REVIEW ESSAYS
IN SEARCH OF ALGERIA:
BETWEEN LITERATURE, HISTORY, AND
CULTURAL STUDIES
ALGERIA: NATION, CULTURE AND
TRANSNATIONALISM: 1988-2015
Patrick Crowley, ed.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017
(Francophone Postcolonial Studies, Volume 8)
(x + 269 pages, illustrations, index) $120.00 (cloth)
THE ALGERIAN NEW NOVEL:
THE POETICS OF A MODERN NATION, 1950-1979
Valérie K. Orlando
Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017
(xxi + 301 pages, notes, bibliography, index) $75.00 (cloth) $35.00 (paper)
ALGÉERIE, LES ÉECRIVAINS DANS LA
DÉECENNIE NOIRE
Tristan Leperlier
Paris: CNRS Editions, 2018
(328 pages + annexes) 25.00 euros (paper)
Reviewed by Idriss Jebari
Idriss Jebari is Assistant Professor in Middle East Studies in the Department of Near and
Middle East Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
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In Search of Algeria
Algerianists frequently lament Middle East studies’ inability to recognize
the wonderfully complex, multilayered, and fascinating country that is the
subject of their inquiry. But on second look, its complex configuration, so
different from better covered Arab countries, explains why Algeria is marginalized in scholarship as compared to, say, Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the
Algerian experience is frequently reduced to three historical markers—the
War of Independence against France (1954 to 1962), the civil war in the
1990s, and the “Algerian exception” in 2011—and a few common tropes:
Algeria as not quite Arab, Algeria as uniquely tied to France through its
migrants, and Algeria as a country plagued by a perpetual cycle of violence
(which, according to “experts,” might as well be written in its DNA). In the
meantime, Algeria has also emerged as a privileged terrain for postcolonial
studies, a pot in which to brew a rich blend of empire, violence, multilingual
literatures, experimental poetics, alienated subalterns, and transnational
connections with the old metropole. This scholarship tends to draw on
Francophone texts, from which it derives a narrative of cultural hybridity
to contrast with the execrable media portrayal of the Arab region in the
aftermath of 9/11.
This reductive portrayal is a serious shortcoming that Algerianists
have sought to address, driven by global academic conversations and by
Arab cultural studies. This is evidenced by three recent publications (and
several upcoming others): Patrick Crowley (University College Cork) has an
edited volume on Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988-2015
that brings together a fantastic group of established and rising scholars to
properly investigate transnationalism in the past three decades in Algeria.
Valerie Orlando (University of Maryland) in The Algerian Novel proposes
a reading of Algerian Francophone literature coming to terms with decolonization and independence through the angle of the French New Novel.
Tristan Leperlier (EHESS Paris) in his published doctoral thesis Algérie, Les
écrivains de la décennie noire breaks new ground by combining Bourdieusian
sociological and literary frameworks to explain how “the transnational and
multilingual literary field reacts to political crises” (27).
Together, these works illustrate a growing appetite for expanding the
field of Algerian studies to new chronologies and new themes while offering
an intelligible account of “Algerianness.” They seek to capture the Algerian
experience through its cultural production and draw on a multitude of dis-
139
ciplines including history, literary criticism, and sociology. Arab cultural
studies, as Tarek Sabry writes, needs to contend with postcolonial studies
and how it impedes a grounded approach to Arab culture. Arabs “seldom
pose the postcolonial question” themselves and the discipline occults Arab
political agency by “deconstructing the complexities of the ‘postcolonial’
text than on the ‘postcolonial’ subject per se, whose condition and material
realities it ought to be representing.”1 It is fixed on abstract ephemeral notions
(such as “entrapment, in-betweenness, alienation, dislocation or hybridity”)
and elaborate “post-colonial texts over the ‘real’ material conditions and
‘realities’ which govern the lives of the real, living and breathing postcolonial
subject,” leading to ludicrous outcomes where, rather than “listening to the
subaltern,” the Arab postcolonial subjects, they are reified, put on display,
and silenced “under the pretext that they cannot speak [and] positions the
postcolonial theorist as their immediate speaker.”2
Arab cultural studies, by contrast, offers rigorous methodologies
and self-conscious approaches to its object of inquiry, focusing on “Arab
media, culture and society” within a specific spatiality and temporality,
and asks rigorous questions such as “how does the cultural material […]
relate to and inform ‘contemporary’ articulations (both sociological and
philosophical) on Arab culture and society?”; “what are our points of reference for what was said, and to what epistemic space ‘paradigm’ did [they]
contribute? […] How do we connect it to the existing body of intellectual
work on Arab culture(s) and society?”3 All the while, it seeks to produce an
“epistemic space in which it can operate and develop paradigms” while it
“build bridges and linkages with Arab and Islamic thought” or Arab reason
to ensure its authenticity.4 These remarks leave us with two major lines of
inquiry: first, how these books on Algeria make use of the past, and second,
how they represent the cultural landscape. We will then be a step closer to
contextualizing and deconstructing how these works adopt the image of a
“plural Algeria” as an aspiration going forward.
1. Bringing the Historical Back
All three volumes go beyond the War of Independence (1954-1962), by
addressing the nation-building period of the 1960s and 1970s (Orlando),
the civil war in the 1990s (Leperlier), and its aftermath from 2005 to 2015
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In Search of Algeria
(Crowley). Citing James McDougall in his introduction, Crowley defines the
aim as filling in the historiographical gaps, the transitions and transformations “in the shadow of three revolutions” (1962, 1988 and 2011; 10), to which
the other two literary studies add a generational framework to underline
the crucial link between historical period and style of writing. In fact, both
Crowley and Leperlier take the October 1988 riots in Algiers as the historical
turning point to explain the Algerian cultural present. The 1990s saw a
string of assassinations of famous writers (Tahar Djaout) and singers (Cheb
Hasni and Matoub Lounes), and even President Mohamed Boudiaf, which
shocked Algerians’ and sparked their cultural production (7). Leperlier’s
book, with an image of Algeria bleeding on its cover, explains that this new
configuration of the literary field began in 1988 with the “liberalization of
the cultural and media sector, shifting […] the rapport between writers and
the political field” and the passing of the giant Kateb Yacine (14).
While there is unanimity around 1988 as the new “center of gravity,”
these books make different uses of history. Crowley seeks the historical
context as an opportunity for “interrogations and exploitations of that period
and of the relationship between nation and context” and not to “fetishize
context – establishing it as the arbitrator of authentic representation” and
instead to provide nuance and multiple experiences (4). His contributors
heed this call with chapters that often reinterpret conventional approaches
to Algerian historical categorizations. For James McDougall, revolutionary
moments are clarified in light of prior ones; hence the events of 2011-12 are
compared to the riots of October 1988, which inevitably invites comparison
with the ongoing events of 2019. Malika Rahal introduces nuance and pushes
back against teleology by noting that “making sense of this period is difficult due to the rapid succession of the events in question” and against the
facile idea that “the democratization process ended in the ‘black decade’
of the 1990s” (82). Instead, by following the PAGS (the Algerian New Left),
its trajectory from clandestine existence to legality, and its difficult choices
after 1988 (especially regarding the Islamist takeover), she alleviates the
determinism of the context and places agency back on those who produce
cultural works.
The other two adopt more implicit approaches toward the historical
context. Due to the nature of Leperlier’s sociological methodology and his
fieldwork (his interviews of Algerian writers and use of press clippings),
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his book is written within the historical period but offers little engagement
with the historical narrative or chronologies, missing an opportunity to
retell a cultural history of this period. Orlando’s use of the past is more
puzzling and problematic. While the book announces its focus on the
post-independence period, and indeed most of the novels she considers
were published in that period, she firmly anchors her reading “backwards”
to the colonial period. When addressing the context of the nation-building
years, she paints in monochromatic, broad-brush strokes a period of “soul
searching and questioning over the tenuous place of the individual in a world
of chaos and disorder, violence and bloodshed, in wars of liberation of the
modern century… that inspired the origins of the modern Algerian novel”
(13-4). While the post-independence period is regularly dispatched with by
evoking “national disillusionment,” “failure to live up to national ideals,”
“Arabization policies” or “Third World ideals,” those feelings are reached in
relation to the colonial experience, which clearly provides the inspiration
for all these novels as we see in the three chapters dealing with the 1970s
generation. Rachid Boudjedra’s novel follows an Algerian immigrant worker
in France who meets his demise in the metro (chapter 6). Nabile Farès writes
about his national disillusionment after independence drawing from stories
about the Kabyle mountains and the FLN fighters during the 1954-1962 war
(chapter 7). Yamina Mechakra’s novel was published in 1979, but its topic
was women during the war of independence and the topic of “vacant goods”
(abandoned lands and houses after independence), “the plot of which takes
place between the years 1955 and 1962,” with little attention paid to the
condition of women and women writers after independence (255, chapter 8).
Overall, The Algerian New Novel frequently appears disconnected
and disinterested in establishing any linkages with recent scholarship on
Algerian history to contextualize its literary analysis. It is frequent to find
Orlando quoting extensively from single sources, which are seldom up-todate: chapter 4 on Mohammed Dib cites repeatedly “the Turkish journalist
and historian Arslan Humbaraci” and his 1967 book Algeria: A Revolution
That Failed, written based on his observations at the time, for in-depth
analyses of the process of nation-building.5 Taking for granted the words
of her novelists that “The History of Algeria, a history that is opaque” we
regularly find problematic passages that mystify rather than clarify: “Within
the historical framework of the period 1961-66, these two novels, depicting
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In Search of Algeria
the ripple in time between colonial and postcolonial Algeria, are remarkably similar in how each novelist attempts but fails to describe a reality
that is outside itself in the sense that its entire context is unknowable and
unreadable” (125, 138).
These three books and their approach to history offer a spectrum and
highlight the pitfalls of insufficient historical awareness when it comes to
writing cultural studies. It hurts the literary analysis in particular when
history is used superficially, in the case of Orlando’s book. Instead of broadening the topic to the post-independence years, it traps Algerian literature
in the colonial question and its authors in nostalgia, malaise, alienation,
and national disillusionment. As a result, the book’s epilogue, which offers
coverage of Francophone literature during the civil war as a continuation of
the themes of malaise and discontent, contrasts heavily with Leperlier and
Crowley’s account that 1988 provided a fundamental rupture in the cultural
field and new forms of writing to express this new stage in the country’s
history, especially in the debate on what it means to be Algerian (section 3).
2. Representing the Algerian Cultural Landscape
“How can we talk about ‘Algeria’?” Crowley asks, without falling into
the narrative of a country torn by “culture wars, by unbridgeable divides
between French speakers and Arabic speakers, seculars and Islamists, Arabs
and Amazigh, etc” (3). This question highlights the act of representation,
which we can break down into three forms in these works: representation as
“depiction” (or observation), the literary product of an experience expressed
in novels, and a critical inquiry into those self-styled Algerian spokespeople.
The representation of the current Algerian cultural landscape to
come out of Crowley’s volume is an encouraging success, especially in
how it approaches Algeria for itself and not through France’s eyes, without
sacrificing the emancipatory potential of transnational perspective from
restrictive national discourse. It does so with a grounded approach toward
this cultural production, studied in its context, and defined broadly (music,
plastic arts, dance, sports, and entertainment). Langlois’s chapter on musical
traditions (Andalusian music, Raï, and Kabyle songs) opens a way to discuss
the country’s internal borders and the uses of music by various social and
political groups; Hecking’s chapter discusses youth and urban street dances,
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such as capoeira, and the possibility of new political patterns of mobilization; Gillet’s chapter on the plastic arts as a form of archival remembrance
of the civil war and its traumas; and Dine’s chapter on sports and national
identity in Algeria, on football stadium violence and transnational patterns
of consumption of sports entertainment.6
These chapters portray a dynamic Algerian cultural landscape centered
around their actors’ choices and subjectivities, while opening fascinating
avenues for methodological and thematic advances, within the themes of
Arab cultural studies (for instance, creative youth dissidence, global networks,
state recuperation and clientelism, and cultural trauma).7 They mostly avoid
blanket statements and problematic generalizations, while opening a space
for new forms to be included later (cinema, television, theatre). Unfortunately,
these chapters seldom engage in dialogue on shared themes (such as resistance between Gillet and Langlois, youth in Dime and Hecking).
These chapters also offer a cautionary tale about ignoring ethnographic
fieldwork in Algeria to update empirical understanding. Dine’s chapter
on sports is too broad and plagued by tired generalizations. It misses an
opportunity to explore a topic that has been made visible by the current
Algerian hirak: the culture of football supporter groups that have produced
street mobilization in 2019. Instead, Dine rests his argument on simplistic
tropes regarding “stadium violence” as “precursors of the riots to come,” or
“the only alternative for many young Algerians seeking escape from el hogra
would appear to be el haraga – literally the burning – of former identities
along with identity papers – associated with clandestine migration and
ensuing European exile” (211).
When it comes to the literary representation of Algerian cultural
experience, these recent publications continue to reify Algerian Francophone
and postcolonial novelists, despite valid questions about their specific
fields of experience compared to Algerian society as a whole. Orlando’s
book offers an extensive inquiry into the Francophone literary tradition
in Algeria and how it was inspired by the French Nouveau Roman that
will add another brick to the edifice of a postcolonial and interconnected
postcolonial and world literature.8 In so doing, it presents a fundamental
limitation: it accounts for the poetics at length without giving equal weight
to reordering the politics and acknowledging the resulting worldview that
emerges from it. As a result, Orlando offers us a study that succeeds in rec-
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In Search of Algeria
reating the feeling of reading these novels, rather than going beyond to draw
deeper from the cultural experience of Algeria from which these authors
emerged. In chapter four, Orlando compares French novelist Claude Ollier
and Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine as two experimental representatives of
the Nouveau Roman. She continuously states that their style is one that is
“unreadable”, “opaque,” and “removed from reality,” but that they were also
“seeking to convey the incomprehensibility of the Algerian nation from two
viewpoints” (119). She justifies this as a poetic device to reflect “Algeria as
a space that is both real and unreal, concrete and temporal” and that “the
sociopolitical climate of the times fostered rethinking the lines drawn
between fiction and reality,” claiming that “we must enter a third world—a
third space of literary imagination” (123, 141). This chapter encapsulates
this work’s fundamental flaw with this work: a failure, or a disinterest in
engaging with the Algerian subject’s worldview that would be grounded in
tangible realities. While this approach may owe to different disciplinary
specifications, literary criticism in this case, the reader learns virtually
nothing about Algeria in the 1960s and 1970s.
Algerian Francophone literature continues to occupy a significant
space in the field: in Crowley’s volume, Corbin Treacy writes about the
“‘88 Generation” and Olivia Harrison explores how Algerian Francophone
writers adopt new themes beyond their fraught colonial relationship with
France (while still within the anti-imperial dialectic). Both chapters offer
more substantive engagement with the Algeria in which these novelists
operate: one grappling with the civil war’s impact for Treacy, and one
engaging with other imaginations, including the question of Palestine or
the post-9/11 world for Harrison (falling under the label of “transcolonial”).
These two texts still share with Orlando an approach that is centered on the
writer, who still comes across as an alienated subject, plagued by cultural
malaise because of Algerian contradictions, which are dispatched under
simple headings—national disillusionment, hollow Third World ideals,
oppressive Arabo-Islamism—that we are forced to take for granted. This
Algeria is mediated by the Francophone writer’s malaise and unable to offer
alternative portrayals for the external reader, curious to understand the
inner workings of Algerian culture.
The breakthrough comes from Leperlier’s innovative sociological
book. He maps the literary field after 1988 and succeeds in re-territorializing
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Algerian culture by embracing its transnational nature (chapter 4). He
avoids making it dependent on France or overshadowing its grounded
stakes inside the country. Leperlier tackles Algeria’s “language wars”
and demystifies the relationship between Arabic and French writers, in
what is bound to spark pushback and debate in the field. In the second
chapter “Language Wars?,” posed as a question, he treats the conflict
between Tahar Wattar (Arabic) and Tahar Djaout (French) not as a conf lict between languages, but for prominence in the Algerian Writers
Union (137). Similarly, he dismisses the claim that Islamists purposefully
assassinated Francophone intellectuals because they were symbols of an
alien culture. Instead, Islamists targeted the cultural field as a whole and
figures associated with the regime. These misconceptions grew because
several Francophone writers produced and controlled a victimized narrative during their French exile, where they gained a podium to talk about
Algeria’s struggles. In fact, the subtlety of the Algerian cultural sphere
and the war was that “the civil war in the literary field was not in essence
a language war, but it became one” (155, 160).
Consequently, these works each offer a different angle to represent
the Algerian cultural landscape through its literary field: a transnational
approach, a transcolonial approach, and a grounded field-based approach.
They deal differently with the Algerian subject’s agency: as a byproduct
of larger forces (France, global forces) or their own decisions and stakes.
These themes allow us to turn the projector on these writers and the third
meaning of representation: how novelists have emerged as spokespeople for
their fellow Algerians, an “avant-garde,” having a “responsibility” to be a
“witness.” Here again, we see a clear dividing line between the three books.
Orlando’s approach builds the novelist as the anti-colonial spokespeople
and authors of the authentic Algerian national aspirations (“littérature de
combat”) who were marginalized after independence by the oppressive state
authorities. Their novels “spoke truth to power” from the margins. Treacy
upholds this representation of the writer-intellectual: a new generation of
writers such as Mostafa Benfodil grew up with terrorism, village massacres,
and assassinations. Their novels express their responsibility to “witness” and
process their societies’ traumatic legacies. From the War of Independence to
the civil war, the Algerian Francophone intellectual’s role remains constant
in this construct.
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In Search of Algeria
Leperlier pushes back against the prophetic intellectual. He claims that
the 1990s was the “swan song of the writer as the novelist as paragon of the
intellectual,” as represented by Rachid Boudjedra as a celebrated “Voltairelike Prophet” (94).9 Instead, he points to several systemic shifts (declining
symbolic capital, emergence of critical journalism), and instances where they
stayed silent, including after the repressive handling of the October 1988
riots. Several Algerian writers took advantage of their status as intellectuals
by publishing “testimony literature” in France, against the massacres in
Algeria that fed into French media narratives (“barbaric Islamic violence”
vs. steadfast enlightened Algerians), rather than having objective aesthetic
quality.10 By the civil war’s end, Leperlier writes, the Francophone novelist
was no longer the national representative of the past (despite figures such
as Kamal Daoud continuing to be elevated).
In conclusion, these works show that representing the Algerian cultural landscape involves a dynamic account of its cultural productions and
a contextualization of those who produce them, that highlight in both cases
their agency. Transnationalism and field-based approaches offer innovative
angles. As we approach the question of Algerianness, the habitual tension
between a cultural literary field that is impacted by transnationalism or
one shaped by local stakes in Algeria is a false one. Rather than opposition
and tension, both are Algerian. They need, however, to properly account
for their interplay.
3. Competing narratives on “
“ Algerianness””
This recent scholarship is built on a strong push to ascribe “Algerianness”
with a plural and cosmopolitan narrative—partly to counter post-9/11
narratives on the Middle East, or French academia’s fixation with colonialism and the war of independence. Crowley devotes his volume as a call
to the “Algerias to come,” already at work and changing the country (19).
Orlando shines light on authors who “affirm the concept of plurality” that
picks “cosmopolitan transnationalism” and difference rather than restrictive Arab and Islamic frameworks (287). Together, these books enrich the
growing literature on the Mediterranean and portray Algeria as a Camusian
space of inter-faith acceptance drawing from the image of neo-Andalusian
convivienca, offered as a response to the 1990s civil war.
147
However, this idea of Algerianness often blurs the line between an
authentic portrayal of Algeria that is, and Algerianness as plurality that
remains an aspiration to be realized. For example, Sami Everett’s chapter
addresses the Jewish component of Algerianness multiculturalism. He
accounts for “successive evocations of instances of intersection between
algerianités and judaïtés” including the chaabi music group El Gusto who
build on a “mythical Andalusi/Berber/North African togetherness” (68).
Meanwhile, he downplays whether this is merely a displacement and projection of a debate in France with different stakes that would undermine the
reality of Algerian pluralism. Similarly, Jessica Ayesha Northey addresses
Algerian heritage associations working to safeguard archeological sites
such as Spanish forts in Oran with EU funding and committed civil society,
emphasizing the idea of a legacy ready to be reactivated in the right circumstances. Hecking’s chapter on capoeira and dance also contains an underlying
defense of progressive values. Her interviewees state that “capoeira ‘saves’
from the violence of the street” (191-3). In these cases, establishing pluralism
is probably more important to the scholars than it is to the actors themselves.
These examples remind us of our relationship to those counterparts
on the ground, and the risk of imposing our narratives or espousing their
ideological positions. A cosmopolitan Algerian is more appealing than a
“banal” and “everyday” one. Yet, when Le Monde Diplomatique recently
revisited the sites of village massacres twenty years ago, the journalist did
not find a country ready to embrace its plural legacy (“except in a few intellectual and artistic circles in Algiers”). Instead, the journalist depicts with
realism the unresolved traumatic aftermaths and a clear religious turn (even
from Islamists’ victims).11 Myopia regarding “the other Algeria” is a greater
risk for Algerian cultural studies than academic neglect.
Against this approach on plural Algerianness, both Leperlier and
Edward McAllister in Crowley demonstrate the way to address the social
construction of competing narratives on Algerianness. Leperlier discusses
expertly how Francophone Algerian novelists shaped their own narrative
through “testimony literature,” but also by emerging as the privileged
counterparts (or informants) for literary scholars in the academy, as we
frequently see close-knit relationships between academic scholarship and
these writers. McAllister’s chapter arguably offers the most conceptually
advanced argument that the nostalgic narrative of “la belle époque,” the
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glorious 1960s and 1970s, is a response to today’s generations economic
anxiety and uncertainty. It represents a prime example for what is done
right, from oral interviews to a complex engagement with memory studies
that portray Algeria as it appears and decoded under the surface. It successfully deconstructs complex narratives about youth, masculinity, nostalgia,
and Algerianness.
Natalya Vince and Walid Benkhaled’s concluding essay in Crowley’s
book, “Performing Algerianness,” offers a lucid and seminal map of the
three competing narratives and their deployment in Algeria. They find
that the interactions between these versions, “taken together, these different groups collectively perform Algerianness,” showing the particular
iteration of culture, knowledge, and power that defines Algerianness (245).
Algerians have learned to navigate, borrow, and recognize the three categories of Algerianness for strategic purposes, citing the examples of two
opposing ideological public figures, Khalida Messaoudi Toumi and Cheikh
Chemseddine. This should extinguish the Manichean narrative of Algerian
“cultural wars” (Francophones vs. Arabophones).
This epilogue invites Algerianists to substitute the narrative of a
“beautiful mess,” to portray the Algerian “cultural present tense” starting
from the way Algerian subjects navigate the field themselves. The epilogue
invites scholars to reach out from the text, question their subject’s subjectivity,
and avoid imposing their aspirations for Algerian society and culture. Each
scholar holds a greater responsibility as they will continue to shape the image
of Algeria for generations of students in Europe and North America. As
Vince and Benkhaled concede, the narrative of “cultural wars” looks to have
a long life ahead, because of “the continuing political expediency of these
categories.” Labels such as hizb fransa [party of France] or barbus [bearded
men] continue to “provoke an instant reaction from one of the two others
and allows for easier access to the public stage,” and the printing press (262).
Conclusion: Slow Cooking and Algerian Cultural Studies
The historian Donald Holsinger once characterized the story of Algeria as
a “three-part tragedy.”12 The present challenge for Algerian cultural studies
is to move beyond the dramatic genre and toward theoretical rigor. These
three works drive the conversation forward but they represent a mixed
149
bag because of the rushed temptation to address the scholarly shortage
on Algeria. The participants in Crowley’s volume offer rich studies, often
informed by quality fieldwork and original material, but occasionally suffers
from incomplete reflection. Orlando’s volume is a testament to Algerian
Francophone literature’s rich and transnational nature, but the book’s prose
can be painful to follow, poorly structured, and contains numerous factual
errors that masks the originality of her contribution. Finally, Leperlier’s
book was a doctoral thesis that breaks new ground by combining a rigorous
sociological account to literature in French and Arabic but still would have
greatly benefited from cutting down its methodological sections and offering
more narrative substance.
This review has argued that Algeria is best understood by transversal
methodologies, multilingualism, and research strategies that include a significant component of oral history and interview in Algeria (as evidenced
by Edward McAllister, Tristian Le Perlier, Malika Rahal, or Britta Hecking).
Second, academic studies need to be more forthcoming about the value of
discourses, culture, and power in Algeria. When it comes to Francophone
novelists, the frequency of their coverage leads the uninformed observer to
assume they are the only existing (or valid) spokesperson for today’s Algeria,
rather than doing the work of framing them in the overall field. Finally,
Algerian cultural studies should work to acknowledge and decode the rules
that govern Algerian culture, rather than impose Manichaeism or images
of beautiful and messy melting pots. To adopt a cooking metaphor, it will
require slow cooking and a greater attention to our ingredients.
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ENDNOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Tarik Sabry, “In Search of the Arab Present Cultural Tense,” in Arab Media and Political
Renewal: Community, Legitimacy and Public Life, ed. Naomi Sakr (London: IB Tauris
2007), 165-6.
Ibid., 166.
Ibid., 155.
Ibid., 168.
Arslan Humbaraci, Algeria: A Revolution that Failed; a Political History since 1954 (New
York: Praeger, 1966).
Mahfoud Amara, “Football, the New Battlefield of Business in Algeria,” The Journal of North
African Studies 16, no. 3 (2011): 343-360.
Naomi Sakr, Arab Media and Political Renewal (London: IB Tauris, 2007); Lina Khatib, Image
Politics in the Middle East (London: IB Tauris, 2012); Walter Armburst, Mass Mediations:
New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East (University California Press, 2000);
Tarik Sabry, Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (London: IB Tauris, 2011).
Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, “The Rise of the Francophone Postcolonial Intellectual:
The Emergence of a Tradition,” Modern & Contemporary France 17, no. 2 (2009): 163-175.
Rachid Boudjedra, FIS de la haine (Paris: Denoël, 1994).
Joseph Ford, “Rethinking urgence: Algerian Francophone literature after the ‘décennie
noire,’” Francosphères 5, no. 1 (2016): 45-65; Soumya Ammar-Khodja, “Ecritures d’urgence
de femmes algériennes,” Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Société 9, no. 1 (1999). Accessed online:
http://journals.openedition.org/clio/289.
Pierre Daum, “Algeria, Twenty Years after the Massacres,” Le Monde Diplomatique (August
2017), accessed online: https://mondediplo.com/2017/08/11algeria.
Donald Holsinger, review of The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History, by Michael
Willis, Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 243-246.
151