The Journal of North African Studies ISSN: 1362-9387 (Print) 1743-9345 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fnas20 Algeria revisited: history, culture and identity Beatrice Ivey To cite this article: Beatrice Ivey (2018) Algeria revisited: history, culture and identity, The Journal of North African Studies, 23:3, 515-516, DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2018.1434914 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2018.1434914 Published online: 05 Feb 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 39 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fnas20 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 515 Algeria revisited: history, culture and identity, edited by Rabah Aissaoui and Claire Eldridge, London & New York, Bloomsbury, 2017, xii + 270 pp., £70/$94 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4742-2103-0 In her chapter in this volume, Claire Eldridge remarks that historical anniversaries enable historians to asses ‘how, or if, certain events are being remembered, to think about which stories are being told, whose voices are being heard, and who is listening’ (212). Emerging from a conference at the University of Leicester in 2012 to mark the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence, Rabah Aissaoui and Claire Eldridge have compiled twelve chapters which, together, reflect on how colonial and postcolonial pasts are heard and told and reappraise the over-prescribed narratives in scholarship about Algerian history. While anniversaries can provide opportunities for myth-making, further entrenching the battle lines of a so-called ‘guerre des mémoires’, Algeria revisited artfully nuances many of the stories told about the colonial and postcolonial histories of Algeria. Aissaoui and Eldridge divide the book into three parts, progressing in a generally chronological logic following the tumultuous events of the twentieth-century. Part One, ‘Re-imagining Colonial Conflicts and Relationships’, deals with the liminal positioning of ‘Muslim Algerians’ vis-à-vis the political and military institutions that underpinned French colonialism, shedding light on their diverse forms of participation and resistance in the relationship between colonial Algeria and metropolitan France. The opening chapters by Samuel Kalman and Michelle Mann offer readers an insight into highly ambivalent reactions to the ‘Muslim draft’ in Algeria during the First World War that provoked, respectively, politicised forms of banditry as resistance to the draft and an opportunity for greater political visibility for the assimilationist group, ‘The Young Algerians’. Aissaoui’s chapter expands on the trajectory of the ‘The Young Algerians’ as occupying a marginal but symbolic space in the colonial political landscape, by focusing on the fascinating profile of its most prominent figure, Emir Khaled. Arthur Asseraf’s chapter rounds off this first section with a salient study of how Muslim deputies from Algeria were instrumentalised in the latter period of the War of Independence as ‘Weapons of Mass Representation’. Part Two, ‘Identity Construction and Contestation’, advances the principle that literary and cinematic production from Algeria is a major avenue for the formation and questioning of identity paradigms. Feminist and queer perspectives come to the fore in this section, demonstrating their centrality to current debates in scholarship on memory and Algerian cultural production. Blandine Valfort’s chapter on the sensual and political poetry of Jean Sénac presents his writing as an act of resistance against the rigid constraints of identity, engaging with his position in independent Algeria as a pied-noir Algerian and homosexual. Rachida Yassine adds to the scholarship on Assia Djebar with her study of language, patriarchy, and biculturalism, while Samira Farhoud and Carey Watt provide an analysis of Maïssa Bey’s novels through Mireille Rosello’s theorisation of the ‘encounter’, and Sophie Bélot re-examines the representation of Algerian women in the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which has also celebrated a recent landmark anniversary. Patricia Caillé expands on this issue of cinematic ‘representation’ to refine, 516 BOOK REVIEWS in her original, thorough and important essay on the industry of Algerian cinema inside and outside the country, the very significance of ‘Algerian cinema’ as a category of analysis. Part Three, ‘Remembering Algeria’, builds on the question of memory and identity introduced by the literary and cinematic analyses in Part Two, by focusing on the memory practices and politics of pied-noir groups in post-colonial France. Jennifer E. Sessions’ excellent study recounts the multiple symbolic values attributed to Marochetti’s equestrian statue of the Duc d’Orléans in its transfer from colonial Algiers to Neuilly-sur-Seine in metropolitan France, acquiring the ‘entangled’ memories of both twentieth century royalists in Neuilly and pieds-noirs in exile. Eldridge offers a novel perspective on the history of pieds-noirs in France by asking where next for pied-noir memory activism. While pied-noir activists have done much to shape public memory discussion, she analyses the challenges facing the transmission of pied-noir memory from one generation to the next in a rapidly evolving memory climate in France. The strength of this volume lies in its critical re-examination of a plurality of Algerian pasts across historical, cultural, and political discourses. If the volume aims to ‘revisit’ questions pertaining to Algeria, it does so successfully within an interdisciplinary framework. In the concluding chapter, James McDougall indeed provides a critique of the limited scholarly interaction between cultural production in Algeria and the question of state formation, by examining the ‘golden age’ of the cultural revolution of the 1970s through the lens of the period’s political economy. Above all, both scholars and students will appreciate the way Algeria revisited sensitively investigates diverse forms of liminality in colonial and postcolonial spaces and subjectivities, beyond familiar binary narratives in scholarship pertaining to postcolonial memory and history. Beatrice Ivey School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds mlbai@leeds.ac.uk © 2018 Beatrice Ivey https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2018.1434914 Comprendre la monarchie marocaine, by Omar Saghi, Casablanca, Éditions la Croisée des Chemins, 2017 (2nd edition), 216 pp., DM 75/€18 (paperback), ISBN: 978-9954-1-0576-4 The study of Morocco, both scholarly and popular, has long been caught in the ideological crosshairs between regime critics and acolytes. As one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies, Morocco has appeared archaic if not atavistic. This perception clearly applies in the cases of oil-rich but sociallyregressive absolute monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. Rabat’s harshest critics want no monarchy at all. More sympathetic observers favour transition to a