Amorcées dès la conquête d’Alger en 1830, les migrations européennes s’amplifient quand Louis-Philippe décide en décembre 1840, après dix ans d’atermoiements, de conquérir l’ensemble du territoire algérien en y installant une colonie de peuplement. Or, bien que la présence de femmes européennes en Algérie soit avérée dès les premiers recensements démographiques, les nombreuses études concernant les migrations européennes sont pour l’essentiel asexuées. Cet article revisite ces flux migratoires au regard du genre. L’analyse de données quantitatives fournies par l’administration française tant (...) en métropole qu’en Algérie (relevés de dossiers de départ déposés en préfecture, recensements démographiques des Européens établis en Algérie, mortuaires des étrangers) permet de mettre en évidence des comportements migratoires plus ou moins familiaux et des sex-ratios différents selon les nationalités et les périodes. Ces constatations sont confirmées et explicitées par des sources qualitatives (récits/témoignages et historiographie migratoire). (shrink)

While there is little doubt that Algeria was of enormous importance to the theoretical output that is often recognized as French, here I would like to ask: what is at stake in re-inscribing these French intellectuals as postcolonial? In what ways did the particularities of Algerian history impact French philosophy? Indeed, if the term postcolonial is meant to describe those who were influenced by events in Algeria, then an entire generation of French thinkers might be considered postcolonial to (...) varying degrees. Surely Derrida’s oeuvre was influenced by his experiences in Algeria, but does this make him postcolonial in the same way as Jean-Paul Sartre or Pierre Bourideu, who have also become important figures in postcolonial theory? . (shrink)

Tocqueville's contradictory writings on imperialism have produced interpretations that range from unrepentant realism to lapsed universalism. This essay considers the moral psychology that underlies his position. It argues that Tocqueville's writings on colonialism exemplify his resort to apologia when his deepest apprehensions are aroused and offers a typology of Tocquevillean rhetorical evasions: the mechanisms by which he attempts to quell perceptions of moral dissonance. It also argues that Tocqueville's evasion of the challenge of Algeria illustrates a particular kind of (...) liberal failure and a peculiar liberal temptation. By avoiding rather than confronting the conflicting intuitions underlying his moral judgments, Tocqueville betrays the promise of his liberalism by failing to explore the tensions implicit in the practice of liberal democracy. These strategies to deaden awareness of complicity in colonial violence appear disturbingly familiar in a world in which national interests and universally acknowledged "human maxims" increasingly collide in the liberal conscience. (shrink)

The paper examines the shift of the veil from a religious and traditional symbol to a political metaphor during French colonized Algeria (1830–1962). It dis- cusses the significance of veiling for both the coloniz- ers and the colonists. For France, unveiled women would have been the proof of colonial power. For Algeria, veiling represented resistance to assimilation. Caught in between, the veil can be considered a metaphor for the Algerian colonization. The first part of the paper explores (...) the religious and traditional meanings associated with the veil. The second part analyses the political importance of the veil during colonization and its use as a tool for misleading the French authorities. (shrink)

This article examines the place of human and animal subjectivity in two autobiographically informed texts by Hélène Cixous. It takes her view on the word ‘human’ and the figure of Fips, the dog of the Cixous family, as a point of departure. By thinking through this figure, I argue, Cixous analyses the dehumanizing logic of colonialism and anti-Semitism in Algeria and develops her own response to such kinds of political evils, arguing for human relationality and animal corporeality. The article (...) shows that Cixous’ meeting with Fips creates a stigma that, belatedly, breaks through the barrier between herself and the dog; the reopening of the wound takes place in a poetical writing that reveals an intense ‘animal humanity’ formed by communal suffering, finiteness, and love. The lesson Cixous learns from the memory of Fips the dog is how to become ‘better human’. This becoming is also an assault on the false humanism of the colonial project and on racialized social exclusion. (shrink)

Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth-century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères, the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the (...) history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post-colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation--in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields.". (shrink)

Sartre's writing on colonialism and anti-colonial critique is diverse, protean and frequently self-contradictory, and for this reason has generated a good deal of controversy. His celebrated and notorious 'Orphée noir', written as the preface to Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, has been read as both veneration and critique of the negritude movement, and he has been named both spokesman and traitor of anti-colonial resistance in Africa. Explicating the dynamics of an assertion (...) of black identity in contradistinction to colonial influence, Sartre introduced revolutionary black poetry to the European audience it was directed against, only to be condemned by some of the other negritude thinkers, such as Alioune Diop, as eurocentric and blinded by his own position as a metropolitan, and therefore colonial, intellectual. The version of negritude promoted in 'Orphée noir' was criticised by such thinkers for being too rigid and essentialist, yet conversely, Fanon objected that Sartre's stress on the movement as transitory and provisional meant that was insufficiently immersed in 'authentic black experience'. In addition, Sartre's more journalistic writing, which called for the withdrawal of the French presence in Algeria during the war of independence, aptly served to draw attention to dissension about the Algerian question within French society, but, as Robert Young points out, the Marxist approach underpinning many of these pieces has also been seen as universalising. (shrink)

A genealogy of the relationship between Islam and knowledge focusing on the Muslim West and, in particular, Algeria explains the current chaos within Muslim societies. The West, on its side, has difficulties understanding a cultural tradition which differs from its own. Islam did develop an aptitude for knowledge that put into play ‘different intellectual modalities, among which were dialectic argument, intuition and controversy’. However, ‘the accession to knowledge is shown by assent’. A long tradition of debate and controversy drew (...) to a close and was abandoned in favour of the exercise of authoritative and absolute power. Intellectual life in the region suffered notably from the successive departures of the elite, at the end of the Ottoman Empire, at the onset of the colonial period and upon independence. Colonialism founded a new system born of different traditions and entailed the breaking up of traditional scholastic institutions. After Independence, fewer and fewer interlocutors were capable of undertaking a reasoned critique of the West. ‘Mistrust with regard to the West’ translated into a ‘refusal even of controversy’. It is a vicious circle that can be broken only through a minimum of democracy. (shrink)

This essay proposes a re-reading of the process of establishing the post-colonial nation-state in Algeria, and of the dynamics of citizenship in the light of gender, in order to illuminate the hesitations of the political class as to the meaning of the principle of universal emancipation and sexual equality in the private sphere of personal status. Whereas up to now readings studying the nature of the Algerian political regime and its ideological discourse have been solely concerned with denouncing (...) the "moribund" character of modernism and/or "Algerian-style" socialism, the argument will deal mainly with the private domestic sphere in order to expose ideological references and representations that are decidedly traditionalist, if not archaic, as regards gender relations in the Algerian family, idealized by the legislation underlying the Family Code (1984/2005). Finally a detailed review, based on an analysis by gender, of the minutes of parliamentary debates in the legislatures from 1982 to 1984 will demonstrate the highly patriarchal nature of the cultural representations of Algeria’s decision-makers, who are reluctant to extend "modernization" to the female population. (shrink)

In this vivid memoir, Denis Guénoun excavates his family's past and progressively fills out a portrait of an imposing, enigmatic father. René Guénoun was a teacher and a pioneer, and his secret support for Algerian independence was just one of the many things he did not discuss with his teenaged son. To be Algerian, pro-independence, a French citizen, a Jew, and a Communist were not, to René's mind, dissonant allegiances. He believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity (...) and could only realize a free future together. René Guénoun called himself a Semite, a word that he felt united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin. He also believed that Algerians had the same political rights as Frenchmen. Although his Jewish family was rooted in Algeria, he inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycée in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. His steadfast belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity led him into trouble, including prison and exile, yet his failures as an activist never shook his faith in a rational, generous future. René Guénoun was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East during World War II. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria, he was sent home to Oran, and in 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents did their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of work and family. The Guénouns had little interest in Israel and considered themselves at home in Algeria; yet because he supported Algerian independence, René Guénoun outraged his French neighbors and was expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armée Secrète. He spent his final years in Marseille. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, Denis Guénoun re-creates an Algerian past that proved lovely, intellectually provocative, and dangerous. (shrink)

Following the conquest of Algiers and its surrounding territory by the French army in 1830, officers noted an abundance of standing stones in this region of North Africa. Although they attracted considerably less attention among their cohort than more familiar Roman monuments such as triumphal arches and bridges, these prehistoric remains were similar to formations found in Brittany and other parts of France. The first effort to document these remains occurred in 1863, when Laurent-Charles Féraud, a French army interpreter, recorded (...) thousands of dolmens and stone formations south-west of Constantine. Alleging that these constructions were Gallic, Féraud hypothesized the close affinity of the French, who claimed descent from the ancient Gauls, with the early inhabitants of North Africa. After Féraud's claims met with scepticism among many prehistorians, French scholars argued that these remains were constructed by the ancestors of the Berbers, whom they hypothesized had been dominated by a blond race of European origin. Using craniometric statistics of human remains found in the vicinity of the standing stones to propose a genealogy of the Kabyles, French administrators in Algeria thereafter suggested that their mixed origins allowed them to adapt more easily than the Arab population to French colonial governance. This case study at the intersection of prehistoric archaeology, ancient history and craniology exposes how genealogical classification made signal contributions to French colonial ideology and policy between the 1860s and 1880s. (shrink)

In this vivid memoir, Denis Guénoun excavates his family's past and progressively fills out a portrait of an imposing, enigmatic father. René Guénoun was a teacher and a pioneer, and his secret support for Algerian independence was just one of the many things he did not discuss with his teenaged son. To be Algerian, pro-independence, a French citizen, a Jew, and a Communist were not, to René's mind, dissonant allegiances. He believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity (...) and could only realize a free future together. René Guénoun called himself a Semite, a word that he felt united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin. He also believed that Algerians had the same political rights as Frenchmen. Although his Jewish family was rooted in Algeria, he inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycée in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. His steadfast belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity led him into trouble, including prison and exile, yet his failures as an activist never shook his faith in a rational, generous future. René Guénoun was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East during World War II. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria, he was sent home to Oran, and in 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents did their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of work and family. The Guénouns had little interest in Israel and considered themselves at home in Algeria; yet because he supported Algerian independence, René Guénoun outraged his French neighbors and was expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armée Secrète. He spent his final years in Marseille. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, Denis Guénoun re-creates an Algerian past that proved lovely, intellectually provocative, and dangerous. (shrink)

During the imperial period, French colonial law developed regimes of exception for indigenous peoples in contravention of the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. These were justified by the need to secure order and by the claim that ‘natives’ were too ‘backward’ for the juridical principles upheld by the Declaration to apply to them. Introduced as temporary measures in Algeria in the 1840s, these measures, which discriminated between the French settler ‘citizens’ and (...) the native ‘subjects’, became firmly entrenched by the Third Republic, supported by the emergence of the ‘colonial sciences’ and the International Colonial Institute in the late 19th century. The exception became the rule. The colonial juridical regimes were derogatory of principle in two major ways: they subsumed universality to territoriality and defined the personhood of indigenous peoples according to racial, cultural or religious affiliations rather than as part of a shared humanity. Two particularly exorbitant measures of wide application were administrative internment without right of review and collective responsibility of a group for individual actions. Such regimes of exception persisted in French colonies until after World War II. (shrink)

During the imperial period, French colonial law developed regimes of exception for indigenous peoples in contravention of the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. These were justified by the need to secure order and by the claim that ‘natives’ were too ‘backward’ for the juridical principles upheld by the Declaration to apply to them. Introduced as temporary measures in Algeria in the 1840s, these measures, which discriminated between the French settler ‘citizens’ and (...) the native ‘subjects’, became firmly entrenched by the Third Republic, supported by the emergence of the ‘colonial sciences’ and the International Colonial Institute in the late 19th century. The exception became the rule. The colonial juridical regimes were derogatory of principle in two major ways: they subsumed universality to territoriality and defined the personhood of indigenous peoples according to racial, cultural or religious affiliations rather than as part of a shared humanity. Two particularly exorbitant measures of wide application were administrative internment without right of review and collective responsibility of a group for individual actions. Such regimes of exception persisted in French colonies until after World War II. (shrink)

Over fifty years after Algerian independence from France, Franco-Algerian relationships and the complexities of the colonial legacy remain a key concern for many citizens in both countries. In Contesting Views, Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle explore the significant role visual culture has had in mitigating this fraught relationship. They trace the circulation of and connections between a diverse range of still and moving images from both sides of the Mediterranean, offering a new understanding of the postcolonial experience in Europe (...) and North Africa and wider contemporary geopolitics as they play out in visual culture. (shrink)

À la fin du xixe siècle, avec l’achèvement des jalons d’un enseignement supérieur colonial en Algérie – création des écoles d’enseignement supérieur en Algérie en 1880 et fondation d’une université coloniale en terre algérienne, dotée d’un système facultaire en 1909 –, le paysage universitaire colonial prend son essor et se développe considérablement. La circulation d’universitaires métropolitains qui traversent la Méditerranée pour venir s’installer souvent durablement en Algérie, est le fait de botanistes, géologues, médecins et de mathématiciens. Cette contribution (...) se focalise sur l’analyse des circulations et des échanges dans le domaine des mathématiques entre la métropole et le territoire algérien. Elle propose d’examiner les évolutions de ces circulations à travers les trajectoires et les parcours d’universitaires qui ont soit effectué un séjour court en Algérie (le passage par l’École des sciences d’Alger pouvant servir de tremplin pour une carrière universitaire en métropole) ou qui ont effectué toute leur carrière universitaire et scientifique en Algérie. Cette focale, qui prend en compte la période 1868 à 1941, s’interroge en arrière-plan sur la contribution (ou non) du système colonial à la formation de jeunes mathématiciens algériens musulmans. (shrink)

This essay deals with Nina Bouraoui’s mixed-race identity as presented in her autobiographical novels Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées. The métis question takes the shape of a representation of an ethnicized, dual and fractured identity. My argument explores a contradiction at work in Bouraoui’s texts: while reclaiming the existence of a Franco-Algerian métis identity, Bouraoui represents the métis as the incarnated perpetuation of the historical tensions that divided France and Algeria. The narratives simultaneously construct and deconstruct Bouraoui’s Franco-Algerian (...) métis identity. I examine how Bouraoui represents her Algerian legacy and appropriates a familial history to construct herself as Algerian. I analyze how traumatic memories of asphyxiation are a metaphor for Bouraoui’s difficult relationship with her French self, symbolized by the motif of white skin. And I consider how the ends of the two novels provide a problematic acceptance and fulfillment of Bouraoui’s métis identity. (shrink)

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the main (...) focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

This paper argues that the newspaper Notre Journal enshrined the importance of narrative in the revolutionary psychiatry of its founder and editor, Frantz Fanon. Anchoring my analysis in the interdisciplinarity of the medical humanities, I demonstrate how care at Hôpital Blida-Joinville in colonial Algeria was mediated by the written word. I examine Fanon’s physician writing and editorial texts detailing the use of narrative approaches in the clinic. As an object of care, Notre Journal’s promotion of psychic healing, social (...) actions, and engaged professional practice shaped the interactions and experiences of patients and staff. Printed and distributed to the wider institution, the newspaper created community—during an oppressive French Occupation and at the outset of the War of Independence—in addition to nurturing creativity, curiosity, solidarity, and accountability. Still, Fanon would come to recognize the limits of narrative methods amidst cultural oral traditions, illiteracy, and divergent attitudes about narrating the self. (shrink)

This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. I examine the public debate leading to the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious signs in schools and French colonial attitudes to veiling in Algeria, in conjunction with discourses on the veil that have arisen in other western contexts. My argument is that western perceptions and representations of veiled Muslim women are not simply about Muslim women themselves. Rather than representing Muslim (...) women, these images fulfill a different function: they provide the negative mirror in which western constructions of identity and gender can be positively reflected. It is by means of the projection of gender oppression onto Islam, and its naturalization to the bodies of veiled women, that such mirroring takes place. This constitutes, I argue, a form of racialization. Drawing on the work of Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and Alcoff, I offer a phenomenological analysis of this racializing vision. What is at stake is a form of cultural racism that functions in the guise of anti-sexist and feminist liberatory discourse, at once posing a dilemma to feminists and concealing its racializing logic. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Le;vi-Strauss—a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Sketch for a Self-Analysis is the ultimate outcome of Bourdieu’s lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not an (...) autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu’s theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time—including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir—as well as Bourdieu’s own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria. (shrink)

Decolonial, postcolonial, and postmodern criticism is indebted to Frantz Fanon for revealing the hegemony of vision and visual language in Western imperial discourse. Yet, the import of Fanon's critique of coloniality reaches beyond a focus on vision into the sonorous. Attending to the often overlooked auditory dimension of Fanon's work, I argue, brings attention to the role of listening as a condition of possibility of a revolutionary consciousness. Listening to Fanon's careful descriptions of the experience of many Algerians of listening (...) to the National Liberation Front's radio broadcast, The Voice of Free and Fighting Algeria in “This is the Voice of Algeria,” I propose that what makes possible the institution of a revolutionary consciousness is listening to murmurs. Listening to the materiality of voice and sound rather than the propositional content of speech is revolutionary because it challenges core values central to the project of colonial modernity: metaphysical logocentrism and the fungibility to which colonial modernity strives to reduce colonized subjects. (shrink)

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation (...) and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt. Reviews of this book: "The goal of this often brilliant and always engaging book is to 'read Fanon's texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative'; the principal subject of this dramatic narrative, according to Sekyi-Otu, is 'political experience'. It is his deployment of a dialectical analysis of Fanon's 'dramatic personae' that permits Sekyi-Otu's fresh and insightful readings to take place." DD--Anthony C. Alessandrini, Minnesota Review "Ato Sekyi-Otu departs from the postmodernist paradigm and ushers in an alternative hermeneutic that primarily considers Fanon's texts as forming 'one dramatic dialectical narrative,' that is a narrative whose complexity is correlative of the intricate configurations of African social experience during the post-independent era...[His] book is an invaluable contribution that offers broader scope for a new appreciation of Fanon's political thinking." DD--Marc Mve Bekale, Revue AFRAM Review [UK] "[I]mportant...The author succeeds in...revealing the complexity and nuanced character of Fanon's thought." DD--Choice "Those who would dismiss or exult Fanon as the high priest of revolutionary violence will be chastened by this patient and completely convincing exposition of his work. Sekyi-Otu produces a reflexive, 'Gramscian' Fanon who, working as a 'detective of the politics of truth,' has produced insights that need to be taken over into the core of democratic political thought." DD--Paul Gilroy, University of London. (shrink)

By what incredible foresight did the most significant intellectual quarrel of the twentieth century anticipate the major issue of the twenty-first? When Camus and Sartre parted ways in 1952, the main question dividing them was political violence—specifically, that of communism. And as they continued to jibe at each other during the next decade, especially during the war in Algeria, one of the major issues between them became terrorism. The 1957 and 1964 Nobel Laureates were divided sharply over which violence (...) most urgently demanded to be addressed and attacked—the humiliations and oppressions, often masked, that Sartre described as systematically built into daily life under capitalism and colonialism, or the brutal and abstract calculus of murder seen by Camus as built into some of the movements that claimed to liberate people from capitalist and colonial oppression.The Sartre-Camus conflict remains, fifty years later, philosophically unresolved. And I would argue—against today's conventional wisdom so persistently asserted by Tony Judt—it is also historically unresolved, despite today. (shrink)

In these original readings of Albert Camus' novels, short stories, and political essays, David Carroll concentrates on Camus' conflicted relationship with his Algerian background and finds important critical insights into questions of justice, the effects of colonial oppression, and the deadly cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism that characterized the Algerian War and continues to surface in the devastation of postcolonial wars today. During France's "dirty war" in Algeria, Camus called for an end to the violence perpetrated against civilians (...) by both France and the Algerian National Liberation Front and supported the creation of a postcolonial, multicultural, and democratic Algeria. His position was rejected by most of his contemporaries on the Left and has, ironically, earned him the title of colonialist sympathizer as well as the scorn of important postcolonial critics. Carroll rescues Camus' work from such criticism by emphasizing the Algerian dimensions of his literary and philosophical texts and by highlighting in his novels and short stories his understanding of both the injustice of colonialism and the tragic nature of Algeria's struggle for independence. By refusing to accept that the sacrifice of innocent human lives can ever be justified, even in the pursuit of noble political goals, and by rejecting simple, ideological binaries, Camus' work offers an alternative to the stark choices that characterized his troubled times and continue to define our own. "What they didn't like, was the Algerian, in him," Camus wrote of his fictional double in _The First Man_. Not only should "the Algerian" in Camus be "liked," Carroll argues, but the Algerian dimensions of his literary and political texts constitute a crucial part of their continuing interest. Carroll's reading also shows why Camus' critical perspective has much to contribute to contemporary debates stemming from the global "war on terror.". (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most influential social thinkers of the past half-century, known for both his theoretical and methodological contributions and his wide-ranging empirical investigations into colonial power in Algeria, the educational system in France, the forms of state power, and the history of artistic and scientific fields-among many other topics. Despite the depth and breadth of his influence, however, Bourdieu's legacy has yet to be assessed in a comprehensive manner. The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (...) fills this gap by offering a sweeping overview of Bourdieu's impact on the social sciences and humanities. Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz have gathered a diverse array of leading scholars who place Bourdieu's work in the wider scope of intellectual history, trace the development of his thought, offer original interpretations and critical engagement, and discuss the likely impact of his ideas on future social research. The Handbook highlights Bourdieu's contributions to established areas of research-including the study of markets, the law, cultural production, and politics-and illustrates how his concepts have generated new fields and objects of study. (shrink)

The question whether, in the interim, the "socialist morality" allows adequate restraint on revolutionary action, cannot fairly be answered in abstraction from history, in this case our epoch. We submit that the group of projects called corporate "globalization" - imposing free trade, privatization, and dominance of transnational corporations - shapes that epoch. These projects are associated with polarization of wealth, deepening poverty, and an alarming new global U.S. military domination. Using 9/11 as pretext for a "war on terror," this domination (...) backs corporate globalization. If Nazi occupation of France and French occupation of Algeria made Sartre and Beauvoir assign moral primacy to overcoming oppressive systems, then U.S. global occupation should occasion rebirth of that commitment. Parallels among the three occupations are striking. France's turning of colonial and metropolitan working classes against each other is echoed by globalization's pitting of (e.g.) Chinese against Mexican workers in a race to lower wages to get investment. Seducing first-world workers with racial superiority and cheap imports from near-slavery producers once again conceals their thralldom to their own bosses. Nazi and French use of overwhelming force and even torture are re-cycled by the U.S. and its agents, again to hide the vulnerability of their small forces amidst their enemies. (shrink)

The fiftieth anniversary of Camus’ death in 2010 was largely ignored in his native Algeria, reflecting the critical response to Camus’ writings that regards him as a colonialist writer and apologist for the French domination of his native Algeria. This critique also claims that Camus’ colonial attitudes are hidden and reinforced by a European attitude that sees him as dealing first and foremost with universal questions about the human predicament and existential isolation. However, Camus’ journalism shows an (...) Algerian closely identified with the destiny of all the peoples of Algeria, and his novel The Outsider contains sufficient indications that, whatever its existential importance, in the concrete situation of Camus’ Algeria the Arab has the precise status of outsider. (shrink)

In these original readings of Albert Camus' novels, short stories, and political essays, David Carroll concentrates on Camus' conflicted relationship with his Algerian background and finds important critical insights into questions of justice, the effects of colonial oppression, and the deadly cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism that characterized the Algerian War and continues to surface in the devastation of postcolonial wars today. During France's "dirty war" in Algeria, Camus called for an end to the violence perpetrated against civilians (...) by both France and the Algerian National Liberation Front and supported the creation of a postcolonial, multicultural, and democratic Algeria. His position was rejected by most of his contemporaries on the Left and has, ironically, earned him the title of colonialist sympathizer as well as the scorn of important postcolonial critics. Carroll rescues Camus' work from such criticism by emphasizing the Algerian dimensions of his literary and philosophical texts and by highlighting in his novels and short stories his understanding of both the injustice of colonialism and the tragic nature of Algeria's struggle for independence. By refusing to accept that the sacrifice of innocent human lives can ever be justified, even in the pursuit of noble political goals, and by rejecting simple, ideological binaries, Camus' work offers an alternative to the stark choices that characterized his troubled times and continue to define our own. "What they didn't like, was the Algerian, in him," Camus wrote of his fictional double in _The First Man_. Not only should "the Algerian" in Camus be "liked," Carroll argues, but the Algerian dimensions of his literary and political texts constitute a crucial part of their continuing interest. Carroll's reading also shows why Camus' critical perspective has much to contribute to contemporary debates stemming from the global "war on terror.". (shrink)

Derrida’s autobiographical and philosophical text Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin is a partial recounting of his own childhood and upbringing in Algeria at a time when it was a colony of France. It is on one level a reflection on matters related to colonialism, and especially on the effects of the imposition of colonial language upon schooling and wider practices of education and coming into the world. Yet Derrida’s text also opens onto structural questions (...) about estrangement, unsettledness and Unheimlichkeit such as they pertain to and characterise life in language more generally. This paper puts Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other into relation with contemporary discussions of multilingualism and language learning in the context of the global education agenda. The result, as we shall see, is the destabilising of assumptions that underpin multilingualism and the global education agenda and foreclose their democratic and ethical aims. At the same time, as we shall also see, Derrida’s text opens ways in which the education of language subjects can be reconstructed in relation to a new conception of ethics and the humanities. (shrink)

During the Algerian struggle, Fanon warned us about the influence on politics of ‘the few European colonialists, powerful, intractable, those who have at all times instigated repressions, broken the French democrats, blocked every endeavor within the colonial framework to introduce a modicum of democracy into Algeria’. Is this remark still pertinent? How does Frantz Fanon help us understand current reactionary politics in France? Is his analysis of the French Left still pertinent? How does colonial discourse weigh on (...) the postcolonial present? In this article, I explore current expressions of French postcolonial reactionary politics focusing on an event in Reunion Island, a French postcolonial territory. I argue that it is important to observe what is happening in French postcolonial territories because they remain laboratories for repressive policies and discourses. What I call the discourse of ‘French Algeria’, a mix of revisionist history, resentment, wounded narcissism and racism, embodies a political trend that seeks to counter the small progress made in rewriting history from the point of view of the colony in France. (shrink)

By what incredible foresight did the most significant intellectual quarrel of the twentieth century anticipate the major issue of the twenty-first? When Camus and Sartre parted ways in 1952, the main question dividing them was political violence—specifically, that of communism. And as they continued to jibe at each other during the next decade, especially during the war in Algeria, one of the major issues between them became terrorism. The 1957 and 1964 Nobel Laureates were divided sharply over which violence (...) most urgently demanded to be addressed and attacked—the humiliations and oppressions, often masked, that Sartre described as systematically built into daily life under capitalism and colonialism, or the brutal and abstract calculus of murder seen by Camus as built into some of the movements that claimed to liberate people from capitalist and colonial oppression.The Sartre-Camus conflict remains, fifty years later, philosophically unresolved. And I would argue—against today's conventional wisdom so persistently asserted by Tony Judt—it is also historically unresolved, despite today. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer a systematic comparison of the philosophies of Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon. It shows how the ethical, political, and psychological outlooks of these two influential thinkers can further our understandings of how to bring about justice in the face of deep power imbalances. The author foregrounds the bloody Algerian War of Independence in his analysis of the philosophies of Camus and Fanon. Although neither supported French colonial occupation of Algeria, they held (...) radically different views of the conflict. Fanon supported emancipation through violence, which the author argues has been uncritically romanticized. Camus, on the other hand, supported an ethics of moderation that shunned indiscriminate violence. The author argues that Camus has been unfairly accused of being an apologist for colonialism. Finally, the author draws out the common endorsement of humanist values that drive both Camus' and Fanon's thought. Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, postcolonialism, existentialism, and African philosophy. (shrink)

This collection of essays marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Frantz Fanon’s classic study of anticolonial struggle, _The Wretched of the Earth_. Scholars explore the relevance of Fanon’s work for current modes of psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and political thought. One contributor reposes a classic question of postcolonial scholarship: what does it mean for a colonial Caribbean man to practice a Continental intellectual tradition? Others identify Fanon’s experiences working at a mental institution in colonial French Algeria (...) as a powerful influence on his psychoanalytic perspective. This issue revitalizes Fanon’s canonical status as Third World theorist by asserting that the main imperatives of Fanon’s work remain as urgent as ever: combating the psychic and physical violence of colonialism, achieving real forms of liberation for colonized peoples, and ending the degradation of people of color. Contributors: Matthew Abraham, Gerard Aching, John E. Drabinski, Grant Farred, Nigel C. Gibson, Priyamvada Gopal, Joy James, Ranjana Khanna, Alfred J. López, Miguel Mellino, Simon Morgan Wortham, Richard Pithouse Grant Farred is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He is the former editor of the _South Atlantic Quarterly_ and the author, most recently, of_ Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football_. (shrink)

Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on the very basis of dissensus. In a rare comparison of these authors' writings, _Algerian Imprints_ shows how Cixous and Djebar consistently reclaim for ethical and political purposes the demarcations and dislocations emphasized in their fictions. Their works affirm the chance for thinking afforded by marginalization and exclusion and (...) delineate political ways of preserving a space for difference informed by expropriation and nonbelonging. Cixous's inquiry is steeped in her formative encounter with the grudging integration of the Jews in French Algeria, while Djebar's narratives concern the colonial separation of "French" and "Arab," self and other. Yet both authors elaborate strategies to address inequality and injustice without resorting to tropes of victimization, challenging and transforming the understanding of the history and legacy of colonized space. (shrink)

In the present essay, I argue that portions of Frantz Fanon’s L’an V de la révolution algérienne significantly contribute to, develop, and advance the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. First, I describe and chart Fanon’s theorization of the transformations of the veil, the radio, and medicine in revolutionary Algeria, and map the homologous moments of each of these studies. Next, I give a brief synopsis of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism and argue that this theory leaves open questions about (...) the way in which use-value plays a role in commodity fetishization in colonial contexts, and, by extension, in actual anticolonial political revolutions. The foregoing then paves the way for a re-evaluation of the central insights of Fanon’s studies of the veil, the radio, and medicine. (shrink)

Comment la Francophonie est-elle perçue dans l'Algérie d'aujourd'hui ? Certes, comme ailleurs, Francophonie n'y est pas francophilie, car l'Algérie a développé depuis longtemps, et encore plus depuis 1830, des racines du côté d'une identité arabo-islamique. Toutefois le français, langue d'oppression coloniale, y est aussi langue d'ouverture à la modernité, de libération des tabous traditionnels. Le pouvoir politique a utilisé cette quête légitime d'une identité autre que française pour tenter d'imposer un monolinguisme arabe. La tendance actuelle de retour au français, dans (...) l'écrit et dans l'oral, se fait dans une perspective multilingue, qui rend sa place au français, mais aussi aux langues maternelles berbère et arabe parlé. Toutefois la francophonie sera d'autant mieux acceptée qu'elle saura laisser sa place à la langue arabe internationaleHow is Francophony perceived in the Algeria of today? Admittedly, like in other parts of the world, Francophony is not a kind of “francophilia” because Algeria has long developed the roots of its Arabo-Islamic identity and to an even greater extent since 1830. However for Algerians, while French is the language of colonial oppression, it is also the language of modernity and of a liberation from traditional taboos. The political authorities have used this legitimate search for a non-French identity to try to impose an Arabic monolingualism. The current tendency to return to French, both written and spoken, is carried out from a multilingual standpoint which gives French is its place back alongside the country’s native languages, Berber and spoken Arabic. However Francophony will be accepted more favourably if it is able to leave its place to the international Arabic language. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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In the nineteenth century, the French utopian socialists, Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, developed different concepts of the colonisation of Africa. These concepts collided in Algeria. The Saint-Simonians were impressed by the Arab system of the tribal ownership of land. They wanted to preserve it and ultimately bring the two peoples, the Arabs and the French, together in the spirit of a commune. On the other hand, the Fourierists wanted to expropriate Arabs from their land and hand it over to the (...) French colonists so that they could build new economic communities of a phalanstery type. This article presents the theoretical disputes between the two schools and also describes the actual practical consequences of these disputes for the French colonial politics. (shrink)

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically (...) by internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home. (shrink)

In his recent book The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben examines the relation between the essence of the human and the living in Martin Heidegger’s thought. Focusing on the treatment of this relation in Heidegger’s 1929/30 lecture course “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” Agamben argues that the dimension of the open, which is central to Heidegger’s understanding of the human essence, can be seen as implicitly dependent upon Heidegger’s account of the essence of animality. In this essay, I argue (...) that Agamben’s reading is insufficient because it has not taken full account of the specifically temporal character of the openness proper to Heidegger’s understanding of the human essence. In conclusion, I present an alternative account of the way in which Heidegger framed his descriptions of animality in the 1929/30 lecture course as articulating the openness characteristic of human being. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler's account of technology as constitutive of the human as such is without precedent. However, Stiegler's work must also be understood in terms of its explicit appropriations from the thought of Jacques Derrida. An important, yet overlooked, context for framing Stiegler's relation to Derrida is the question of nonhuman life thought in terms of différance . As I argue, Stiegler's account does not unfold the most profound implications of Derrida's understanding of nonhuman life as différance . While Stiegler describes (...) human life as prosthetic and in default of origin, there is no treatment of the way in which nonhuman life is also aporetic and constituted in terms of its relatedness to exteriority. I conclude with a reconsideration of Stiegler's work from the perspective of Derrida's richer account of nonhuman life as différance in order to bring to light an anthropocentric aspect of Stiegler's work. (shrink)

It is well known that Heidegger described his Nietzsche lecture courses as confrontations with National Socialism. Traditionally, this sense of resistance was seen firstly in the fact that Heidegger read Nietzsche at the level of metaphysics and explicitly rejected those ideological appropriations which attempted to reduce Nietzsche’s philosophy to the level of biologism or mere Weltanschauung. This essay argues that the way in which Heidegger framed his interpretation of will to power in his first and second Nietzsche lecture courses can (...) be seen to contain a more explicit critique of the contemporaneous “official” Nietzschebild than has customarily been said. (shrink)

Charles Bambach’s recent book Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks traces the themes of rootedness and the earthly in Heidegger’s thought. Focusing on the role of these themes in the major works of the 1930’s, Bambach offers an account of Heidegger’s relation to contemporaneous conservative and National Socialist ideologies. In this review article, I question the fundamental presupposition guiding Bambach’s approach and present specific reservations regarding his use of untranslated material from Heidegger’s Nietzsche lecture courses.

In this essay, I argue that the scope of Heidegger’s dialog with Hölderlin in Contributions to Philosophy is wider than has often been acknowledged. Traditionally, accounts of this relation have focused solely on tracing Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin’s “flight and arrival of the gods.” In addition to this theme, the relation between Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the project of Contributions should also be framed in light of the specific understanding of attunement which Heidegger developed in his 1934-35 Hölderlin lecture courses. From (...) the perspective opened by this reading, I bring into question and offer an alternative to a widely accepted interpretation of Contributions’ structural composition. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s 1953 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” has been one of the most influential texts in English language philosophy of technology. However, within this field Heidegger’s understanding of technology is widely seen to be a conventional essentialist account of technological phenomena. In this essay, I argue that a close reading of what Heidegger exactly demarcated as the essence of technology can be seen to limit the degree to which Heidegger’s understanding of technology should be interpreted as a traditional form (...) of technological essentialism. (shrink)