the anarchive.
Chapter 5 tackles the issues of race and racism as they relate to the October 17 massacre itself,... more Chapter 5 tackles the issues of race and racism as they relate to the October 17 massacre itself, the way it was documented in police archives, and the anarchive. When read for its representations of race and racism, the anarchive produces a transhistorical discourse that is as instructive in its moments of ambivalence as it is in its most pointed critiques. The chapter begins with a discussion of the difficulties of talking about race in a French context, and then goes on to excavate discourses of race and racism as they have been produced, implicitly or explicitly, in over 50 years’ worth of cultural productions, ranging from documentary and feature film to historical and graphic novels. In each section, cultural productions are read against their specific micro-historical context, conditions of publication or production, and other epiphenomena. At stake in reading race in the anarchive is a process of “race-ing” October 17, that is, of understanding the repression as not simply a...
Chapter 4 analyzes the anarchive’s representations of the Seine River. The notion of the iconic P... more Chapter 4 analyzes the anarchive’s representations of the Seine River. The notion of the iconic Parisian river as a mass burial site remains one of the most gruesome aspects of the massacre. While not all of the dead on October 17 fell victim to the river, it is nonetheless true that the Seine has come to occupy significant symbolic territory in the realm of representation, to a degree that perhaps surpasses the representation of analogous “killing fields” or “technologies” of destruction in other episodes of state violence. The anarchive is replete with images of the Seine and of the experience of what Sidi Mohammed Barakat calls “exceptional bodies,” all of which participate in an implicit project of re-signifying the river. In exploring representations of the Seine in novels, documentary and fiction film, and visual art, this chapter makes visible a poetic and political discourse about the nature of the violence on October 17. It also explores how culture has dealt with the weigh...
This chapter explores the intersection of spatial practices, the representation of urban space, a... more This chapter explores the intersection of spatial practices, the representation of urban space, and the way both of these interact with the visibility of October 17 and its inscriptions (or lack thereof) on the city. Beginning in the contemporary moment with a discussion of current polices and politics of the representation of October 17 in the Parisian memorialscape, the chapter then returns to October 1961 to explore the spatial politics of the demonstration and its representation, teasing out a cartographic impulse that connects up with both earlier colonial technologies of mapping and representation, and that emerges, later, as a trope in the anarchive (notably in documentary film). Finally, chapter 3 explores the ways the anarchive has represented October 17 and the space of Paris through revisionist cartography, pop- or counter-cultural subversive tactics such as graffiti, and rogue spatial practices.
Chapter 2 brings together several strands of analysis which, together, produce an argument about ... more Chapter 2 brings together several strands of analysis which, together, produce an argument about both official archives and the representation of archives or archival material in works of fiction. Beginning with a narrative about the Parisian police archives on October 17, this chapter charts the archives’ slow road to declassification and the various obstacles that have led to the persistent belief that the machinations of the French state make it impossible to ever fully know their contents. The second section operates in two modes: ethnographically, detailing the author’s own experience of consulting the freshly declassified police archives, and hermeneutically, that is, in the manner of literary critic, offering typological assessments and interpretations of the archival material itself. The final sections of this chapter connect the archive to the anarchive, demonstrating that the latter stages its own archive stories—narratives about the provenance of the archive, its history,...
Chapter 1 forms the essential foundation of the book, insofar as it names, describes, and themati... more Chapter 1 forms the essential foundation of the book, insofar as it names, describes, and thematises the contents of the anarchive—the cultural productions that have represented, directly or obliquely, the stories of October 17. While anarchive is presented in 3 “waves”--the original scene (1961-1963); the return to the scene (1983-1999); and the post-Papon anarchive (1999-)—the chapter nonetheless seeks to tease out the limits of periodization, calling attention to continuities over time. Chapter 1 also looks at trends and problems within the anarchive, investigating, in particular: the “turn,” in the 3rd wave, to visual representation and performance; debates about demands for historical accuracy and truth in fiction; and the anarchive’s relationship to scholarship on cultural production and memory. This analysis is also infused with a concern for epi-phenomenal and meta-textual matters, how issues of circulation, translation, marketing, authorial status, genre, and medium bear up...
Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural hist... more Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. Covered up by the state and hidden from history, the events of October 17 have nonetheless never been fully erased. Indeed, as early as 1962, stories about the massacre began to find their way their way into novels, poetry, songs, film, visual art, and performance. This book is about these stories, the way they have been told, and their function as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Identified here for the first time as a corpus—an anarchive—the works in question produce knowledge about October 17 by narrativizing and contextualizing the massacre, registering its existence, its scale, and its erasure, while also providing access to the subjective experiences of violence and trauma. Cultural Traces of a Massacre is invested in exploring how literature and culture may “do history” differently by complicating it, whether by functioning as first responders and persistent witnesses; reverberating against reality but also speculating on what might have been; activating networks of signs and meaning; or by showing us things that otherwise cannot be seen. This book provokes important questions about the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of representation.
If quantItIes of scholarshIp are any measure—indeed, if the number of volumes and essays devoted ... more If quantItIes of scholarshIp are any measure—indeed, if the number of volumes and essays devoted to the archive, as both object and concept, can be understood as so many thermometers capable of taking the disciplinary temperature in any number of domains—then we are certainly in a position to diagnose an epidemic of archive fever. More than a place where documents are filed for safekeeping and consultation, the archive has taken on a critical valence that allows it to be conceptualized and theorized, then redeployed as a heuristic tool. The scholarship in question speaks to the multiple ways in which this old noun is made new again, be it by bringing fresh interpretations to documents with a long history (Ann Stoler’s work on imperial Dutch archives in Along the Archival Grain); through the pioneering consultation of official records long hidden from public view (South African scholars’ excavations of apartheid in Reconfiguring the Archive or Mark von Hagen’s engagement with post-Soviet archives in “Archival Gold Rush”); or in discussions of digital technologies and the delights and dangers they pose (Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics). Beyond these encounters with the archive in its more or less denotative meaning—that is, as documents or a place where documents are kept—scholars have also proposed that archives are all around us; Mike Featherstone, for example, reminds us that the city was an archive for Benjamin, and that Christian Boltanski’s installations constitute “visual archives.”1 Regardless of the form the archival material takes, the work of the “archival turn” has necessarily been concerned with entities that are accessible, that can be viewed, read, consulted, or otherwise physically apprehended by the researcher. Yet numerous state-controlled archives in France, Germany, South Africa, and the former Soviet Union (to name only a few) are subject to administrative injunctions that prohibit consultation of documents deemed “sensitive.” While the reasons and logistics of these various types of archival sequestration vary from country to country, the denial of access underscores the imbricated nature of knowledge, power, and politics. As Foucault and, later, Derrida would point out: “There is no political power without control of the archive [. . .] Effective democratization can always be measured by [. . .] the
ABSTRACT In his apparent send-up of Camus' colonial classic L'Étranger, first-time Algeri... more ABSTRACT In his apparent send-up of Camus' colonial classic L'Étranger, first-time Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud produces a far more ambiguous document. Meursault, contre-enquête perhaps the most famous Maghrebi novel of the early 21st century, subverts is own ostensible goal of critiquing Camus while also using the genre of the “postcolonial remake” to make a broad comment on literature itself. Exceptional in many ways, Daoud's novel nonetheless may be read as emblematic: it appears to exceed its cultural origins while all the while gesturing back to them and resincribing the Maghrebi novel's ability to resonate on both local and universal levels.
Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction i... more Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French. Ninette's author, Vitalis Danon, arrived in Tunisia under the aegis of the Franco-Jewish organization the Alliance Israélite Universelle and quickly adopted—and was adopted by—the local community. Ninette is an unlikely protagonist: Compelled by poverty to work as a prostitute, she dreams of a better life and an education for her son. Plucky and street-wise, she enrolls her son in the local school and the story unfolds as she narrates her life to the school's headmaster. Ninette's account is both a classic rags-to-riches tale and a subtle, incisive critique of French colonialism. That Ninette's story should still prove surprising today suggests how much we stand to learn from history, and from the secrets of Sin Street. This volume offers the first English translation of Danon's best-known work. A selection of his letters and an editors' introduction and notes provide context for this cornerstone of Judeo-Tunisian letters.
Au moment des faits et pendant des décennies, le 17 octobre 1961 se retrouvera exclu des rapports... more Au moment des faits et pendant des décennies, le 17 octobre 1961 se retrouvera exclu des rapports officiels et du discours public, relégué au statut d'événement oublié. À l'occasion du cinquantenaire des événements en 2011, deux documentaires – Octobre à Paris de Jacques Panijel et Ici on noie les Algériens de Yasmina Adi – sortent en salles. Ces documentaires se prêtent à une analyse en fonction de leurs stratégies de représentation. Nous proposons d'y saisir la représentation du sujet algérien.
Against autobiography: Albert Memmi and the production of theory / Lia Nicole Brozgal. pages cm I... more Against autobiography: Albert Memmi and the production of theory / Lia Nicole Brozgal. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
The introduction provides critical information on the history and stakes of the October 17 massac... more The introduction provides critical information on the history and stakes of the October 17 massacre, situating it within the context of the Algerian War for Independence and the French imperial project more generally. It is invested in tracing the evolution of the massacre’s representation in political, popular, and scholarly discourse, and in exploring the ways in which the massacre has been rendered both visible and invisible. Comparisons with Vichy (briefly) and with another episode of state violence (the 1962 police murder of protesters at the Charonne subway station) help to contextualize October 17’s ambivalent status in the French national narrative. Arguing that October 17 should be read as a signal event whose putative invisibility has been both metaphorical and a result of historical conjuncture, the introduction also lays out the book’s critical commitments, surveys the landscape of existing scholarship, and establishes the concept of the anarchive.
Chapter 5 tackles the issues of race and racism as they relate to the October 17 massacre itself,... more Chapter 5 tackles the issues of race and racism as they relate to the October 17 massacre itself, the way it was documented in police archives, and the anarchive. When read for its representations of race and racism, the anarchive produces a transhistorical discourse that is as instructive in its moments of ambivalence as it is in its most pointed critiques. The chapter begins with a discussion of the difficulties of talking about race in a French context, and then goes on to excavate discourses of race and racism as they have been produced, implicitly or explicitly, in over 50 years’ worth of cultural productions, ranging from documentary and feature film to historical and graphic novels. In each section, cultural productions are read against their specific micro-historical context, conditions of publication or production, and other epiphenomena. At stake in reading race in the anarchive is a process of “race-ing” October 17, that is, of understanding the repression as not simply a...
Chapter 4 analyzes the anarchive’s representations of the Seine River. The notion of the iconic P... more Chapter 4 analyzes the anarchive’s representations of the Seine River. The notion of the iconic Parisian river as a mass burial site remains one of the most gruesome aspects of the massacre. While not all of the dead on October 17 fell victim to the river, it is nonetheless true that the Seine has come to occupy significant symbolic territory in the realm of representation, to a degree that perhaps surpasses the representation of analogous “killing fields” or “technologies” of destruction in other episodes of state violence. The anarchive is replete with images of the Seine and of the experience of what Sidi Mohammed Barakat calls “exceptional bodies,” all of which participate in an implicit project of re-signifying the river. In exploring representations of the Seine in novels, documentary and fiction film, and visual art, this chapter makes visible a poetic and political discourse about the nature of the violence on October 17. It also explores how culture has dealt with the weigh...
This chapter explores the intersection of spatial practices, the representation of urban space, a... more This chapter explores the intersection of spatial practices, the representation of urban space, and the way both of these interact with the visibility of October 17 and its inscriptions (or lack thereof) on the city. Beginning in the contemporary moment with a discussion of current polices and politics of the representation of October 17 in the Parisian memorialscape, the chapter then returns to October 1961 to explore the spatial politics of the demonstration and its representation, teasing out a cartographic impulse that connects up with both earlier colonial technologies of mapping and representation, and that emerges, later, as a trope in the anarchive (notably in documentary film). Finally, chapter 3 explores the ways the anarchive has represented October 17 and the space of Paris through revisionist cartography, pop- or counter-cultural subversive tactics such as graffiti, and rogue spatial practices.
Chapter 2 brings together several strands of analysis which, together, produce an argument about ... more Chapter 2 brings together several strands of analysis which, together, produce an argument about both official archives and the representation of archives or archival material in works of fiction. Beginning with a narrative about the Parisian police archives on October 17, this chapter charts the archives’ slow road to declassification and the various obstacles that have led to the persistent belief that the machinations of the French state make it impossible to ever fully know their contents. The second section operates in two modes: ethnographically, detailing the author’s own experience of consulting the freshly declassified police archives, and hermeneutically, that is, in the manner of literary critic, offering typological assessments and interpretations of the archival material itself. The final sections of this chapter connect the archive to the anarchive, demonstrating that the latter stages its own archive stories—narratives about the provenance of the archive, its history,...
Chapter 1 forms the essential foundation of the book, insofar as it names, describes, and themati... more Chapter 1 forms the essential foundation of the book, insofar as it names, describes, and thematises the contents of the anarchive—the cultural productions that have represented, directly or obliquely, the stories of October 17. While anarchive is presented in 3 “waves”--the original scene (1961-1963); the return to the scene (1983-1999); and the post-Papon anarchive (1999-)—the chapter nonetheless seeks to tease out the limits of periodization, calling attention to continuities over time. Chapter 1 also looks at trends and problems within the anarchive, investigating, in particular: the “turn,” in the 3rd wave, to visual representation and performance; debates about demands for historical accuracy and truth in fiction; and the anarchive’s relationship to scholarship on cultural production and memory. This analysis is also infused with a concern for epi-phenomenal and meta-textual matters, how issues of circulation, translation, marketing, authorial status, genre, and medium bear up...
Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural hist... more Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. Covered up by the state and hidden from history, the events of October 17 have nonetheless never been fully erased. Indeed, as early as 1962, stories about the massacre began to find their way their way into novels, poetry, songs, film, visual art, and performance. This book is about these stories, the way they have been told, and their function as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Identified here for the first time as a corpus—an anarchive—the works in question produce knowledge about October 17 by narrativizing and contextualizing the massacre, registering its existence, its scale, and its erasure, while also providing access to the subjective experiences of violence and trauma. Cultural Traces of a Massacre is invested in exploring how literature and culture may “do history” differently by complicating it, whether by functioning as first responders and persistent witnesses; reverberating against reality but also speculating on what might have been; activating networks of signs and meaning; or by showing us things that otherwise cannot be seen. This book provokes important questions about the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of representation.
If quantItIes of scholarshIp are any measure—indeed, if the number of volumes and essays devoted ... more If quantItIes of scholarshIp are any measure—indeed, if the number of volumes and essays devoted to the archive, as both object and concept, can be understood as so many thermometers capable of taking the disciplinary temperature in any number of domains—then we are certainly in a position to diagnose an epidemic of archive fever. More than a place where documents are filed for safekeeping and consultation, the archive has taken on a critical valence that allows it to be conceptualized and theorized, then redeployed as a heuristic tool. The scholarship in question speaks to the multiple ways in which this old noun is made new again, be it by bringing fresh interpretations to documents with a long history (Ann Stoler’s work on imperial Dutch archives in Along the Archival Grain); through the pioneering consultation of official records long hidden from public view (South African scholars’ excavations of apartheid in Reconfiguring the Archive or Mark von Hagen’s engagement with post-Soviet archives in “Archival Gold Rush”); or in discussions of digital technologies and the delights and dangers they pose (Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics). Beyond these encounters with the archive in its more or less denotative meaning—that is, as documents or a place where documents are kept—scholars have also proposed that archives are all around us; Mike Featherstone, for example, reminds us that the city was an archive for Benjamin, and that Christian Boltanski’s installations constitute “visual archives.”1 Regardless of the form the archival material takes, the work of the “archival turn” has necessarily been concerned with entities that are accessible, that can be viewed, read, consulted, or otherwise physically apprehended by the researcher. Yet numerous state-controlled archives in France, Germany, South Africa, and the former Soviet Union (to name only a few) are subject to administrative injunctions that prohibit consultation of documents deemed “sensitive.” While the reasons and logistics of these various types of archival sequestration vary from country to country, the denial of access underscores the imbricated nature of knowledge, power, and politics. As Foucault and, later, Derrida would point out: “There is no political power without control of the archive [. . .] Effective democratization can always be measured by [. . .] the
ABSTRACT In his apparent send-up of Camus' colonial classic L'Étranger, first-time Algeri... more ABSTRACT In his apparent send-up of Camus' colonial classic L'Étranger, first-time Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud produces a far more ambiguous document. Meursault, contre-enquête perhaps the most famous Maghrebi novel of the early 21st century, subverts is own ostensible goal of critiquing Camus while also using the genre of the “postcolonial remake” to make a broad comment on literature itself. Exceptional in many ways, Daoud's novel nonetheless may be read as emblematic: it appears to exceed its cultural origins while all the while gesturing back to them and resincribing the Maghrebi novel's ability to resonate on both local and universal levels.
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