Multiple Algerias
Where, then, is this Algiers? In Africa, Europe or the Maghreb? Is it the colonial Alger, the Arabic al-Djazaïr, a hybrid of both, or something altogether new? And we shall ask: where is where? Whose Algiers are we describing? How is
Less clear has been the question of what would come after such a claim had been won. In Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, the resistance leader Ben H'midi says to Ali La Pointe that the hardest moment for a revolution comes after its victory. If colonization means, as Albert Memmi put it, that the colonized is "outside history, outside the city," what does it look like when that viewpoint is restored? How can a right to look, framed in the language of Western colonial jurisprudence, be sustained as the place of the decolonized inside history and inside the city, whether that city is Algiers, Paris, New York or the civis of civilization itself?
As the case of Algeria itself suggests, such questions have yet to generate sustainable answers, here or there. For the Algerian insistence on a nationalist solution that would, in Fanon's famous phrase, create a "new man" set aside questions of Islam as belonging to the past. If that "new man" was the image of decolonization, the investment in a new imagined community, the independent post-colonial republic, was such that it was felt to be capable of solving the questions of a postcolonial imaginary.
The anti-fascist investment in the "spontaneity" of the people was a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, it was capable of evading and overcoming even the most dedicated repression, as the French discovered to their cost. At the same time, spontaneity was not invested in building institutions, allowing the FLN's Army of the Frontiers to preside over what the writer Ferhat Abbas has famously called "confiscated independence" almost as soon as the French had departed in 1962. Still worse, as the world knows, the Islamic Salvation Front won the elections of 1991 that were invalidated by the ruling FLN and the Army, unleashing a civil war that cost an estimated 160,000 lives, including some 7,000 "disappeared" by the government. The practice of "disappearing" anti-government activists, meaning having them killed and disposed of in secret, was begun by the French during the revolution and later exported by them to Latin America, most notably to Argentina and Chile.
Yet the "people" did not forget, and in 2011 they once again took to the streets when least expected to remarkable effect.
Algiers
separated in time and space, now and then, and why does this battle continue? It is precisely such questions that the cultural work on Algiers has raised from France to Finland, Italy, the United States and, of course, Algeria itself. At stake is the possibility of a movement towards the right to look, the counter to visuality, against the police and their assertion that there is nothing to see here. Less clear has been the question of what would come after such a claim had been won. In Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, the resistance leader Ben H'midi says to Ali La Pointe that the hardest moment for a revolution comes after its victory. If colonization means, as Albert Memmi put it, that the colonized is "outside history, outside the city," what does it look like when that viewpoint is restored? How can a right to look, framed in the language of Western colonial jurisprudence, be sustained as the place of the decolonized inside history and inside the city, whether that city is Algiers, Paris, New York or the civis of civilization itself?
As the case of Algeria itself suggests, such questions have yet to generate sustainable answers, here or there. For the Algerian insistence on a nationalist solution that would, in Fanon's famous phrase, create a "new man" set aside questions of Islam as belonging to the past. If that "new man" was the image of decolonization, the investment in a new imagined community, the independent post-colonial republic, was such that it was felt to be capable of solving the questions of a postcolonial imaginary.
The anti-fascist investment in the "spontaneity" of the people was a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, it was capable of evading and overcoming even the most dedicated repression, as the French discovered to their cost. At the same time, spontaneity was not invested in building institutions, allowing the FLN's Army of the Frontiers to preside over what the writer Ferhat Abbas has famously called "confiscated independence" almost as soon as the French had departed in 1962. Still worse, as the world knows, the Islamic Salvation Front won the elections of 1991 that were invalidated by the ruling FLN and the Army, unleashing a civil war that cost an estimated 160,000 lives, including some 7,000 "disappeared" by the government. The practice of "disappearing" anti-government activists, meaning having them killed and disposed of in secret, was begun by the French during the revolution and later exported by them to Latin America, most notably to Argentina and Chile.
Yet the "people" did not forget, and in 2011 they once again took to the streets when least expected to remarkable effect.
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