Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations: The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb 9780415781725

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Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations The politics of transgression in the Maghreb

Alina Sajed

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Alina Sajed The right of Alina Sajed to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sajed, Alina. Postcolonial encounters in international relations: the politics of transgression in the Maghreb / Alina Sajed. pages cm. – (Interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Africa, North–Relations–France. 2. France–Relations–Africa, North. 3. Postcolonialism–Africa, North. I. Title. DT197.5.F8S34 2013 327.61044–dc23 2012047355 ISBN: 978-0-415-78172-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-49704-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis

Contents

Acknowledgements 1

xii

IR and the world: the politics of encounters

1

The politics of encounters and translocal webs of relations 4 Literary narratives in the Franco-Maghrebian encounter 8 Meeting the Franco-Maghrebian intellectual 12 Memory and authenticity 15 2

The post always rings twice? The Algerian War, post-structuralism and the postcolonial in IR theory

20

Rethinking theory, nativizing discipline(s): disturbing the margins in Robert Young’s White Mythologies and Postcolonialism – An Historical Introduction 23 Colonial desire and the politics of Algerian intractability: Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard 25 The (im)possibilities of theoretical miscegenation: what is at stake in associating post-structuralism and postcoloniality in International Relations? 29 3

Exilé and immigré: the politics of exile and diaspora in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland The politics of language in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland Flirting with hybridity and transnational citizenship 48 The diasporic intellectual and her others 52

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41 44

Where have all the natives gone? Spectral presences and authenticity in photographic and literary narratives Where have all the natives gone? The (in)authentic native woman in the colonial harem 64 The ‘native’ as spectral presence in photography and literary narratives 69

62

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Contents

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The Franco-Maghrebian borderland as cinematic space: memory, trauma and authenticity

86

Tropes of memory 89 Locating the new Europe and the Franco-Maghrebian borderland: the colonial past in the postcolonial present 106 The politics of authenticity 111 6

Fanon, Camus and colonial difference: possibilities and limits for decolonial thought and action

121

Politics in exile: between strangeness and alienation 125 Irreconcilable visions of (post)colonial futures: Camus, Fanon and the Algerian War 134 Colonial difference and the decolonial promise: possibilities and limits 143 7

Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world: postcolonial hybridity and beyond

155

Migration in International Relations: moving beyond or around the state? 158 Postcolonial strangers: Maghrébins, immigrés and beurs – who is the real indigène? 162 8

Diasporic identifications, translocal webs and International Relations

175

IR and the problem of colonial difference 177 The Maghreb: ‘the difference that cannot be told’? 186 On the lures of diaspora and transnationalism 196 Transgressing International Relations: concluding remarks Bibliography Index

204 207 225

Acknowledgements

This project has been an unintended exercise in translocality: it began in Canada, with intermezzos in France and Tunisia, and it was finished in Hong Kong. It started out as a doctoral dissertation, changing substantially over the last five years. While at McMaster as a doctoral student, I benefitted from the mentorship and thoughtful guidance of Will Coleman. I owe him a big debt of gratitude for his unwavering support and his attentive and meticulous feedback on my work. Over the years, Will has become a dear friend; this friendship enriched me both as a person and as an academic. I must also thank my friends at McMaster for hours-long chats over coffee and wonderful meals without which my time in Hamilton would be so much poorer: Carolina Moulin Aguiar, Marcela Vecchione, Fauzia Viqar, Nadia Rauf, Richard McLymont, Chelsea Gabel, Wanda Vrasti, Jessica Franklin, and Nathan Souza. I am lucky to have the most loving and supportive sister: Claudia has provided a haven away from work during the summers in Italy. So has my nephew Simone, who is much loved and a source of joy. I have been blessed with parents whose resolute belief in my abilities and in me has been my foundation from which I have drawn strength throughout my life. I think, too, of my second family in Singapore, who has made my visits there wonderfully leisurely. This project gained a lot from the generous feedback of several people who have read and commented on various chapters or various drafts. I am deeply grateful to Naeem Inayatullah for his honest and insightful comments, for his generous faith in me throughout the years, and most of all, for his friendship. I must also thank Peter Nyers for his constant encouragement, generosity and friendship. Many thanks are owed to Robbie Shilliam, Sankaran Krishna, Nevzat Soguk, Roland Bleiker, Eric Selbin, Meghana Nayak, Aida Hozic, Kole Kilibarda, Anne McNevin, Marshall Beier, Anna Agathangelou, and Susie O’Brien for being part of this project in different ways. I am also very thankful to the three anonymous reviewers whose detailed and insightful comments and suggestions have strengthened this book. Needless to say, any errors or shortcomings are my own. I would like to thank Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams, the editors of the series, for their help in bringing this book about. At Routledge, I must thank Nicola Parkin and especially Peter Harris, whose prompt and patient assistance have been much appreciated.

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While working at the University of Hong Kong, I have received generous financial support that allowed me to revise the manuscript substantively and add two new chapters. I am greatly indebted to Leslie Wee, who accompanied me enthusiastically and selflessly on the crazy adventure of moving to Hong Kong. His faith in me, his love and encouragement have sustained me on the path of my academic career. Our daughter, Sophia Anya, was born in Hong Kong as I was adding the final touches to the manuscript. Her smile and laughter teaches me everyday about the rich potential and hope the future holds. This book is dedicated to her, and to my parents in Romania, who keep me rooted. Parts of this book have been published elsewhere in different versions. Chapter 2 appeared, in modified form, as ‘The Post Always Rings Twice? The Algerian War, Poststructuralism and the Postcolonial in IR Theory’, in the Review of International Studies, 38:1 (January 2012), 141-163. Parts of chapters 3 and 7 were published in ‘Postcolonial Strangers in a Cosmopolitan World: Hybridity and Citizenship in the Franco-Maghrebian Borderland’, Citizenship Studies, 14:4 (August 2010), 363-380. Parts of chapters 6 and 7 appeared in ‘Fanon, Camus and the Global Colour Line: Colonial Difference and Decolonial Horizons’, published by Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:1 (March 2013), 5–26.

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IR and the world The politics of encounters

… liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. Edward Said (1994b: 332)

My first encounter with International Relations (IR) theory happened in 2002 as I was completing a Master’s degree in European Studies in my native country Romania. I do not recall the name of the book I randomly skimmed through to get a glimpse of what IR theory is about, but I do recall that it only presented two views: realism and liberalism. The realist perspective gave me the chills, while the liberal perspective left me unsatisfied and wondering whether this was all there was to IR. I knew what I imagined IR should be about but I simply could not find it in any of the readings I was doing or in any of the class discussions. I had a BA degree in English and French literature so I felt I was a novice in political science. As an undergraduate student I had been mesmerized by the intricate webs literary narratives spun where politics, art, history, philosophy and culture seemed to be blended so effortlessly into the texture of life as to make their separation futile and violent. It was this rich intricacy and the multiple connections it engendered that sent me reeling and thirsting for more. However, the IR readings and discussions I encountered as a graduate student (first in Romania, then as a bona fide IR student in Canada), were cold and clinical, unimaginative and tedious. I remember going through the IR theories course and thinking that I must be enrolled in the wrong program, as I could not imagine a greater gap between the world I experienced and IR theory. My first glimmer of hope was lit in the last week of the course when we discussed postcolonial theory. I remember reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, Philip Darby’s The Fiction of Imperialism, and Sankaran Krishna’s ‘The Importance of Being Ironic’ and suddenly it all made sense. Perhaps it was not I who was misplaced in the world of IR. Rather it was IR who had displaced itself from the world.

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I wrote this book to understand what it might mean to bring the world back into IR. IR’s world is suffocatingly narrow and self-referential: a glance at most IR narratives reveals not people, but states, as privileged subjects of politics and of the international. In fact, people are conspicuously absent from the world of IR, and the world as I imagined it is one of overlapping voices, memories and histories, of encounters, violence, but also promises. The contours of these overlaps and the memory of these encounters do not obey the statist logic of rigid borders but evoke different geographies of meaning and interaction. I thus chose a locale that encapsulates the richness of encounters, the painful weight of violence, and the intricate webs of memory: the Maghreb, ‘the land where the sun sets.’ But the Maghreb I engage here is a living ‘web of translocal relations,’ and not simply the sum of several nation-states.1 To make sense of (post)colonial Maghreb I examine the violence of the encounter between France (or rather the French colonial project) and the various Maghrebian locales and voices. The goal of this book is threefold: to provide an alternative framework for looking at (international) relations as encounters, one which questions the state-centeredness of the ‘international,’ focusing instead on the translocal webs created and on the various subjectivities produced.2 In adopting this specific focus, this book seeks to go beyond not only the limiting framework of the ‘international,’ which has been for so long the stubborn preoccupation of IR, but also beyond recent conceptualizations of the ‘transnational’ as a necessary alternative and foil to the former (see, for example, Mandaville 2003; and Varadarajan 2010).3 As I contend later, ‘translocal’ does not take the nation-state as its primary reference; rather, it refers to the enmeshment of the local into larger structures and webs of interactions that precede the emergence of the nation-state (Dirlik 2007: 166). In employing the idea of translocality, this book does not seek to render the state irrelevant or ignore it as a level of analysis, but rather to indicate the workings of different and varied spatial and political formations that should also be legitimate foci of IR. Another goal pursued by this project is to re-centre the importance of colonialism and imperialism in the creation and endurance of ‘inter-national’ relations both as a discipline and as a set of practices. As explored at length by Chapters 2 and 8, IR as a discipline is itself a product of colonial relations (see Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). To take colonialism as crucial to an understanding of the discipline is to seek to make visible the workings of colonial difference in contemporary world politics and the global racial hierarchies it has engendered. In this sense, this book highlights the failure of critical approaches within IR to engage meaningfully the (post)colonial substance of ‘global relations.’4 A third objective of this book is thus to interrogate the limits of current critical endeavours in IR and to suggest an approach that hopes to make visible other lifeworlds outside the West. These limits become apparent when examining the emergence of the post-structuralist project from the violence of the French colonial project in Algeria and its intersections with the Algerian War (undertaken at length in Chapter 2). Given the centrality of French intellectual traditions to the emergence of critical IR theory, this work’s

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focus on French colonial history and the translocal character of the Maghreb aims to bring into spotlight both the colonial roots of post-structuralism and the exploration of non-Western worlds and subjectivities through postcolonial lenses. This trans-Mediterranean encounter produced specific subjectivities shaped by class, gender and racial formations. The book’s interest in the migration flows between the Maghreb and France thus stems from a desire to explore these various subjectivities and, more specifically, to provide more nuanced distinctions among various migration experiences and the differentiated claims to agency, hybridity, belonging and citizenship they have enabled. As the critique of Roxanne Doty’s analysis of immigration policies in France illustrates (explored in Chapter 7), many critical engagements with migration and diaspora in IR remain stubbornly state-centred even as they seek to disrupt or destabilize the hegemonic hold the nation-state has on practices of citizenship and belonging. This paradoxical approach produces analyses whereby processes of migration emerge as largely undifferentiated experiences unaffected by categories of class, gender or ethnicity. The emphasis of the book then falls largely on Franco-Maghrebian diasporan cultures, and more specifically on how subjects from these cultures experience and situate their hybridity, belonging, and sense of political agency within the colonial world of the Maghreb and within the ‘cosmopolitan’ spaces of France. My more particular interest in the role and figure of the FrancoMaghrebian intellectual speaks to the complicated character of the differentiated subject-positions within this diaspora and to the limits of postcolonial diasporic solidarity. Any solidarity between the diasporic intellectual (called the exilé here) and her diasporic other – the disenfranchised Maghrebian migrant labourer living on the fringes of French society, identified here as the immigré – is constrained and compromised by multiple stratifications of class, gender and racial formations lingering on from the colonial encounter. This compromised solidarity only serves to reinstate and perpetuate the colonial position of the ‘native’ within the postcolonial imaginary and spatiality of a supposedly hybrid and cosmopolitan French society. The Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals whose works I examine here aim to reflect on and to mediate in their narratives the persistence of colonial memory in the current condition of the immigré(e). However, their act of translating the ‘suffering of the immigrant’ (to use Abdelmalek Sayad’s phrase) into literary narratives without musing on their privileged position within the diaspora, and hence on the socio-political distance that separates them from their immigrés subjects, renders them complicit in the (post)colonial violence that produced the category of the ‘native’. Ultimately, as I argue throughout this book, their strenuous attempts to rescue the authenticity of the Maghrebian ‘native’ through strategies of sanctification, which aim to undo the colonial defilement of the ‘native’, speak more than anything about a desire to take control of the ‘native’s’ subjectivity and to re-fashion their own endangered sense of selfhood as the ‘non-duped’ of modernity (capitalism, imperialism or globalization) (Chow 1993: 53).

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The politics of encounters and translocal webs of relations This project draws a link between the work of colonial memory, its mediation into the postcolonial present, and the politics of authenticity that surface from the examination of various diasporic subjectivities. Within critical approaches in IR (more specifically post-structuralist ones) there is a tendency either to dismiss the notion of authenticity altogether (in the name of a dogmatic anti-foundationalism), or to dilute it into a never-ending fluidity and weightlessness (to use Naficy’s term) that divests it of all political content. I argue that this position has been detrimental to our understanding of the complexities of various subject-positions, and of the politics of subalternity. This is an issue I take up in Chapters 2 and 6, where I discuss the colonial roots of deconstruction in the context of the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and the contrapuntal experiences of the Algerian War of Fanon and Camus. In spite of the centrality of French intellectual traditions to the emergence of critical approaches in IR, there has been virtually no discussion or exploration of the colonial origins of such traditions. As I remark in Chapter 2, it is ironic that a project so attentive to the notion of historicity – as post-structuralism claims to be – should be so oblivious, indeed resistant, to the idea of examining its own historicity. Here I suggest that the failure of the post-structuralist project to decentre the discipline of IR may lie also in its own amnesiac tendencies. I make the case for rethinking the relationship between post-structuralism and postcolonialism by probing the claims of Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria. Names associated with post-structuralism such as Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard experienced the violence of the Algerian War and reflected on it in their various writings. Their reflections on their personal experience of colonialism in Algeria are particularly relevant to a better understanding of the historical context in which the project of deconstruction became possible. In these reflections, I argue, the colonial subject tends to be recolonized as the wholly other whose alterity is unfathomable, and whose difference serves to refashion a knowable Western discourse. Their framing of alterity and difference has been very much replicated in many of the contemporary critical analyses in IR informed by poststructuralist perspectives. Indeed I contend that one of the consequences of an approach inattentive to its own colonial historicity has been the idealization of the marginalized, the oppressed or the ‘native’ without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Within critical attempts in IR at retrieving the native’s voice, this idealization of the ‘native’ as the other, the oppressed, and wronged/marginalized subject, speaks ironically to the notion that ‘defilement and sanctification belong to the same symbolic order’, which is that of colonial/imperialistic discourse (Chow 1993: 54). Equally disconcerting is the assumption embraced by many critical IR scholars that a critique of the Eurocentrism of the discipline is a sufficient

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gesture in decolonizing the discipline, without a meaningful engagement with the difference and alterity for whose voice they claim to be creating space (see George 1995). More specifically, this book finds problematic the politics of post-structuralist analyses in IR that empty out the ‘other’ while retaining an epistemological privilege on the ‘self ’ – a practice sadly reminiscent of realist and liberal approaches in the discipline.5 Post-structuralism emphasizes difference both as an important focus of analysis meant to supplement IR’s refusal to engage its inherent hierarchies and marginalizations, and as an analytical tool that investigates the violent dynamics of an international predicated upon exclusion and exploitation. In doing so, its contribution to the field has been most valuable. But the critique of the field has been confined to a self-referential project that ends up re-centring the Eurocentrism of the discipline through a critical re-reading of IR’s ‘canon’. By ‘canon’ I mean not only the so-called major thinkers who have purportedly inspired the realist and liberal traditions (such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Kant), but also the by now canonical themes of IR (sovereignty, state, international, security). I re-emphasize here that I do not wish to dismiss the very good work done by such critical re-readings. Indeed it has been salutary to exposing some of the limits of the mainstream’s claims to disciplinarity, and for this aspect, my work is greatly indebted to such analyses. However, it is also worth noting that when such re-readings are not accompanied by genuine attempts to de-centre not only the discipline but its embedded Western-centric frame, they end up simply reiterating the image of a West in ‘[a] permanent dialogue with itself ’ (Fanon 2004: 237). Julian Saurin noted that ‘IR has inherited a colonizer’s model of the world or arrogated to itself a supremacist position’ (Saurin 2006: 27). In this sense, post-structuralist IR has simply attempted to reform the model of the discipline from within without breaking up the mould of colonial supremacy, which still deeply permeates the discipline. To put it differently, the post-structuralist project has not dislodged the engrained assumption that the history of IR is the history of the West. Thus the discipline is still very much constituted as an Anglo-American space that renders all other spaces and voices as both inadequate and dispensable. As an academic trained in a Western institution and working in a nonWestern location, I’ve been inspired by Appadurai’s conceptualization of the ‘research imagination’ as a tool with immense emancipatory potential (see Appadurai 2000). I am committed to the idea that as academics we need to make the link between the emancipatory potential of imagination in our contemporary world, which has informed people’s desire to migrate, to mobilize and to congregate politically across national borders, and our impoverished research imagination, which does not yet have the adequate vocabulary to capture these emerging webs of relations. In order to make sense of the multiple translocal connections and relations, I thus adhere here to a perspective that aims to highlight the ‘mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role’ in political, security, economic and social relations (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 329), or as Said (1994b) would have it,

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‘intertwined histories’. In this book, I take the Maghreb as a paradigmatic example of an intertwined history forged through its violent encounter with French colonialism. When I speak of the encounter between France and the Maghreb, I am not referring to the ‘official’ portrayal of histories and characters; nor am I focusing upon the state-centred interactions within this region. Rather, this project is concerned with the interactions, transgressions and negotiations that happen between and among individual and collective voices and memories, which find themselves located within the Franco-Maghrebian web of translocal relationships. My interest in the productivity of this trans- has thus been stirred not only by a desire to investigate cross-border politics and border crossings in a territorial and concrete sense, but also by the theoretical and disciplinary border crossings promised by the connotations of ‘trans’ that emerge from terms such as ‘transgressive’ and ‘translocal’. Thus I am interested in how the flows of colonial memory but also the postcolonial flows of unequal mobility (migrant labourers, intellectual exiles) and activism constitute the space of the Franco-Maghrebian borderland in a way that is irreducible to individual states. Branwen Gruffydd Jones and Julian Saurin argue that the task of decolonizing IR cannot be confined to ‘restoring excluded narratives from beyond the confines of Europe’ (Gruffydd Jones 2006: 8; see also Saurin 2006). I agree that simply bringing voices from ‘elsewhere’ is not a sufficient gesture, but it is a necessary starting point. Julian Saurin’s analysis of IR as an imperial project raises excellent criticisms about the limits of contemporary postcolonial theory, but his easy dismissal of the necessity for a retrieval of various colonized voices is disconcerting in the context of a discipline in which such a task has barely begun (see Saurin 2006: 37)! Moreover, his suggestion that the ‘first task [in the decolonization of IR] is to explain imperialism’s production and reproduction and not to be preoccupied by one particular historical form of imperialism, namely, that of colonialism’ (ibid.; my emphasis) strikes one as rather strangely familiar of the Derridean strategy of flattening the specificity of colonialism into a ‘prudent and differentiated universalization’ of imperialism (Derrida 1998: 23; see Chapter 2 in this book). This book starts from the premise that the metropole and the colony cannot be separated, as they constitute a ‘single analytical field’ (Stoler and Cooper 1997: 4). In this case, making the processes of colonialism central to investigations of world politics is not simply an act of ‘yapping and nibbling at the heels of imperialism’ (Saurin 2006: 37), but an epistemological endeavour that indicates the making together of translocal relations. I should clarify here that in the book I use both ‘postcolonial’ and ‘decolonial’ as analytical devices for the examination of colonialism and of its consequences in the present. I identify the former both as a marker of sociopolitical realities that emerged with the nominal independence of colonial societies, and as an indicator of the main preoccupations and central concerns advanced by postcolonial studies. On the other hand, I employ the term ‘decolonial’ in Chapters 6 and 7 to refer to the potentiality and promise of

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de-centring Western-centric frames of knowledge and action (and thus implying a continuous struggle towards effecting decolonization by making visible marginalized knowledges and ways of being in the world). Walter Mignolo distinguishes between ‘postcoloniality’ and ‘decoloniality’ as two distinct intellectual projects (albeit bound together by their common preoccupation with coloniality), where the former’s genealogy of thought stems from the experience of British colonialism in India, Egypt and Palestine, and the latter’s from the colonial experience of South America, the Caribbean, and of Latinos/as in the United States (Mignolo 2011: xxvi). He suggests that the postcolonial project emerged as a response to the rhetoric of postmodernity, whereas decoloniality developed as ‘an option to the rhetoric of modernity and to the combined rhetoric of “development and modernization” (from 1950 to 1970), re-converted to “globalism” during the Reagan years’ (Mignolo 2011: xxviii). I do not adhere to this strict differentiation here; rather, as mentioned earlier, I see and use the two terms as analytical devices that allow me to explore the different dynamics of the colonial experience.6 The current focus of critical theory (whether in IR or in other areas of inquiry in humanities and social sciences) lies on specificity, contingency and particularity – terms that presuppose, or at least leave the impression, that locality is, if not disconnected from the global, then perhaps separate and distinct from it.7 I find this emphasis troubling and prefer to proceed by perceiving the several Maghrebian cultures (commonly known as Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian), which will be the focus of my study, within the ‘web of translocal relationships’ (Dirlik 1994: 345) of which they are part. The concept of translocality allows for a conceptualization of relationships as terms of ‘encounters’, pace Rosello (2005), who examines the performative dimensions of the (post)colonial encounter between France and the Maghreb. Rosello discusses ‘performative encounters’ as: a type of encounter that coincides with the creation of new subject-positions rather than treating preexisting (pre-imagined) identities as the reason for, and justification of, the protocol of encounter – whether it is one of violence or trust, respect or hostility. (Rosello 2005: 1) While this book does not focus on the ‘performativity’ of these encounters, it does aim to highlight ‘the encounter between memories’ (Rosello 2005: 22) and how the various Franco-Maghrebian subject-positions situate themselves vis-à-vis these memories. Therefore, the task this book attempts to fulfil is not simply one of retrieving voices from ‘elsewhere’. Rather it puts forth a new framework for conceiving relations and interactions as encounters, which are not confined to the methodological spatiality of the nation-state. Thus the focus on ‘translocal’ – as an analytical device that attempts to highlight both the contingency of the local and its embeddedness in larger geopolitical contexts – seeks to make visible the inseparability of (hi)stories, memories and

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relations. In exploring the Franco-Maghrebian encounter from a postcolonial standpoint and via literary narratives, I was thus mainly concerned with an understanding of translocal and transgressive political practices that speak about a ‘rich and complex texture of the political’, which does not attempt to reduce such complexity to ‘states, nations, and borders alone’ (Soguk 2008: 192).

Literary narratives in the Franco-Maghrebian encounter As mentioned earlier, in pursuing these lines of inquiry I was not interested in official historiographies or in the policies and state-to-state interactions between France and the Maghreb. In fact, the evidentiary resources deployed here are not considered to be the usual evidence consulted in political science (I confess I cringe at the notion of ‘data’ usually associated with statistics and official interactions). I contend that IR needs to expand its evidentiary sources if it is to meet the complexity of the world. This book explores literary and visual narratives as legitimate sources for the investigation of the webs of translocal relations produced by Franco-Maghrebian (post)colonial encounters. However, in undertaking this approach I do not wish to sanctify literary narratives as privileged spaces where the translocal operates and emerges at its most visible. While I do not agree fully with his critique of postcolonialism, I do take seriously Arif Dirlik’s warning against the ‘economy of discourse [becoming] a paradigm for all encounters, including the encounters of political economy’ (Dirlik 1998: 5). As Dirlik rightly notes, there is a tendency within postcolonial criticism to assume that ‘literary works suffice as evidence of what goes on in the world’ (ibid.). My deployment of literary and visual narratives does not then aim ‘to start off with a sociology of power relationships only to take refuge in aesthetic phraseology’ (Dirlik 1998: 81, n.35). I am using literary narratives for two purposes: to impart a sense of the specificity of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, but also to suggest that in this specific context, literary narratives have played a strategic role both in documenting and in shaping the encounter. Let me explain this aspect briefly. In his Colonial Myths, Azzedine Haddour traces an indissoluble link between the emergence of three specific literary movements in colonial Algeria and the interpretation of colonial culture and experience. These movements, which emerged in the first half of the 20th century, were: Algérianisme, École d’Alger, and what he calls littérature de combat (which I translate here as resistance literature) (see Haddour 2000: 24–41). The former, Algérianisme, perceived Algeria to be part of a common Mediterranean culture born under the genius of Latin culture and civilization, and hence ‘ante-Muslim’, aiming to restore an imagined ‘Latin’ Algeria of which the colonial settlers were the prime representatives (Haddour 2000: 25). The function of the Algérianisme mythology was thus both to bolster the legitimacy and even naturalness of French colonial presence and to cement a settler culture out of disparate elements (ibid.). From the perspective of this school, the ‘natives’ were simply superfluous to

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the ‘natural’ Latin character of Algeria, and thus had to be discarded and replaced by the Western settlers. The École d’Alger, on the other hand, of which Albert Camus was the best-known representative, challenged the mythology of Algérianisme, and ‘denounced its génie militaire which perpetuated racism, oppression, and colonial abuse’ (Haddour 2000: 27). In the imaginary of the École d’Alger, the unity of the Mediterranean world had to be maintained through a co-existence between settlers and ‘natives’. The school thus advocated strongly for an assimilationist strategy that would turn the ‘natives’ into ‘petits Français.’ As Haddour remarks, ‘[i]n this Mediterranean harmony, he [Camus] overlooked the colonial conflict; instead he treated conflict as a universal question’ (Haddour 2000: 29). The function of the mythology embraced by the École d’Alger was thus to champion an anachronistic assimilationism that was already clearly rejected by the nascent Algerian nationalism (Haddour 2000: 33). As I argue in the next chapter, Derrida’s claim to a Franco-Maghrebian hyphenated identity echoes Camus’s stance on colonialism by erasing the specificity of the colonial encounter and thus taking refuge in a conceptualization of colonialism as the inherent trait of discursive/ linguistic violence. The third school, littérature de combat, gathers together under its rubric the voices of colonized intellectuals who contest the Eurocentric and inherently racist mythologies of both schools. Intellectuals such as Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Jean Amrouche (whose works I engage in this book) reject both the settler supremacy vision and the assimilationist benevolent paternalism of the Europeans and advocate for an end to colonial rule as the only possible solution to colonial violence. These three literary movements overlap the distinct and various ideological positions that reflected on the colonial experience. In this sense, to understand the specificity of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, I needed to engage the crucial role of literary production and of intellectuals in documenting and giving voice to these dissonant colonial experiences. My deployment of literary sources as evidentiary material for the colonial encounter does not intend to make a statement about the privileged status of literary narratives in evoking the complexity of translocal relations. Rather it aims to illustrate the need to expand our methodological horizons in IR by developing trans-disciplinary approaches to understanding various contexts and issues. It also aims to indicate that in the context of the Franco-Maghrebian colonial experience leaving out literary narratives produces a truncated map of relations and interactions. Moreover, as I discuss at length in Chapters 5 and 6, the colonial memory of the Algerian War translates in France and Algeria in official historiographies replete with amnesia (in France) and hypermemory (in Algeria). In France, research on colonialism has been relegated to the discipline of history, and the subtext is the following: colonialism is best perceived as an anomaly in the history of the French Republic, belonging to the realm of the past and carrying few repercussions for the present.8 In Algeria, the hyper-memory of colonial violence and of the Algerian War bolsters the legitimacy of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National

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Liberation Front) and its post-independence dictatorial grip on Algerian society. It is in this complex context of suppression of memory and neutralization of responsibility that literary narratives become particularly significant in the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, to the extent that they perform precisely what has not been done within the ‘public’ sphere: the work of memory and responsibility. Thus evocations of colonial violence coexist and share the same discursive/narrative space with exposés on postcolonial violence. The literary narratives I engage here, produced by Franco-Maghrebian writers such as Assia Djebar, Albert Memmi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Leïla Sebbar, evoke the violence of the colonial encounter at the same time that they reflect on its continuity into the postcolonial present. As Phillip Darby (1998) aptly demonstrated, literary productions are vividly implicated in the construction of our social, cultural and political realities, as much as they can be considered products/constructs of such realities. Darby went even further than this and contended that ‘narrative truth may have a greater utility than historical truth’ (Darby 1998: 23). Paraphrasing Clifford Geertz, Cynthia Weber suggested that IR theory can be viewed as an ‘ensemble of stories’ we tell about the world (Weber 2001: 129–30). Darby’s and Weber’s positions speak to two different methodological aspects of employing literary narratives as evidentiary sources for IR. The former engages not only the value they provide as evidence of the everyday, but their ability to draw on complex maps of socio-political interactions. Weber, on the other hand, applies this insight onto the narratives deployed by IR to make sense of the world, and reads the various theoretical approaches to IR as narrative genres that mediate the world through specific lenses. Thus to view IR theories as stories assigns a keen sense of authorship to texts that claim to merely reproduce an outside reality, and to portray it as they see it (see, for example, Morgenthau 1967; and Waltz 1979). I use both approaches here, though I emphasize Darby’s stance more directly. To put it differently, I think that the political dimensions and effects of literary productions are largely under-explored (and marginalized) in IR. Such productions speak in meaningful ways about encounters between what we comfortably designate as ‘East’ and ‘West’, about ‘translocal’ relations, about relations between universals and particulars, and between immediate and distant locales. As mentioned earlier, I prefer the term ‘translocal’ for the possibilities of transcendence, transgression and translation that it encompasses, and for the ways in which it allows for an understanding of socio-political realities as ‘encounters’. In this book, I read literary and visual narratives with an eye both to their ability to summon complex political worlds in their everyday-ness, but also to the implicit political relations of power they invoke between the writer and the subjects of the narrative, and between the world instantiated and the one implicitly desired. I am obviously not suggesting here that literary strategies need to substitute or supplant other social science methodologies. Rather I am attempting to carve out a legitimate space within

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IR theory for literary strategies as alternative methodologies. Or to use Michael Shapiro’s terminology, I am interested in literary strategies as methodologies that allow me to pay heed to ‘complicated loci of enunciation’ – those politically charged assumptions and groundings into which any project is embedded (Shapiro 2004: vii). I note with excitement and keen interest the emergence, within the last decade, of alternative social science methodologies, which offer imaginative and sophisticated insights into various socio-political events.9 I turn towards literary productions therefore in order to assess the relationship between the postcolonial intellectual and the subjects of her narrative, and the webs of translocal relations such narratives produce. Moreover, such productions are imbued with the ways in which we perceive the relationship between ‘local’ and ‘global’, ‘universal’ and ‘particular’. The question of how subjects perceive the relationship between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ is inextricable from the notion of the site from where such perceptions might be retrieved. I find Anna Tsing’s conceptualization of ‘global connections’ very compelling. She argues that universals are constantly enacted and engaged in the ‘sticky materiality’ of our daily encounters (Tsing 2005: 1). Local knowledges speak about specificity, contingency and historicity, but they are rarely fixed and immutable. Rather they move, they circulate, and they undergo and effect transformations. My argument revolves thus around a ‘web of translocal relationships’ (to use Dirlik’s expression), which is performed through literary narratives as a dizzying and somewhat treacherous mélange of hegemonic discourses and practices, various resistances and countless complicities. All of these produce a site of what I would call metamorphosed authenticity, which implies that the global, the universal, the hegemonic is never simply superimposed on the local. Rather what Walter D. Mignolo (2000a) calls ‘global designs’, which are ‘local histories’ with pretensions of universality and globality, constantly metamorphose in their countless encounters with various sites and locales. This framework, I believe, allows us to perceive our subjects of analysis as products, but also as producers, as transformers, as gazers.10 Literary narratives produced by authors from the Maghrebian diaspora (such as Assia Djebar, Albert Memmi, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Leïla Sebbar) attempt to retrieve colonial memory by memorializing the image of the Maghrebian ‘native’ rescued from defilement and thus purified from colonial violence. Simultaneously they engage the violence of the postcolonial present by reflecting on the condition of the immigré and the inescapable defilement that accompanies such a condition. Chapters 2 to 7 speak to each other and complement each other’s vision of the relationship between the gazer/producer and the gazed. Chapter 2 explores the limits of critical perspectives in IR by interrogating the politics of post-structuralist ethics, which aim to create space for difference and otherness even as they render difference inscrutable and set it as the limit to Western knowledge. The critique of Jenny Edkins’s politics of seeing otherness aims to illustrate the failure of post-structuralist analyses in IR to effect a meaningful de-centring of the discipline (see Nayak and Selbin

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2010). Chapters 3 and 7 examine the relation between exilé(e) and immigré(e) in the context of the unequal diasporic experiences of translocation, claims to citizenship and hybridity encountered by the Maghrebian exiled intellectual (the exilé) and by the immigrant labourer (the immigré). Chapter 4 engages both literary and visual narratives by examining the politics of the triangle between image, text and ‘native’ within the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, in which the first two elements are bound by complicity in the production of the third one. The triangle image-text-’native’ analysed in Chapter 4 appears in a different form in Chapters 3 and 7, as the exilé(e)’s luxury of being able to re-position herself vis-à-vis the West from an advantageous position mirrors both the diasporic experience of the Maghrebian intellectual, and the agonizing socio-political marginalization of the immigré(e). Chapter 5 reflects on the politics of colonial memory as transposed in three cinematic narratives and argues that the cinematic space created by these narratives produces a Franco-Maghrebian borderland where trauma, memory and authenticity intersect. Chapter 6 constitutes a nodal chapter of sorts that produces a contrapuntal reading of Fanon’s and Camus’s experiences of colonialism and of the Algerian War. The chapter echoes the themes advanced in Chapter 2 and reads some of Camus’s literary texts via an engagement of Fanon’s vision of the colonial experience in Algeria. In a reversal of Chapter 2’s argument, Camus’s Western-centric portrait of colonial Algeria (in which the ‘natives’ act as a sort of nameless and faceless background to the French presence) becomes even more acutely self-referential through a reading of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. A contrapuntal reading of Fanon’s and Camus’s visions of colonialism exposes also the limits of Western theories of emancipation and their inability to make visible the idea and experience of colonial/racial difference. The role of the diasporic intellectual as producer of authenticity and as the voice of subaltern consciousness (as Said expressed it) becomes thus a crucial element in exploring the politics of (post)colonial encounters.

Meeting the Franco-Maghrebian intellectual So why focus on intellectuals and writers as subjects and as producers? What do they tell us about the Franco-Maghrebian world that other subject-positions do not? In his concluding chapter to Culture and Imperialism, entitled ‘Movements and Migrations’, Said contrasts ‘the optimistic mobility, the intellectual liveliness, and “the logic of daring”’ implicit in the work of intellectuals who perceive the experience of migration as a new form of anti-hegemonic transgression, and ‘the massive dislocations, waste, misery, and horrors endured in our century’s migrations and mutilated lives’ (Said 1994b: 332). Yet, Said continues his thoughts by highlighting the degree to which the idea and practice of liberation ‘as an intellectual mission’ has shifted from a territorial and confined understanding of culture to ‘unhoused, decentered, exilic energies whose incarnation is today is the migrant and whose consciousness is that of

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the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages’ (ibid.; my emphasis). Said’s perception of liberation entails thus the inseparableness of the figure of the diasporic intellectual (whom I call in this book the exilé) from that of the migrant (immigré). I find Said’s perception incredibly intuitive (especially in the case of the Maghreb), but I also feel his intuition requires further examination. One question that arises here is why liberation is an intellectual mission and what might be the consequences of such a perception. Second, Said does not seem to muse on the inherent power relationship between the diasporic intellectual and the migrant – implicit in the assumption that the former is the consciousness of the latter. It is perhaps Fanon who provides a useful counterpoint to Said’s intuition. In ‘On Violence’, Fanon remarks that during decolonization there is an established dialogue between ‘certain colonized intellectuals’ and ‘the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country’ (Fanon 2004: 8). Fanon’s concern with the role of the colonized intellectual in the project of decolonization indicates the ambivalent position of this figure caught between the colonized world and what Fanon calls ‘the famous dialogue on [Western] values’ to which the colonized intellectual is inextricably attached by virtue of his education (Fanon 2004: 9). This Fanonian counterpoint to Said’s intuition is crucial, as argued in this book, to understanding both the power differentials between the diasporic intellectual and the migrant, and the deeply ambivalent role of the diasporic intellectual in emancipatory/liberationist projects. The dialogue on Western values which the latter shares with the Western world (and in which she is inevitably engaged) spells also the political and socio-economic distance that separates these two experiences of mobility (diasporic/exilic and migrant). Fanon reverses the relationship between the two (in his case the colonized intellectual and the revolutionary peasantry) and sees the latter as the ultimate consciousness of the former. While I do not wholly share Fanon’s uncompromising judgement of the colonized intellectual, his deep suspicion towards the latter’s proximity to Western values is worth bearing in mind as a significant element in grasping the unequal relationship between the diasporic intellectual and the migrant. My examination of the various formations of diasporic intellectuals, to paraphrase Stuart Hall (2003), in the Franco-Maghrebian context needs thus to be seen in connection with their reconstruction of the ‘native’ as subaltern within certain literary and visual narratives as a way of mediating the (post) colonial encounter. Such a double construction of selfhood and subalternity entails a double task: a critical labour of memory (Balibar 2004), which attempts to resuscitate moments of colonial violence and the complex consequences of colonialism that emerged in the space of the Maghreb. It also attempts a re-performance of postcolonial encounters that evokes the precarious positions of both the exilé(e) and the immigré(e). This double task performed by literary and visual (hi)stories involves a complicated spectrum of violence, (im)possibilities, moments of discipline and escape. This sort of mediation of memory and forgetting is not without its own violence, and these

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literary strategies are themselves caught within the politics and practices they attempt to denounce, even as they suggest certain possibilities of transcendence and transgression. I argue here that the fantasy of authenticity and the ‘unified moralism’ (Aihwa Ong’s expression) they attach to the figure of the ‘native’/indigène reflects a desire to transcend colonial stereotypes by counterposing a ‘purified’ (and equally stereotypical) version of the subaltern. As Anthony Appiah (1992: 58) aptly expressed it, it is ‘the association of a europhone elite and a noneurophone populace … that makes for the appeal of nativism’. In discussing the lures of ‘nativism’, Appiah warns us against ‘the sentimental notion that the “people” have held onto an indigenous national tradition, [and] that only the educated bourgeoisie are “children of two worlds”’ – an assumption that both Fanon and Said seem to adopt (ibid.). I am thus interested in the complex relationship between the subjectpositions of the diasporic intellectual and the migrant, and argue that this relationship is central to understanding the dynamics of the (post)colonial encounter between France and the Maghreb. To put it differently, ‘the complex co-production of indigenous categories by organic intellectuals, linguists, missionaries and ethnologists’ lies at the heart of the webs of translocal relations produced in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland (Appadurai 1995: 207; my emphasis).11 I decided to include a number of Franco-Maghrebian authors in this project because their names were deemed to be representative of the FrancoMaghrebian literary writing. By this I do not mean to suggest here that these authors should be viewed as the most important voices coming out of Maghreb. Rather, when I focus on names such as Assia Djebar, Albert Memmi, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Albert Camus and even Fanon (whom I see as a Franco-Maghrebian intellectual only in the context of his engagement with the Algerian War), among others, I am interested in their role as public intellectuals.12 My focus on their public status entails that they are somehow deemed representative as mediators between France and the Maghreb, but also between the Franco-Maghrebian encounter and the ‘West’.13 A significant common denominator of their work is the manner in which the colonial past and legacy shapes their productions in every possible way. As Christiane Chaulet-Achour from Université Cergy-Pontoise mentioned in my interview with her, these particular authors are products of colonialism (des rescapés du colonialisme).14 As such, their works reflect a particular tension: between the need to take colonialism and its various facets as the material for their creation (arising out of their lived experience of colonialism, but also out of a sense of ethical responsibility as intellectuals); and the impulse of negotiating the possibilities, violences and ambiguities that arise from their fragile and ambiguous positioning as intellectuals living in the ex-metropole (although I should note that the ‘ex-’ in question is a very tenuous one).15 The tension of the latter position emerges out of the confluence and interaction of several dimensions of their diasporic experience. They write in French for a mainly French speaking audience, and enjoy the privileges of their position as

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intellectuals in the (ex)metropole. At the same time, they put forth narratives that speak about the violence of colonialism, racism and discrimination, about the in-betweenness of young Maghrebians in France, about the corruption of post-independence Maghrebian states, and about the (im)possible socio-political spaces inhabited by women. It is worth mentioning here that each of them muses, within their narratives, on the ambivalence and irony of their use of French as the main linguistic medium of expression (with the exception of Camus), either by relating to the reader their precarious and fragile relation to the French language (in the case of Djebar, Ben Jelloun and Memmi) and/or by using French in an ambivalent way that tries to subvert its hegemonic status and, at the same time, to expose the dominant hold it has had over them and over other individuals in their condition (in the case of Derrida and Cixous). Some of them, such as Djebar, express a vivid concern with the act of mediating the voices and histories of subaltern others in a language to which the others do not have access (see Chapter 4). In this sense, focusing on diasporic intellectuals and their relationship to their native/ migrant others makes visible the politics of making public the work of colonial memory and of postcolonial violence.

Memory and authenticity The issue of memory is a recurrent theme running through the book though the theme is not directly engaged until Chapter 5, where I examine the mediation of colonial memory in three cinematic narratives. However, before I engage the argument of this specific chapter, I would like to clarify the emphasis on memory in the book. As already mentioned, the public debate surrounding the issue of French colonialism and its legacies has been largely and conspicuously absent from French society (in spite of recent sustained attempts undertaken by various intellectuals and activists). However, there has been a sustained production of literary, historical and visual material that has engaged the violence and trauma of the colonial past, more specifically that of the Algerian War – an event whose memory has been stubbornly suppressed, as rightly notes the historian Benjamin Stora (1998) when he characterizes it as the gangrene eating at the fabric of French society from within. More specifically, as I discuss later in Chapter 5, it is primarily through the written word that the work of colonial memory has been undertaken in France (see Dine 1994). Thus my focus on literary narratives of Franco-Maghrebian authors aims to understand the modalities through which colonial memory penetrates the texture of their narratives. In the case of these authors, it is in the figure of the ‘native’/subaltern, whether as heroic resister or as defiled migrant figure, that the dimensions of colonial memory converge. However, I have chosen to explore the politics of both textual and visual narratives, not only because some of the authors discussed here added their voices to visual narratives of the Maghreb, but also due to a preoccupation with the increasing relevance of the visual in our everyday understanding of the political. As Cynthia Weber

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remarked, the linguistic turn in IR, while making tremendous contributions to the field, has ‘ex-communicated’ the visual from the linguistic (Weber 2008: 137). I thus attempted to bring together, within the scope of my explorations, both the linguistic and the visual as mediators of complex political practices. The purpose of this bringing together was to illuminate the ways in which, in the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, the linguistic and the visual constitute inseparable spaces for political mediation, and diasporic identifications. As I discuss in Chapter 4, when I examine the intersection between text, image and ‘native’, the native’s authenticity not only as genuine representative of the land and of the people but also as genuine anti-colonial resister is hypostasized and memorialized both in image and text by the voice and the gaze of the diasporic intellectual. The latter’s hyper-memory of the anti-colonial colonial struggle and of the colonial past enables her to speak with authority over the voice of the memorialized native. To put it differently, in the texts and images (to which they add their voice) of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar tragic heroines and defiant resisters come to life as spectral presences for the benefit of the socially aware Western consumer. Hence the paradox of the work of memory performed by these literary narratives: even as they bring to life (and to the present) the repressed memory of the colonial past and simultaneously gesture towards its seeping into the (post)colonial present, they also end up reifying the figure of the ‘native’ into a posture of sanctification. This reification obscures the complexities of the latter’s agency and political positioning and perpetuates the current marginalization of the Maghrebian migrant: the contradictory and deeply ambivalent condition of postcolonial misery in the heart of the metropole cannot be easily reconciled with the heroic hypostasis of the anti-colonial past (the tension becomes particularly acute in Memmi’s Portrait of the Decolonized). In a sense, precisely because they see themselves as public mediators (Spivak’s Native Informants) between the postcolonial present and the colonial past, they produce an aestheticized figure of the ‘native’ for the consumption of socially aware Western audiences who entertain a specific fantasy of the authenticity of the anti-colonial resister. This notion of authenticity I explore further in Chapter 5, albeit under different guises. By exploring the metamorphosis of colonial memory in three cinematic narratives (Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, Kassovitz’s La Haine and Haneke’s Caché), I contend that the work of colonial memory in the cinematic text is always incomplete as the memory of (post)colonial violence always ‘exceeds the bounds of acceptable realism’ (Khanna 2008: 123). In this sense the idea of an authentic representation of colonial violence becomes precarious at best (an idea strongly put forth by Haneke’s Caché). Unlike many critical readings of cinema in IR, this analysis does not start from the implicit premise that our reading of cinematic narratives untangles the complicated web of repressed political truths lying hidden within them.16 Rather I choose to investigate how these three cinematic narratives choose to project and reflect on (or question) their own authenticity as they engage (or disengage from) the

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memory of colonial trauma. Here, I take a dual approach to authenticity: I discuss both the authenticity of the director (the producer of the cinematic narrative) and the authenticity of the (post)colonial subjectivities produced by these visual narratives. The core issue here is thus who is an authentic enough subject to speak on behalf of the subaltern (this issue arises also in Chapter 7 when I discuss some of the politics of contemporary migrant activism in France). Pontecorvo and Kassovitz, through recourse to documentary-style black-and-white filming, attempt to project authentic political (the Algerian people as an authentic agent of revolution) and social (the excluded banlieue subject) subjectivities. Haneke, on the other hand, seems more concerned with subverting precisely the notion of authenticity of the subject (and of cinematic representation). However, Haneke’s subversion of authenticity should not be read as a postmodern refusal to accept claims to truth, but a stubbornly modernist search for a piece of the historical truth, and as awareness that cinematic mediation of traumatic memory is always incomplete. The structuring argument of this book regarding authenticity is the following: my approach does not adopt a postmodern scepticism towards the possibility of authenticity (i.e. any claims to authentic representation are inadvertently problematic because they gesture towards the existence of an ideal/standard that needs to be attained), nor does it indulge in ‘nativist’ fantasies of missed authenticity (i.e. there is an authentic ‘native’ out there and we simply looked in the wrong place). Rather, I posit that authenticity has a specific socio-political function in a given context, and thus cannot be fixed or atemporal any more than it can be deemed impossible (or chimerical). To use Hamid Naficy’s words, ‘cultural identity is neither a fixed essence nor all, or always already, a fabrication’ (Naficy 2001: 286). In the case of diasporic/ migrant subjectivities, the question of authenticity becomes a political as much as a psycho-social anchor whereby one makes claims to belonging and community. The North African migrant living in desolate banlieues may assume authenticity as ‘a set of primary categories of belonging (sediments) to which one attaches in order not to become totally weightless, atomized, or alienated’ (ibid.). One of the central concerns of this book is thus with who deploys authenticity, in whose name and for whose benefit, and with what political effects. To conclude, there has been a nagging feeling that has followed me while writing and researching for this book, which can be expressed as a subtle but haunting need to work with the ‘material’ at hand and make it fit into the mould provided by IR. At times it was frustrating, since it seemed that the more I explore practices of diasporic politics, of political and cross-cultural translation, of mediation of memory, and of migrant and exilic identifications, the further I remove myself from the self-avowed concerns of IR as a discipline. However, an article by Nevzat Soguk allowed me to see things from a different perspective. Expressing a frustration with disciplinary IR’s failure to pick up on complex realities and transpose them into its narratives, Soguk (2008: 192) remarks that ‘[o]ur task, among others, appears to communicate

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the world to IR’. In the spirit of these words, my hope is that this text has managed, in a small way, to communicate a part of the world and its captivating political complexities to the discipline of IR.

Notes 1 The expression ‘web of translocal relations’ belongs to Arif Dirlik (1994: 345). 2 I place ‘international’ in quotation marks and brackets because it does not constitute the political realm this project examines. I am not interested in the ‘international’ per se because inter-national gestures towards exchanges and interactions between nation-states, which is not the object of this analysis. Rather I propose here, as I discuss later, the term ‘translocal’ to intimate encounters that are historically situated and bound by a certain sense of immediacy and proximity, but which are also part of larger geopolitical webs of relations. See also Anna Tsing (2005), for a compelling discussion on the conceptualizations of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’; her theoretical frame allows both for a complex mix of agency and structural determinism to emerge, and for an understanding of the global as local and vice versa. I explore the concept of the ‘translocal’ in greater depth in Chapter 8. 3 While Mandaville (2003) develops a framework that employs the notion of ‘translocal politics,’ he uses ‘transnational’ and ‘translocal’ interchangeably. As explained later, they are not interchangeable. 4 I borrow the term of ‘global relations’ from Persaud (1997: 170). 5 I owe this insight to Robbie Shilliam (personal correspondence). 6 I find problematic the rigid compartmentalization on which Mignolo builds his idea of decoloniality as very different from that of postcoloniality. Nor do I agree with his argument that postcoloniality was made possible by the twin projects of post-structuralism and postmodernism (see Chapter 2 in this book for a critique of this argument). However, I do find very compelling some of his insights on ‘colonial difference’ and ‘decolonial’. For more on ‘decolonial’, see Mignolo (2007, 2011). 7 See, for example, in globalization studies, the works of Robertson (1992), Held et al. (1999), Scholte (2005), and Beck (2000). Bauman (1998) and Sassen (2000) conceive of more sophisticated relationships between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’. However, I argue that they still maintain intact the binary local/global. See Castells (1997) and Tomlinson (1999) for analyses that transcend such a binary. 8 While there has been an explosion of work on colonialism and on its enduring legacy in the postcolonial migration of North Africans to France, such works are largely contested by mainstream historians (see Chapter 7). 9 I mention here Urvashi Butalia (2000), whose methodological frame captured my imagination. 10 A comfortably invisible, yet problematic term insinuates itself in the statement above, namely ‘us’. Throughout this book, I attempt to address and clarify who is this ‘us’ who is constantly reiterated here. Identifying the ‘us’ requires me to assign agency, and thus show that translocal webs of relations are not performed in the text ex nihilo. Rather they emerge in the interface between writer and reader and the broader circumstances of production/consumption. In particular, what I mean by ‘us’ refers specifically to readers and knowledge producers/consumers from Western academia and/or associated with/living within Western(ized) locales. Dealing with this particular category of Western(ized) consumers/producers becomes more apparent in Chapters 3 to 7, when I examine who benefits from the production of exoticized ‘natives’ in photographic production, the politics of memory in cinematic narratives, and the fragile relationship between exilés and immigrés. As such, the point is to identify the producers/consumers of the various narratives examined here, and of the codes of desire they inadvertently disseminate.

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11 I explain the notion of Franco-Maghrebian borderland in Chapter 3. 12 Many of the authors examined here have received public recognition for their work and various contributions, both within academia and beyond. Tahar Ben Jelloun was the first North African to have been awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize for his novel La Nuit Sacrée, and Assia Djebar was the first Maghrebian to have been included in the French Academy. Leïla Sebbar’s texts have been studied in the North American academy as exemplary illustrations of postcolonial feminine writing (l’écriture féminine), which embody and perform a particular kind of postcolonial resistance, that of the feminine ‘orientalized’ subject. Albert Memmi’s essay on the colonized and the colonizer has become a seminal reading in postcolonial studies, read in conjunction with Fanon’s writings and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and thus constituting one of the fundamental anti-colonial writings of this century. 13 I note here important omissions such as the works of Adelkebir Khatibi (whose work Walter Mignolo engages in his Local Histories/Global Designs), Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Jean Amrouche and others. I obviously could not include a very large spectrum of authors in this book. I hope to engage these other authors in future research. 14 The interview took place at the Université Cergy-Pontoise, on 18 October 2006. 15 I note here that Derrida’s and Cixous’s works, while shaped by their experience of colonial Algeria, do not display this tension in the same obvious and overt manner as do the works of other writers mentioned here. 16 For an excellent critique of this practice in IR, see Hozic (2011).

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The post always rings twice? The Algerian War, post-structuralism and the postcolonial in IR theory

Postmodern open-endedness, its lack of resolution, risks immobilizing oppressed peoples: as feminists argued earlier, it is hard to achieve activist ends (with firm moral values) in a postmodern world where such values are not permitted to be grounded … It is simply not enough to focus on ex-centricity, marginality and difference as part of a demystifying process; or at least one should not stop there. Whether the arena be international politics or classroom pedagogy … , the postcolonial and the postmodern, it appears, separate at some point on this question of ethics. (Hutcheon 2002: 174)

Postcolonial theory and research has had a fragile, often overlooked presence within the discipline of International Relations (IR). In spite of excellent studies of world politics written from postcolonial perspectives, the ‘field’ has been largely unenthusiastic about the possibility of opening alternative spaces for thinking about ‘relations international’, to use Phillip Darby’s (2004) expression. More than ever there is a need to look at the particular racial, gendered and class inflections that help us explain and understand power in IR. In this chapter, I argue that postcolonial thinking has much to contribute to IR. In doing so, I suggest a rethinking of postcolonialism’s relation to deconstruction and to post-structuralism, a relation that emerged from a peculiar historical context – that of the French colonial experience in Algeria. By attempting to historicize the project of post-structuralism and to retrace its colonial roots, I highlight the dangers of engaging in deconstructionist exercises without a postcolonial exposé (see Hutcheon 1994). In making the case for rethinking the relation between post-structuralism and postcolonialism, I build on the claims advanced by Robert Young (2001, 2004), Azzedine Haddour (2000, 2006), and Pal Ahluwalia (2005, 2010) that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I reflect on the (im)possibilities of reading contrapuntally the emergence of post-structuralism in the context of colonial Algeria, and on the implications that such a reading might pose for thinking critically about world politics. I begin by assessing Robert Young’s claim that post-structuralism emerged as

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an anti-colonial project of resistance, born out of the experience of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) (Young 2001: 411–28). Young’s claim bears a tremendous significance for the practice of critical theory. His claim not only highlights the initial anti-colonial drive of deconstruction, but it also inevitably prompts us to ask questions about the problematic nature of current deconstructionist exercises within IR that are divorced from postcolonial perspectives. Next, I consider three authors unmistakably associated with post-structuralism, and whose legacy has endured in critical theory: Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Jean-François Lyotard. Their reflections on their personal experience of colonialism in Algeria are particularly relevant to a better understanding of the historical context in which the project of deconstruction became possible. I argue here that between Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism and Cixous’s displacement of phallocentrism, the postcolonial subject tends to be recolonized as the wholly other whose alterity is unfathomable, and whose difference serves to refashion a knowable Western discourse. Moreover, Jean François Lyotard’s experience of the Algerian War acquires the dimension of an intimate différend, which sees Lyotard becoming the same ‘inventing subject’, to use Cixous’s term, of both the yearning desire for Algeria’s liberation and emancipation, and of the condition of its impossibility. Focusing on these particular theorists illustrates the similar quandaries faced by analyses in IR that are informed by post-structuralist sensibilities. Thus, I choose to examine their narratives because they not only provide the link between colonial violence, the post-structuralist project that ensued and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much post-structuralist work in IR. In the last part of the chapter, I explore the implications of Young’s claim and I discuss the impact of post-structuralism’s problematic politics of difference on the practice of critical theory within IR. I retrace post-structuralism’s initial drive, all the while bearing in mind the caveats posed by a reflection on origins in the context of a theory that disavows and disparages ‘originary’ claims. One of the major points on the post-structuralist agenda in IR has been precisely the intent to bring a sense of historicity and contingency to a field that asserted its ahistorical truths and policed them with a fierce stubbornness.1 In this respect, I attempt to historicize the project of post-structuralism, and to draw attention to the irony attending a project that is oblivious to its own historicity. I suggest that in the context of a continued failure of IR’s critical discourses to decentre the discipline, it has become more important than ever to reflect on what an honest engagement with these amnesiac practices might mean for the discipline of IR and for the practice of IR. Moreover, I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting post-structuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealization of the marginalized, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Within critical attempts in IR at retrieving the native’s voice this idealization of

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the native as the other, the oppressed and wronged/marginalized subject, speaks ironically to the notion that ‘defilement and sanctification belong to the same symbolic order’, which is that of colonial/imperialistic discourse (Chow 1993: 54). By exploring the post-structuralist politics of encountering otherness in Jenny Edkins’s ‘Exposed Singularity’, I illustrate that a deconstructionist exercise, which fails to engage the contradictory and complex character of postcolonial subjects, ultimately redisciplines the ‘native’ as the limit of Western knowledge and sanctifies her as absolute and unfathomable difference. This critique levelled against post-structuralist IR reappears in a different form in Chapter 7, when I address the omission of (post)colonial contexts from Roxanne Doty’s analysis of anti-immigrantism in Western societies. In this later chapter, I highlight the consequences of engaging in a deconstructive exercise deprived of any postcolonial horizons. Leaving out the enduring effects of colonialism from a discussion on racism and antiimmigrantism in contemporary France speaks eloquently about the need to examine the unexplored assumptions of post-structuralist IR. Post-structuralism emphasises difference both as an important focus of analysis meant to supplement IR’s refusal to engage its inherent hierarchies and marginalizations, and as an analytical tool that investigates the violent dynamics of an international predicated upon exclusion and exploitation. In doing so, its contribution to the field is most valuable. However, insofar as most poststructuralist analyses in IR assume that the critique of the field’s Eurocentrism is a sufficient gesture for decolonizing IR without meaningfully engaging otherness and difference, they fail to transcend the West as a system of reference. I thus explore the linkage between the colonial violence out of which the project of deconstruction emerged, the problematic engagement with otherness in the writings of Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard, and the tendency of post-structuralist IR to replicate the failures signalled in my analysis of these three theorists. I stress, however, that it is appropriate to examine not only the prospects of rethinking the colonial roots of deconstruction, but also the dangers present in associating it with postcolonialism. Accordingly, the last part of the chapter investigates the tensions, contradictions, but also the possibilities that arise from this reading of post-structuralism against the background of colonial Algeria and its subsequent association with postcolonialism. Bringing these theories together will contribute to the ongoing debate in IR about the need for a dialogue between post-structuralism’s desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialism’s potential to transcend the selfreferential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere. Maintaining a tension between these two visions of the international and of otherness without attempting to reduce one to the other can be a productive exercise. This tension might allow difference to emerge not simply as the result of deconstructing the West’s knowledge of the other, but to have political and social texture outside of the deconstructionist endeavour.

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Rethinking theory, nativizing discipline(s): disturbing the margins in Robert Young’s White Mythologies and Postcolonialism – An Historical Introduction IR’s disciplinary margins – which I identify with post-structuralist, feminist and postcolonial views – constitute the target spaces with which I engage. I explore these margins by reflecting upon the writings of several theorists who have greatly influenced post-structuralist practices in IR. Insofar as most critical IR views gesture towards a subalternity whose voice and dignity they intend to retrieve, I examine an unusual location for the status of native, namely in the inceptions of post-structuralism as an anti-colonial theory. This location is a borderland that has the potential to unsettle easily assumed binaries, such as East/West, inside/outside (and insider/outsider), colonizer/ colonized, familiar/strange or foreign, and native/non-native. Robert Young treads into this borderland when he claims that poststructuralism should be better understood as an anti-colonial theory born out of the violence of the Algerian War of Independence (Young 2001: 413). When discussing the origins of post-structuralism, Young makes the following claim: If so-called ‘so-called poststructuralism’ is the product of a single historical moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence – no doubt itself both a symptom and a product. In this respect, it is significant that Sartre, Althusser, Derrida and Lyotard, among others, were all either born in Algeria or personally involved with the events of the war. (Young 2004: 32) As he points out, the experience of colonialism, of the Algerian War, and of the ‘extreme rationalization and centralization of the French administrative system’ make deconstruction become possible and give it its full meaning (Young 2001: 417). More importantly, Young perceives deconstruction as a ‘form of cultural and intellectual decolonization’, which ‘expos[es] the double intention separating rational method from its truth’, namely the conflation of a myth with a universal truth (Young 2001: 421). From his perspective, deconstruction, as a decolonizing gesture, attempts to decentre and to expose various forms of centrisms, such as logocentrism, phallocentrism, and structural centrism (Young 2001: 417). Insufficient attention is paid to the link between deconstruction and postcolonial project(s) by intellectuals coming from different areas of inquiry. Indeed, the relation between deconstruction and postcolonialism has been regarded with scepticism, in spite of the work of postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Robert Young, Rey Chow, Linda Hutcheon and others, who have (some of them enthusiastically) blended the two. Deconstruction is seen to be overly preoccupied with textuality and language to tell us anything significant about

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the concrete mechanisms of colonial oppression, and about the contradictions of decolonization.2 However, it is not this critique, insightful and accurate though it may be, that strikes at the heart of matter, so to speak. The tacit assumption has always been that deconstruction and postcolonialism are two distinct theories, which at times may seem complementary to each other, but which nonetheless operate with distinct premises. The project of deconstruction aims, among other things, at decentring the Cartesian subject, and at destabilizing the naturalness of post-Enlightenment categories such as reason, progress and man, by exposing their contingent and historical lineage (see also Critchley 1992).3 In contrast, the postcolonial deals with the consequences, in their material and ideational form (whether cultural, political, economic, or social), of processes of colonization and decolonization. If history, understood as History, is nothing but the master narrative of Western consciousness, then the postcolonial project aims not only at rewriting history from the vantage point of the West’s ‘others’, but also at retrieving the absent voices, gazes and subjectivities of these ‘others’. Young asserts that the task of post-structuralism/ deconstruction is best grasped as the intent to ‘[undo] the ideological heritage of French colonialism and [to rethink] the premises, the assumptions and protocols of its centrist, imperial culture’ (Young 2001: 414). As such, Young’s claim makes a significant contribution to understanding deconstruction and postcolonialism in two ways. Not only does he trace the anti-colonial impulse as the driving force of deconstruction, but also, more importantly, he implicitly makes the case that deconstruction does not make sense outside of the critique of Western Reason and History, and of the devastating impact of Western colonialism. In fact, Young is keen to stress that deconstruction, as a method of post-structuralism, has arisen as a form of ‘insurrection against the calm philosophical and political certainties of the metropolis’ (Young 2001: 412), at a moment when ‘the fundamental conceptual systems of Europe are in the process of taking over all of humanity’ (Young 2004: 50), which he identifies with the processes of ‘western globalization’. In short, he writes ‘[i]f one had to answer, therefore, the general question of what is deconstruction a deconstruction of, the answer would be, of the concept, the authority, and assumed primacy of, the category of “the West”’ (Young 2004: 51; added emphasis). The most powerful implication of this position for the post-structuralist intellectual is that of an ethical responsibility. In discussing the Algerian connection between post-structuralism and postcolonialism, I do not intend to conflate these two theories. Rather, my goal is to highlight the historical roots of post-structuralism in the violence of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter. In doing so, I am able to explain and confront the failure of critical accounts within the discipline of IR, and of the postmodern project more generally, to engage difference meaningfully and to allow for the emergence of alternative conceptions of world politics that go beyond a critical re-reading of IR’s ‘canon’. The dangers of engaging in deconstruction without a postcolonial

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exposé, as Linda Hutcheon (1994) has once put it, are not insignificant. If the driving force of the former is to deconstruct the category of ‘the West’, then must one not pay closer attention to the background of Western colonialism, and to the current hegemonic status of Western thought and culture?

Colonial desire and the politics of Algerian intractability: Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard Derrida (1998: 12) claims that he is ‘the most Franco-Maghrebian, and perhaps the only Franco-Maghrebian’, and Hélène Cixous (1998: 153) refers to her ‘Algeriance’ and to herself as being ‘inseparab’ (Cixous 2006: 24). These self-characterizations intimate a sense of difference from both the French colonizer and from the colonized ‘natives’, and gesture towards a colonial identity experienced as agony, filled with various potentialities and transgressions. Inhabiting neither the space of colonial privilege, nor the abjection of the colonized, Derrida and Cixous claim a peculiar native and (post)colonial subject status for themselves, as members of the Jewish community in the Maghreb. The transgression of such a status speaks about the richness and complexity of both the colonial experience and its enduring legacy in contemporary social and theoretical structures. Jean-François Lyotard uses his experience in Algeria as a teacher both as a pretext and as an impulse for in-depth analyses of the political situation in Algeria (and in North Africa in general), both during colonialism and shortly after Algeria’s independence. Exploring the colonial links in the writings of Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard opens space for a better understanding both of the colonial context of deconstruction, and of the recurrent tendency of post-structuralist authors in IR to sanctify their own exile and the difference of their others. The latter involves an unqualified assumption of marginality and self-estrangement, which precludes other voices from making meaningful claims to a marginal status or from being heard.4 Theirs is a colonial desire that disguises itself as intractability of the other. Such a desire emerges from their persistent preoccupation with subverting the imperial language – Derrida’s and Cixous’s monolanguage – from within, and with the intractability and the elusive character of the (Algerian) other, who becomes the limit of Western knowledge. Thus, an analysis of the autobiographical narratives of these three poststructuralist theorists will seek to highlight those themes that mirror the failures of current post-structuralist critiques in IR to transcend the Western-centric frame of the discipline and to engage otherness and difference in a productive dialogue. Very much like the post-structuralists writing during the Algerian War, contemporary post-structuralist analyses in IR work under the assumption that subverting the imperial language from within constitutes a sufficient act of decolonization of the discipline. They fail to see that this step might be only the beginning to a more open-ended process of initiating a dialogue with difference and subverting their self-imposed marginality. Inadvertently following in the footsteps of Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard, post-structuralist critiques

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of the discipline offer an image of the other reduced to its utter intractability and inscrutability as a resistant image against the West. Subverting the imperial language from within In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida uses his own monolingualism as a pretext for an incursion into the aporias of his own identity or better said, his identification.5 He writes of the (im)possibilities that underlie the construction of a hyphen (the Franco-Maghrebian hyphen): he is an Algerian Jew who speaks only French, a language that is not his ‘own’ (Derrida 1998: 25). A hyphen does not represent an amalgamation or a unity, but the violent imposition (or better said juxtaposition) of two terms, in this context, of two heterogeneous realities.6 However, interestingly enough, the French term used for it is trait d’union. The French meaning of ‘union’ echoes Étienne Balibar’s understanding of the violent union between France and Algeria, who claims that these societies cannot be regarded as separate entities, insofar as they are still very much bound together, ‘for France today was made (and doubtless is still being made) in Algeria, with and against Algeria’ (Balibar 1999: 162). One can only infer that the treacherous hyphen (Franco-Maghrebian) is the most appropriate sign for his relation to Algeria, because it never fully incorporates one term into the other; it leaves them slightly parted and divided. When pondering his relationship with the French language, Derrida divulges that his deep desire was to ‘make something happen to this language’, ‘making the language to come to him, forcing then the language to speak itself by itself, in another way, in his language’ (Derrida 1998: 51). However, as Derrida remarks a bit later, this dream, this desire, constituted his ‘independence from Algeria’, his ‘nostalgeria’ (ibid.: 52). Is Derrida’s ‘nostalgeria’, in his fusion of ‘nostalgia’ and ‘Algeria’, the expression of a defeat, of having been seduced by the master’s language, the other’s language, the one that is not his ‘own’? In contrast, Cixous’s relationship with Algeria is one of desired fusion. Such a desire appears to be expressed linguistically, in the form of ‘I thought I am inseparab’ (Cixous 2006: 24), ‘my father an arabizarre’ (ibid.: 25), ‘my Disalgeria’ (ibid.: 39), ‘the malgerian force of imagination’ (ibid.: 64), and ‘my Algeriance’ (ibid.: 153). These terms express not only states of mind and of the heart in regards to her peculiar Algerian identity, but also they evoke a sense of an ever-elusive absence as presence, an unattainable entity named Algeria. Moreover, such terms suggest a deep desire to effect a rupture within the monolanguage, the only language that she speaks. This rupture would manifest itself through the insertion of Algeria’s memory into the materiality of language, and thus disrupt the very logic of monolanguage by opening space for ambivalence and heterogeneity. It appears that Derrida’s and Cixous’s agonising proximity to and their self-avowed desire for the master’s language and for subverting it from within have turned out to be the master narrative of deconstruction. The desire to deconstruct Western logocentrism seems to translate itself into an almost

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exclusive preoccupation with logocentrism, so that language becomes both the object and the subject of desire. Derrida’s paradoxical task of translating into the monolanguage, into ‘the only French culture [he has] at [his] disposal’, a language and a culture to which his access was marked by an interdict, prompted him to attempt to destabilize the monolanguage from within (Derrida 1998: 70).7 Insofar as this exercise is self-referential par excellence (both in its intent and in its method), deconstruction often slips into reconstruction and recontainment. There is an unmistakable desire for and move towards subversion in Derrida’s and Cixous’s reflections on their Algerian experience, in their denunciation of ethnocentrism, Western logocentrism, and racism. However, when such a desire for subversion is linked with a self-referential enterprise which fails to step outside of the boundaries of Western discourse, and which does little to encounter otherness in a meaningful way, subversion metamorphoses into recontainment (see Varadharajan 1995: 21), as will be examined next. Algerian intractability and colonial desire As Cixous confesses in the opening of ‘My Algeriance’, ‘[t]he whole time I was living in Algeria I would dream of one day arriving in Algeria, I would have done anything to get there, I had written, I never made it to Algeria … ’ (Cixous 1998: 153). Algeria can never be possessed, attained or understood. It seems that as Lyotard himself would put it, Algeria constitutes an ‘intractability’, an absence as presence, which always eludes the one who desires it. Such intractability arises not only for the one who never interacts with it, but also, and perhaps especially, for the one who is born there but who does not quite belong there, as both Cixous and Derrida conclude. Insofar as Cixous’s recollection of Algeria suggests feelings of elusiveness, unattainability, of a thoroughly enigmatic absence as presence, one can sense an aura of exoticism, mystery and reification of otherness. Alterity or difference seems to become, in the being in/of Algeria, incarnate alterity, whose otherness one cannot hope to know or fathom. In Woman and Chinese Modernity, cultural critic Rey Chow remarked that critical discourses of the non-West produce an Other ‘that is deprived of fantasy, desires, and contradictory emotions’ (Chow 1991a: xiii). In contrast, in her autobiographical essay, Cixous produces an Algeria that is nothing but incarnate desire, fantasy and contradictory emotions. Cixous’s Algeria acquires an almost spectral presence, a phantasmatic expression of otherness that is felt as presence only insofar as it is crystallized as the unknown and the unknowable. In the short essay ‘The Name of Algeria’, Lyotard defines the ‘intractable [intraitable]’ as ‘[t]his stake, which motivates the carrying on of resistance by other means, on other terrains, and perhaps without goals that can be clearly defined’ (Lyotard 1993: 166). As Winifred Woodhull points out, in Transfigurations of the Maghreb, Lyotard seems to locate a moment of depoliticization of French society during the Algerian War (or perhaps with the Algerian

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War), so that the intractable/the différend must be located and explored elsewhere (Woodhull 1993: xvi), ‘on other terrains’. Thus the name of Algeria is one of an intractable difference, which will make itself known through other means or in other locations, identified by Lyotard in his différend as follows: ‘What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to différends by finding idioms for them’ (Lyotard 1988: 13). Winifred Woodhull expresses her discontent with Lyotard’s assessment of intractability. In her view, to consider the Algerian experience as intractable glosses over the very grounded and grassroots mobilizations that have taken place in Algeria among students, intellectuals, women and Berber communities. Similar to Derrida and Cixous, Lyotard takes the West as the point of reference and the primary location of the political: he claims that ‘the voice of the intractable difference no longer makes itself heard, in Western societies, in social or political channels’ (quoted in Woodhull 1993: xvii). Consequently, this intractable difference can only manifest itself in poetic/aesthetic and philosophical realms. Such a categorical statement moves Lyotard to claim that since radical Marxist politics have lost their intelligibility (in the West), other political struggles – ‘those of youths, immigrants, women, homosexuals, prisoners, or peoples of the third world’ – cannot effect a meaningful change (Lyotard 1993: 169; added emphasis). Edward Said remarked that ‘[t]he ideologies of imperialism and the critiques of imperialism … shared the same historicist premises’ (quoted in Young 2004: 2). This critique applies to the already quoted passage by Lyotard. Insofar as ‘activities of free spontaneity’ do not revolve around the programme and the tenets endorsed by radical Marxism, they have very little chance of exerting a significant impact. Thus, should one assume that struggles related to issues of race, gender and (neo-)colonialism do not have much chance of being political (and politicizing), simply because Marxism has lost ‘its intelligibility and substance’ (in the West) (Woodhull 1993: xvi–xviii)?8 As for Cixous’s (2006: 81) desire ‘to get out of French Algeria for lack of Algeria’, one cannot escape the fantasy of nativism that seems to radiate from her narrative. I make this argument having sensed a certain nativization of Arabs and of ‘Arabitude’ (as Cixous calls it), which prevents her from conveying to the reader a more nuanced and contradictory picture of Algeria. She mentions ‘the unshakeable certainty that “the Arabs” were the true offspring of this dusty and perfumed soil’, or that ‘the Arabs [were] … the earliest “arrivals” in this land’ (Cixous 1998: 153, 162). It is understandable that Cixous makes such statements to counter the French colonial claims, and in solidarity with the colonized population of Algeria, but her ‘unshakeable certainty’ needs to be vastly qualified in a text that talks about colonial violence. Her totalized and unnuanced victimization of Arabs obscures the ways in which such oppression did not prevent other groups from being oppressed by Arabs, such as the Berbers, the Touaregs, the black Africans, the Jews (!), and others.9 Therefore, one needs to be very careful when operating with ‘unshakeable certainties’ and when assigning indisputable labels of victimhood and

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oppression. This sort of enigmatic nativism, which precludes the ‘inventing subject’ from perceiving the other as ridden with tensions and ambivalence, also relegates the other as the (unknowable) limit of Western discourse’s knowledge. Between Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism and Cixous’s displacement of phallocentrism, the postcolonial subject tends to be recolonized as the wholly other whose alterity is unfathomable, and whose difference serves to refashion a knowable Western discourse. Lyotard becomes the subject of an intimate différend: Lyotard, the lover of Algeria, desires his beloved’s ‘liberty’, as he puts it, and her liberation from colonial occupation (Lyotard 1993: 170), but Lyotard, the radical Marxist, knows that insofar as radical discourses and practices of emancipation ‘have lost their intelligibility and substance’, this lover’s desire is somewhat futile. The lover’s lament is thus the lover’s différend, insofar as he is the same ‘inventing subject’, to use Cixous’s term, of both the yearning desire and of the condition of its impossibility.

The (im)possibilities of theoretical miscegenation: what is at stake in associating post-structuralism and postcoloniality in International Relations? Self-referentiality and the ever elusive ‘other’ In conceptualizing the notion of ‘différend’, Lyotard (1988: 9) remarks that such a notion can be perceived as ‘the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim’. As both Derrida and Cixous point out, they are the (postcolonial) subjects of an historical paradox: they both experienced French colonialism (with its discriminatory effects), but the only language in which they can express this experience is French, the only language they speak, but which is not their own.10 In Lyotard’s terms, their narratives constitute instances of an impossibility of bearing witness to the injustice of their condition.11 Therefore, their projects attempt to subvert the only language they speak from within, and ‘make something happen’ to it, as Derrida (1998: 51) confesses. The problem arises from the implications that such self-referential projects pose for imagining and understanding postcoloniality. In short, deconstruction (at least the kind that is associated with Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard) emerged out of an anti-colonial stance, as a project of displacement and subversion of the category of ‘the West’, in the context of the Algerian War against French colonialism. I have thus argued that deconstruction and postcolonialism are intimately linked. These links are currently found in the works of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Robert Young and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – who want to ‘make something happen’ to deconstruction by grafting it onto postcolonial analysis. Within IR there have been a few attempts to link these two approaches and to move beyond a critique of the discipline from within.12 However, most researchers

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working within post-structuralist and postcolonial approaches have preferred to express suspicion towards the effectiveness of the subversion envisioned by either the post-structuralist or the postcolonial projects. In IR, deconstruction entails a set of practices, which aim to render strange the boundaries, the self-identity and the central objects of research of the discipline, and thus ‘to deconstruct or denaturalize through detailed interpretation the inherited language, concepts, and texts that have constituted privileged discourses in international relations’ (Der Derian 1989: 4). On the other hand, postcolonial voices in IR have drawn attention to the endurance of the Western-centric frame of the discipline, and more particularly have addressed the politics of silence that have excised non-Western perspectives and (hi)stories from the study of world politics. Therefore, the joint consideration of the colonial roots of deconstruction and of the association between post-structuralism and postcolonialism is important for ethical positioning. To practise deconstruction bearing the colonial background in mind pushes the researcher to go beyond an exercise that begins with the category of ‘the West’ (albeit in a subversive and critical mode) and that ends up reconstituting the image of the West without significant attention paid to other voices beyond the West. Deconstruction informed by (post)colonial perspectives opens the door to a much-needed balance between too narrowly defined oppositional politics – a common criticism advanced by postmodernist approaches against postcolonial endeavours – and analyses that lack the groundedness and the deeply politicized positions (stemming from historical contexts), which deconstruction often lacks.13 By drawing attention to the colonial roots of post-structuralism and to the linkage between the project of deconstruction and the violence of Algerian decolonization, this analysis highlights a crucial omission from current post-structuralist analyses in IR. This omission of the colonial background of deconstruction is marked by the following irony: a critical project that aims to subvert the discipline of IR by exposing the historicity of its most cherished categories and thus refuting their alleged universality, operates within a dehistoricized framework, unaware of its own colonial legacy. How shall we make sense of this contradiction? One possible explanation could be that contemporary analyses of post-structuralist IR, just like Derrida, imagine themselves exonerated of the task to scrutinize their own assumptions. Since they constitute themselves as the margins of the discipline, they see their endeavours cleared by default of any potential or blatant orientalism. To put it differently, it is intriguing that such critical projects have not yet seriously entertained the possibility that their own horizons and assumptions might be in need of decolonization. These criticisms are inspired, in part, by Rey Chow’s critique of Derrida’s representation of Chinese writing in Of Grammatology. In a typically absorbing analysis, Chow deconstructs Derrida’s own implicit orientalism in his seminal work. Derrida’s text attributes ‘imagined, fantastical qualities to the East without paying attention to its reality’ (Chow 2001: 70). Derrida uses the stereotype of Chinese writing as an ideographic language and crystallizes its

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erroneously represented nature into the West’s other, who escapes scrutiny and proper comprehension (ibid.). For this reason, the East becomes nothing more than the ‘name of the limits of the text’s knowledge’, as Spivak (1976: lxxxii) aptly points out in the preface to her English translation. The paradox is that a method that aims at subverting the category of the West ends up reifying (and impersonating!) the very ‘metaphysics of presence’ it denounces (see Derrida 1967). Rey Chow assesses that ‘Derrida’s Chinese writing [acts] as a spectre, a kind of living dead that must, in his philosophizing, be preserved in its spectrality to remain a utopian inspiration’ (Chow 2001: 72). I should clarify, at this point, my stance on the (im)possibilities of associating post-structuralism/deconstruction and postcolonial theory. Although I am compelled by Robert Young’s argument that deconstruction emerged out of an anti-colonial impulse, I do not think it lived up to its initial impulse, and that is precisely why I think it is crucial that a re-association between deconstruction and postcoloniality be made. One of the frames within which this re-association needs to happen is that of an ethical responsibility. Derrida (and following in Derrida’s footsteps so many other intellectuals, including myself) adopts an ethical positioning that moves from an ‘intractable singularity’ (his experience of (post)colonial Algeria) to a ‘prudent and differentiated universalization’ (Derrida 1998: 23), for fear that focusing on more collective approaches to colonialism might make the project of deconstruction a reductive one (cf. Hiddleston 2005: 293). When such a move is constantly performed, what emerges is an apologia for self-referentiality (masked as the transparency or effacing of the subject) on account of the subject being able to speak only for himself, so that the other might be allowed her own voice. This systematic refusal to speak for others (while laudable in its intent) translates (also systematically) into a gesture of absolving oneself of the ‘responsibility for the brutality of history’ (Varadharajan 1995: xvi). This refusal becomes another doubly recolonizing gesture. First, the Western critic attributes to herself/himself the ‘right to grant the other “permission to narrate” her (hi)story’ (Varadharajan 1995: xvii).14 Second, this much-extolled reflexivity implies that the ‘other’ constitutes a ‘barrier’ of some sort (ibid.) – an inscrutable and wholly different other that serves the same purpose and plays the same role as Derrida’s exotic representation of Chinese writing. What was intended as a reflexive and critical auto-ethnography, becomes an ethnography that paralyses the other into a stereotypical frame of difference and exoticism. Moreover, moving beyond Varadharajan’s insightful critique of post-structuralist reflexivity, it is not reflexivity per se that is problematic. Reflexivity is desirable and highly necessary in the work of deconstruction. It is a particular aspect of reflexivity that needs to be questioned: that of focusing so much on the auto-ethnographic/self-referential dimension of subjectivity that the other is usually treated in an anecdotal or mystifying way. I develop this criticism later when I engage Jenny Edkins’s politics of subjectivity and otherness outlined in her article ‘Exposed Singularity’.

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As the refusal to speak for others (in the hope that the others will speak for themselves) unfolds in the works of deconstructive IR, the implicit assumption that emerges (between the lines) is that otherness is ‘radical and irreducible’ (Varadharajan 1995: vii). Such a vision of otherness produces a sanctification of the ‘native’, which, in Rey Chow’s understanding, stems from a ‘Third Worldist fantasy’ of the Western critical intellectual, whose strategy is a ‘rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her rhetoric’ (Chow 1993: 10–11).15 This strategic renunciation Chow identifies as the ‘productivity of the white guilt’, the fantasy of the absolute and total difference of Eastern from Western societies translates itself (textually and materially) into a representation of otherness that rematerializes the binary structure (West/East; West/Other) deconstruction claims to have subverted. To put it differently, a project that aims at developing a practice of responsibility to the other (to use an expression frequently encountered in the analyses of post-structuralist IR scholars such as Jim George, David Campbell, Roxanne Doty and Jenny Edkins) continues to silence those on the margins, by speaking over their voices. Deconstructive and postcolonial politics in IR This discussion on the claims of post-structuralism to an effacement of the subject, and consequently to a refusal to speak for others, takes me into a problématique that has been an important concern of critical approaches to IR. The question of why critical IR should be concerned with the politics of subjectivity seems to require no elaboration. One of the most prominent points on the post-structuralist agenda has been the deconstruction of IR’s disciplinary practices of subjectivity. But why critical IR should take seriously the possibility of associating postcolonialism with post-structuralism is an interrogation that requires further reflection. The encounter between IR and deconstruction can be situated within a particular nexus – that between postmodernist/post-structuralist and postcolonial approaches.16 As mentioned earlier, the endeavours of post-structuralist intellectuals within IR spring from an ethical desire to undermine ultimate claims to truth, to allow otherness and difference to express themselves, and to demystify concepts and standpoints that make claims to neutrality and universality.17 However, such tenets do not necessarily translate into genuine space-clearing gestures18 that might include various alternatives of being-in-the-world, nor into meaningful engagements with difference and otherness. Post-structuralists’ current adherence to contingency and historicity seems to preclude an inquiry into the historical background of deconstruction, and into the ‘imperial conceit’ that emanates from the texts of many postmodern theorists whom post-structuralists in IR view as mouthpieces for emancipation. Sankaran Krishna notes, for example, how there is very little engagement with and reflection on some of the problematic statements concerning the ‘Third World’ coming from prominent figures such as Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and

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Michel Foucault, among others. He remarks that it is indeed ironic that ‘a movement supposedly so sensitive to the historicization of social categories and knowledge practices as postmodernism is should also be so amnesiac regarding its own origins’ (Krishna 1993: 416, n.40). It is precisely out of a concern with knowledge practices, or rather with a certain manner of practising critical knowledge in IR, that an incursion into the colonial roots of post-structuralism is undertaken here. I view such an incursion as not only important but imperative, if the self-avowed task of decentring Western visions of world politics is to be taken seriously. I retrace the colonial roots of deconstruction as an illustration of its ambivalence not only regarding its self-proclaimed marginality in IR, but also regarding the marginality of those (post)colonial others, whose voices are still sorely lacking from the conversation (see Ahluwalia 2005, 2010). More to the point, if post-structuralist IR does wish for a genuine practice of conversation to emerge then it needs not only to acknowledge but also perform its provisional location. This location fluctuates between the marginality of the colonial experience in Algeria that made deconstruction possible, and ‘the simultaneous disavowal of that marginality which puts deconstruction at the centre of European thought’ (Ahluwalia 2005: 145). Following in the footsteps of Derrida’s deconstructive work, theorists like Richard Ashley, Rob Walker, Jim George, David Campbell, Cynthia Weber and others deconstruct IR’s long-cherished disciplinary landmarks, such as: the state as the main actor in International Relations (see Ashley 1986; Doty 2003); the concept of state sovereignty (see Walker 1991; Weber 1995); the ‘founding’ texts of IR (see George 1995; Walker 1993); and America’s foreign policy (see Weber 1995, 1999; Campbell 1998). These deconstructive exercises have been immensely beneficial insofar as they have demonstrated that IR’s disciplinary claims to its own area of expertise stem from a hegemonic imposition of Western (really American) perspectives as regards world politics (see Hoffman 1987; and Smith 1995). Indeed, they have exposed IR as a self-referential Western discipline, which takes the West (mainly the United States) as the main point of reference for global politics. It then designates its founding texts, its relevant actors, and its main concerns within the jealously guarded boundaries of this ‘centred structure’ (Derrida’s expression). However, insofar as such critical deconstructive projects have limited themselves to the deconstruction of US foreign policy, and to that of the main elements with which mainstream IR traditionally operates, they have inadvertently reinscribed the limits of the field, and more generally the limits of the knowable (and of the ‘international’). Just as Derrida used Chinese writing to inscribe the limits of Western knowledge, so such critical deconstructive attempts in IR have used non-Western concepts and practices as the names of the limits of IR, to paraphrase Spivak’s critique of Derrida. The paradox that haunts deconstruction as is currently practised is that even as it stems from an anti-colonial and anti-Western drive, it does not manage to transcend ‘the West’ as a system of reference.

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Post-structuralist approaches in IR have been painfully concerned with illuminating other spaces of knowledge, with bringing to light those ‘subjugated knowledges’ that speak about other ways of being, about other ways of being-in-the-world.19 However, the enthusiasm with which post-structuralist IR has focused on otherness and difference is problematic in several ways. First, in their injunction that all difference is equally significant and equally contestable, post-structuralist analyses in IR have operated with an ‘undistinguished postmodern vision of difference’ that flattens out context and specificities (Sajed 2010). In an insightful analysis of the need for historicity in IR, Richard Ashley claims precisely this undifferentiated vision of difference when he states that ‘all other grounds are equally arbitrary, equally the effects of attempts to decide the undecidable, and … equally subject to political dispute’ (Ashley 1989: 279). Why equally? What are the effects of this equalizing gesture on our understanding of otherness? I single out this passage because it is a vision that has been replicated by many post-structuralist engagements in IR, which aim to practise a sense of responsibility to others on the grounds of their being equally worthy of our attention. I find this assumption highly problematic. As I highlight later, in my analysis of Jenny Edkins’s ethics of responsibility, this emphasis on our equal responsibility and on their equal worthiness has the unintended effect of flattening all difference into an undifferentiated ‘pile of subversive marginality’ (Chow 1993: 59). Second, as repeatedly mentioned earlier in this chapter, I find that this prompt affirmation of the equally subversive nature of all difference creates a postcolonial subject cum object, who – very much like Cixous’s Algeria and like Derrida’s Chinese writing – lacks texture and depth, frozen into a portrait of difference that is nothing but resistance against the West. Such an idealization of the oppressed and of the marginalized is many times remarkable by the paradoxical absence of their voices or perspectives from analyses that problematize contemporary practices of security, of the state, of sovereignty, among others. It is not uncommon to find that the legacy of colonialism and the manner in which (post)colonial subjects negotiate their political identities and practices in an age of postmodernity is simply left unexplored (see Chapter 7). In this later chapter, I explore Roxanne Doty’s omission of the postcolonial in understanding the mechanisms of racism and antiimmigrantism in contemporary France because I find it symptomatic of a lack of preoccupation in post-structuralist IR with the colonial roots of current practices of marginalization and racism. However, one could advance the argument that in this context, exploring the colonial roots of post-structuralism tells us little if anything about contemporary post-structuralist IR and its sins of omission. I disagree. It is sobering to examine the colonial roots of post-structuralism because it allows for a better understanding of those things left unsaid by post-structuralist IR. Focusing on the engagements with (Algerian) difference of a few Franco-Maghrebian authors associated with the beginnings of post-structuralism has several outcomes: first, it illuminates the historical context out of which post-structuralism emerged; second, we are

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prompted to ask questions about the current disconnect within post-structuralist analyses in IR between (post)colonial contexts and critical incursions into world politics; and third, it provides a crucial background to understanding how current post-structuralist explorations in IR replicate the facile idealization of the postcolonial subject signalled in the texts of Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard. Postcolonial intractability in International Relations I now focus on Jenny Edkins’s work on visuality and subjectivity to exemplify my criticism of the practice of deconstruction in IR, and of its problematic politics of engaging otherness. In an article entitled ‘Exposed Singularity’, Edkins (2005) muses primarily on the politics and on the ethical implications of the reception of photographs. Her article focuses on the production of images of children affected by political crises, such as genocide and famine. Thus, Edkins chooses to look at the portraits produced by celebrated photographer Sebastião Salgado, which, in her opinion, elicit a response from us as viewers. She also reflects on the mugshots of children taken in the infamous prison of Tuol Sleng (Cambodia), which leave the viewers with the inability to respond adequately. Edkins aptly complements and juxtaposes Derrida’s theory of responsibility (from his The Gift of Death), and Jean Luc Nancy’s formulation of ‘being singular plural’ (from his The Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural). She does so in order to illuminate the ways in which viewing these different and disturbing photographs constructs us (the viewers) as exposed selves, in need to respond (and thus to take responsibility in the events). Edkins’s reading of the photographs becomes the pretext to reflect on the ways in which a political community might be envisaged, one where we would perceive ourselves not as individuals assembled together in a community, but as ‘being singular plural’, or as ‘being in-common’. Put differently, she attempts to understand how we arrive at perceiving ourselves as individual and separate subjects in the first place. While I find Edkins’s article intriguing with respect to challenging taken for granted notions such as subjectivity, responsibility and ethics, there are several points in the text that deserve further reflection. First, Edkins makes a distinction between the authentic subjectivity evoked by a portrait photograph, and the state-imposed (and thus inauthentic) subjectivity of identity photos (mugshots). Her analysis attempts to question the facile reading of the photos of Cambodian children as simply victims in need of rescue, and to explore the ways in which these photos might be read as portraits in their own right. However, an inadvertent juxtaposition insinuates itself in her analysis, between the positive aura surrounding Salgado’s photos, which are more explicitly described as portraits that displace and expose us (Edkins 2005: 362), and the Cambodian mugshots that are described more negatively as leaving us unable to respond adequately – an inevitable tendency perhaps considering the circumstances under which they were taken. The question that arises is the

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following: what makes ‘us’ read more positively Salgado’s photos? Why is their character as portraits not questioned? Why are ‘we’ sure that these photos evince the subjects as authentic and hence, according to Edkins (2005: 364), as ‘someone’ and not as ‘something’? In the same vein, why are the photos (mugshots) of Cambodian children more difficult to read as portraits? Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of community, Edkins employs the notions of being-with or being-in-common to challenge assumptions of individuality, and to posit that we are always and simultaneously being-with, both us and me at the same time. This ethical vision entails that ‘we are inevitably already engaged with what is happening or has happened’ (Edkins 2005: 382). Nancy’s conceptualization allows for a different interaction with and reading of the Cambodian photos insofar as it exposes that there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’, but that ‘we’ are always ‘us’, always already engaged: ‘It is not just that we recognize ourselves in these portraits (these people could have been “us”) but that they are “us”’ (Edkins 2005: 384; added emphasis). This ethical vision of ‘they are us’ inadvertently conveys a sense of equality that erases the specificity of ‘their’ experience. What would a postcolonial reading of ‘they are “us”’ look like – one that would account for the power relationships and the attending socio-political hierarchies between ‘they’ and ‘us’? Are they really us? Can ‘we’ really be them? Do not our privileged geopolitical position and our entrenchment in a Western institution place such an equality (and interchangeability) under a legitimate question mark? Do they not make it tenuous, albeit very attractive? More importantly, who is this ‘we’ in this article? Why does this ‘we’ author responsibility? Perhaps Nancy’s notion of being-in-common aims to alleviate precisely this sense of authorship and author-ity, but I argue that a postcolonial reading of ‘they are “us”’ makes such a claim in need of further critical exploration. Moreover, the inadvertent distinction made between the subjectivity evinced by Salgado’s photos and the questionable (and questioned) subjectivity emanating from the Cambodian mugshots seems to override the being-in-common impulse, and to place the author-ity of responsibility and of subjectivity squarely with this ‘we’. It is precisely this sort of fantasy of our interchangeable positions and subjectivities (‘they are “us”’) that depoliticizes difference and erases its specificity. Cultural critic Rey Chow remarks how post-structuralism/postmodernism, by perceiving all others to be equally different, implicitly treats them as interchangeable, thus levelling them into one pile of ‘subversive marginality’ (Chow 1993: 59), which really serves to reinforce our sense of sophisticated, socially engaged, and reflexive selves rather than theirs. Why is it that it is only us (the reader, the viewer, the Western academic or critic) who have the privilege to respond (and thus to be responsible) to our imagined others? Perhaps this is the source of Edkins’s predicament as regards the aporia of responsibility in front of these photos: they confront us with a subjectivity that challenges our liberal notions of agency and seeing. More importantly, it seems to be the case (implied by Edkins’s analysis) that it is the viewer who determines the subjectivity of the other: the Cambodian mugshots are more

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difficult to read as portraits because they are taken illegitimately by a photographer who was complicit with the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge. In contrast, Salgado’s children emanate dignity and presence since their images are captured by a well-known and socially engaged photographer. Consequently, it is implied that they are authentic representations of these children. What we have here is also a claim to the authenticity and interchangeability of the (post)colonial subject sanctioned by the knowing and knowledgeable gaze of the Western critic. More to the point, to reiterate the very intriguing questions Azzedine Haddour poses in his Colonial Myths, are non-Western perspectives doomed to be always rendered as absences, as the limits of Western knowledge, and/or to be ‘locked in the prisonhouse of Western metaphysics, condemned not to have cultural [and political] texture outside as an outside?’ (Haddour 2000: 159; added emphasis). I chose to engage Jenny Edkins’s analysis (and later on in this book, Doty’s work) because this research is inscribed within a larger effort of critical IR scholars to tackle the practices of (and the consequences thereof) ‘symbolic power’ (Hall 1997b: 259) in IR.20 The power to ‘mark, assign and classify’, to perform ‘ritualized expulsions’ (Hall 1997b), and symbolically (and materially) to confine others to stereotyped images of who/what they are has tremendous consequences in foreign policy. These powers are instrumental in deciding whether or not to intervene in situations of political conflict, in establishing the parameters of aid and development, and in framing our encounters with others. There is a disconnect between the post-structuralist critic’s self-avowed mission to create space for other forms of being and thinking about the political, and her implicit elision of non-Western views and subjectivities. Such a disconnect stems from the above-mentioned refusal of the post-structuralist ‘subject-in-estrangement’ (Ashley 2002: 249) to speak for the other out of a fear that since the Western discourse and practices have been involved in so much violence, ‘any intervention on behalf of the other … will be contaminated by that history and therefore futile’ (Varadharajan 1995: xvi). More to the point, post-structuralist theorists of IR assume that a deconstruction of the Western-centric and state-centric discourse/practice is somehow a sufficient exercise to undermine not only the rigid disciplinarity of the field, but also that it constitutes a sufficient ‘ground-clearing gesture’. How then is it that there has been no significant engagement, within critical IR, with the colonial roots of post-structuralism? If post-structuralism arose out of the violence of the Algerian War, why is there no mention of the initial anti-colonial drive that, according to Young, started the project of deconstruction? If deconstruction only makes sense within the violence of the (French) colonial project, then one can make the argument that current practices of deconstruction operate with a decontextualized and dehistoricized understanding of deconstruction, which is divorced from its initial (anti-colonial) preoccupations. Is there any connection between Derrida’s failure to transcend the limits of the Western-centric discourse he wanted to deconstruct, and

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critical IR’s inability to exceed the disciplinary boundaries it claims to unsettle? As is evident, I argue that both failures can be traced to a lack of a serious engagement with (post)coloniality and with its implications. Nevertheless, if so far I have discussed the dangers of disciplining ‘natives’ through an easy idealization of marginality (identified as one of the dangers of an exclusive focus on deconstruction), what can be said about nativizing disciplines? In other words, to echo my earlier analysis of Derrida’s hyphenated identity, what function does the hyphen that separates and unites poststructuralism and postcolonialism in IR perform? What would be the dangers involved by the gesture of erasing such a hyphen? Perhaps one such danger can be perceived in terms of the concerns and issues of what is known as the ‘Third World’ being reabsorbed by an ‘increasing momentum of instrumentalism’ disseminated globally, which attempts to gather under one umbrella of postmodernism, feminism and postcolonialism, and thus erase and level differences among them (Chow 1993: 69).21 Also, such an association or, to put it differently, such a rethinking of post-structuralism as a postcolonial theory,22 would make the assumption that postcolonialism is beyond critique, that it truly embodies and represents the interests of Third World peoples, and that postcolonial intellectuals are not guilty of the same commodification charges levelled against Western academia. This assumption would be very mistaken. Not only has postcolonialism been critiqued on grounds of its reducing Third World peoples to mere resistant images to Western hegemonic practices, but postcolonial intellectuals have been perceived as nothing more than Western-educated, Western-minded scholars who are engaged in reinscribing the imaginative geography of the West.23 Anthony Appiah has called postcolonial intellectuals the ‘comprador intelligentsia’ (the link to commodification is unmistakable) and suggests that this sort of intellectual is not so much a mediator, but an appropriator of the ‘native’s’ voice (Appiah 1991: 348). Nonetheless this retracing of post-structuralism’s anti-colonial drive has, in my opinion, important ramifications for current practices in critical theory in IR, insofar as it allows for the possibility of transcending the Western frame of reference that so pervades the discipline. By this transcendence, I do not mean that we should try to recapture a long-lost ‘authentic’ nativism, or to disentangle ourselves completely from Western influence. I have no such illusions. In fact, I believe that such a project is as dangerous as the European colonial one, if post-independence Algeria teaches us anything about facile erasures of memory and desires for lost origins (see Stora 1998). Rather I conceive of the construction and portrayal of otherness in such a manner as to transcend notions of mystery, unambiguous victimhood and irretrievable silence. What Rey Chow calls a ‘context of cultural translation’ illustrates the manner in which ‘others’ are also entangled in ‘the contradictions of modernity, such as the primitivization of the underprivileged’ (Chow 1995: 196). Viewed in this light, ‘coevalness of cultures’ does not imply a bland and meaningless equality, but ‘the co-temporality of power structures’ (ibid.). With these concluding thoughts in mind I now turn

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towards an exploration of the politics of exile and migration in the FrancoMaghrebian borderland. In the next chapter I aim to dispel visions of the equality of difference and to attend to the power relations that bind and separate various experiences of hybridity, mobility and citizenship in the postcolonial Franco-Maghrebian space.

Notes 1 See, for example, the skilful analysis on historicity in IR undertaken by Ashley (1989). 2 In this sense, see the criticisms formulated by Shohat (1992), Dirlik (1994, 1998), McClintock (1995), and Varadharajan (1995). 3 For an extended analysis of the post-structuralist/postmodern project in IR, see Sajed (2010). 4 See, for example, Ashley’s (2002) thought-provoking critique of post-structuralist IR’s propensity towards self-estrangement. 5 For interesting evidence to support the links between Derrida’s deconstruction, autobiography and postcoloniality, see Morrissey (1999) and Hiddleston (2005). 6 The fate of the Algerian Jewry is a peculiar one: after the French conquered Algeria in 1830, the French government granted French citizenship to the Jews in Algeria, in 1870, through the Crémieux decree. This constituted the first rift between the Algerian Jewish community and the Muslim population of Algeria. However, the decree was revoked in 1943, by the Vichy government, which implied that a community who had managed to imagine itself as ‘French’ now no longer belonged anywhere. 7 See also Edward Said’s (2001) critique of Derrida’s work. 8 For an extended critique of Lyotard’s politics, see Woodhull’s (1993) ‘Introduction’ to her Transfigurations of the Maghreb. 9 For in-depth investigations of the linguistic complexities of the Maghreb, and of the recolonization projects undertaken by post-independence Maghrebian states with regards to the ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity that constitutes the North African region, see Toumi (2000, 2002). 10 Cixous makes mention of a sort of multilingualism going on in her family, on account of her parents coming from different backgrounds (Cixous 1998: 168). Yet, she identifies herself as ‘a book of apocalypses written in a language I don’t speak’ and ‘hav[ing] no author’ (Cixous 2006: 71; emphasis added). 11 For a fascinating analysis of the ethical and philosophical implications of the impossible witness situations, see Agamben (2002). In here, Agamben seems to concur with Lyotard to the extent to which he acknowledges that the situation of the Jews at Auschwitz gives rise to a différend: the act of testimony about Auschwitz is inexorably marked by a lacuna; the true witness of Auschwitz cannot be the survivor, since the true witnesses have not only died (ibid.: 33), but they have wandered off the realm of the human into the condition that Agamben identifies as the Muselmann, the ‘threshold between life and death, the human and the inhuman’ (ibid.: 47). However, for Agamben, this situation is not that of a conundrum that needs to be preserved so that meta-narratives might be subverted by the mere existence of the différend(s) (which seems to be Lyotard’s argument in The Différend). Agamben’s analysis of Auschwitz represents the positing of an ethical position(ing) of the survivor as a witness to the impossible/unthinkable (even if s/he is not the true witness); it also attempts to transcend the différend, not by a neutralization of its paradoxical terms, but by re-phrasing the différend in the following terms: the mere existence of the impossibility to bear witness, and of the impossibility of speech

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12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20

21

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The post always rings twice? constitute testimonies in themselves, they constitute ‘the event of a subjectivity’ (ibid.: 164). See, for example, Constantinou (2004), Lisle (2006), Jabri (2007), Soguk (2008), and Bleiker (2009). I signal here an edited volume by Cheah and Guerlac (2009), which aims to dispel the commonly held assumption of disconnect between deconstruction and politics. See George (1994, 1995) for an example of such claims advanced within poststructuralist IR. My use of the term ‘strategy’ here follows Michel de Certeau’s usage in The Practice of Everyday Life. Here de Certeau identifies ‘strategy’ as the assuming of a place by a ‘subject of will and power’ which can be designated as ‘proper’, and which can serve as the basis for the generation of relations ‘with an exterior distinct from it’ (de Certeau 1988: xix). De Certeau uses this concept in juxtaposition to that of ‘tactic’, which is meant to imply a non-proper place that ‘belongs to the other’, and which depends on time (as opposed to the ‘strategy’ which depends on space) (ibid.). I chose to associate de Certeau’s understanding of strategy to the fantasies of the Western critic, insofar as I perceive some of the Western critics to be operating with strategies masked as tactics. They claim to operate from a marginal, non-proper place, when in fact they enjoy the privileges of the proper space, which makes possible and enables their claims to subversive tactics. There are IR scholars who have made conscious efforts to combine both perspectives. In this regard, see, among others, Soguk (1999), Krishna (1999), Agathangelou and Ling (2004), Shapiro (2004), Beier (2004, 2005), Grovogui (2004, 2006), Nyers (2006), and Bleiker (2008). See, here, the by now ‘classic’ studies of Der Derian and Shapiro (1989), Ashley and Walker (1990), Walker (1993), and George (1994). I owe this expression to Appiah (1991). The expression ‘subjugated knowledges’ was used by Foucault (1980: 78–108). Jenny Edkins does not situate her work within IR and does not consider herself an IR scholar (personal communication). However, I included her in this statement since her work does address certain issues critical for IR, and thus has significant implications for how we think critically about and interrogate the discipline. Indeed it is worth noting here that many critiques of postcolonial theories within IR (Saurin 2006) and beyond (Dirlik 1998) tend to conflate postcolonial and poststructuralist/postmodern approaches. To put it differently, critics have deplored the influence of post-structuralist approaches on many postcolonial authors (e.g. Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak) on the grounds that under such influence postcolonial analyses are overly preoccupied with textuality at the expense of materiality and political economy (see Shohat 1992; Dirlik 1994, 1998). In this book, I introduce and examine the notion of ‘decolonial’ (Chapters 6 and 7). The assumption behind the use of the term ‘decolonial’ in IR (see Gruffydd Jones 2006) is that it has the potential to transcend the limitations of the postcolonial project and offers a more substantive promise of decentring the Western-centric and imperial frame of IR. I do not express a judgement here on which term/project is preferable. Rather I am more interested in examining the claims to emancipation each of them advances, and their translation into various projects in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland. There are voices who claim that the post-structuralism associated with deconstruction can be better understood as an offshoot of postcolonial theory. In this regard, see Macey (2001: 309); Ahluwalia (2005, 2010), Haddour (2000: 155–74, 2006). These searing critiques appear in the works of postcolonial and/or Marxist theorists who have been cited earlier in note 2. See also, Spivak (1999).

3

Exilé and immigré The politics of exile and diaspora in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland

Children of [North African] migrants will do violence to France as France has done violence to their parents here and over there. They are without memory, but I do not think they forget. Their relationship to France will be a mixture of love and hate, perverse and often deadly. They do not really belong to France nor do they belong to the country of their parents. They live in the banlieues, they have a country: the buildings of the suburban project, a poor jungle of the city … What will they do? For my part, from where I can see them, from where I can hear them (I do not live with them), I would like them to be inassimilable, unique and violent, filled with their specificity and their ability to grasp modernity … They are my mythology in a way, I dare say and write, because I am ten or twenty years older than them, far from them and from their country of migration, always at a distance (and I don’t think I can change this position in spite of my painful inclinations), I know where I am like them, close and attentive despite my age, my privilege of belonging, my difference … (Leïla Sebbar, in Huston and Sebbar 1999: 62)1

The main engagements with migration in International Relations (IR) revolve around securitization, whether concerned with the securitization of the border through a development of surveillance strategies and technologies (see Walters 2002; Huysmans 2000), or concerned more generally with the securitization of migrants (Campbell 1998; Waever 1995; Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002; Doty 2003; Nyers 2006). Whereas most analyses of migration and citizenship in IR revolve mainly around the issue of securitization (whether of the border or of the migrant/refugee), my approach here explores the manner in which literary narratives translate various experiences of migration and inadvertently indicate the socio-political distance that separates claims to mobility and belonging. It should be noted, however, that recent investigations within IR of the politics of migration have linked current dynamics of global mobility with grassroots politics and movements in an attempt to illuminate the types of identities that are made possible both by state-centric citizenship discourses and by claims to citizenship and belonging advanced by migrants themselves (see, for example, Nyers and Rygiel 2012). This chapter speaks mainly to these more recent re-conceptualizations of citizenship within IR while pointing to

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how they resonate with the larger literature of citizenship studies, and in particular to how they replicate a certain image of the subalternity of the migrant present in this literature. Current critical theorizations within citizenship studies on the condition of migrants and refugees celebrate the nomadic dimension of the contemporary migrant/refugee figure and assign her the potential to disrupt hegemonic practices of capital and state-centric citizenship (Soysal 1995; Xenos 1996; Soguk 1999; Hyndman 2000; Agamben 2000; Benhabib 2002a, 2002b; Doty 2003, 2006; Orford 2003; Bhabha 2004a). Such critical studies are undoubtedly most welcome developments in conceptualizing political agency and identity and transcend the usual rigid preoccupation with state boundaries and state-centric political identities. However, perhaps such enthusiastic accounts need to exercise a sense of caution in conceptualizing the fragile and unstable condition of the migrant, and need to distinguish between various experiences of mobility, hybridity and citizenship. Such a differentiation between these different lived experiences of citizenship echoes Aihwa Ong’s critique of the ‘unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects [that] now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power’ (Ong 1999: 13). Cautiously working through the politics of this unified moralism that surrounds the figure of the migrant, my analysis points to how class, race and language inflections structure various experiences of mobility and citizenship. These inflections interrogate easy celebrations of postcolonial hybridity within critical re-configurations of citizenship. In here, I argue that practices of postcolonial mobility in the Franco-Maghrebian context have produced differentiated and unequal hybridities, and, consequently, asymmetrical experiences of citizenship. Moreover, by distinguishing between various practices of mobility and hybridity, I indicate that postcolonial hybridity can also be employed to re-constitute the rigid boundaries of nation and citizenship. I look at selected narratives written by Franco-Maghrebian authors, such as Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Albert Memmi, who attempt to mediate the experiences of displacement of North African migrants while inadvertently indicating the ambivalence of their own location. I discern here between the categories of exilé(e) and immigré(e) as analytical expressions of the multiple experiences of mobility that emerged in the context of postcolonial migrations between the Maghreb (North Africa) and France. They are ambivalent and ambiguous conditions illuminated through language, and through practices of hybridity. The close encounter between the North African diasporic intellectual, the exilé(e), and the North African migrant, the immigré(e), takes place on precarious ground and under the sign of frailty. To paraphrase Tahar Ben Jelloun, if the former can claim affinity to both shores of the Mediterranean, and enjoys a sense of hospitality within French society, the latter’s claim to belonging lies in the suitcase of her illusions. The latter’s sense of time is permeated by immobility and waiting, whereas the former reaps the benefits of mobility. More importantly, they are

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both hybrids, but their hybridity separates them more than unites them: the exilé(e) takes pleasure from her dual attachment, and many a time, diasporic intellectuals have claimed that their true home is in writing (l’écriture). Such a cosmopolitan aspiration could not be further from that of the immigré(e), whose true home is an imagined future, the fantasy of a better life in Europe and of a dignified return to her village. Instead, the immigré(e) experiences hybridity as a confusing and nightmarish situation of not being able to claim belonging anywhere. The diasporic intellectuals, the exilés, and their others, the immigrés, are ‘familiar strangers’, to use Stuart Hall’s (2003) expression, whose inhabited symbolic space of hospitality translates into the not so symbolic space of French political geography with its centre-villes (city centres) and banlieues (suburban ghettos). This preliminary distinction, however, between these two social categories runs the risk of setting the differences and asymmetries between them as rigid identities. Therefore, what binds them is as important as what separates them. The social positionings of immigré(e) and exilé(e) have permeable boundaries and are fraught with desire: the desire for upward mobility of the immigré(e) and her yearning for the status of exilé(e); and vice versa, the desire of the exilé(e) for the imagined authenticity of the immigré(e), discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, indicate the need to articulate the movement between them and the political articulations that separate them. Here I undertake the task to differentiate between various experiences of mobility, hybridity and citizenship with the awareness that they rarely solidify into rigid identities. However, as permeable as the boundaries between these social positions are, their political articulations in terms of marginality and potential to be seen and heard politically are not as flexible. This is a distinction that still needs to be made more forcefully and more carefully in critical analyses in IR: we should not assume that there is a direct translation from the instability and permeability of certain analytical categories into their political articulations. An acceptance of this instability should not lead to a fetishization of language that assumes there is a perfect overlap between linguistic signifiers and their political representations (see Dirlik 1998: 5–7). I start by examining the postcolonial politics of language as they reflect on the uneasy relationship between class, race and citizenship. Such an examination attempts to provide insight into the ambivalent navigation of Maghrebian diasporic intellectuals between French language as the language of the former colonizer, and French language as the tool for resistance against and liberation from the totalitarian practices of post-independence Arabization projects in the Maghreb. This section claims that the act of translating the experience of the immigré(e) through the cosmopolitan filters of the exilé(e) illustrates the complicated politics of celebrating hybridity as the post-modern condition and as the necessary foil to a rigid practice of citizenship.2 In the second part of the chapter, I elaborate on the differentiated hybridities engendered by current practices of mobility in the Franco-Maghrebian context. I also reflect on how such a differentiation alters our understanding

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of ‘transnational citizenship’ (Balibar 2004, 2009) when examined through the lenses of class and language. Following Stuart Hall’s (2003: 502) conceptualization of hybridity in his interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen, I understand the hybridity haunting and performing the Franco-Maghrebian encounter as an historically situated process that is imbued with specificity. As Marie-Paule Ha (1995) so appositely articulated, the politics of hybridity imply for the exilé(e) ‘an exhilarating and liberating condition’, whereby the diasporic intellectual easily falls into conversation with different cultures. For the immigré(e), however, hybridity is experienced as ‘cultural limbo’ through which she must negotiate her socio-political marginalization, her economic exploitation and the disaffection of young generations. I thus explore not only the different degrees to which hybridity is negotiated by the exilé(e) and the immigré(e), but also the relation that binds them in an uneasy and fragile way.

The politics of language in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland Following Étienne Balibar’s (2009) conceptualization of Europe as a borderland, I argue that the Franco-Maghrebian encounter produced a borderland constituted by overlapping histories and experiences such as conquests, colonizations, cultural exchanges, linguistic hybridizations, anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial migrations, among others. In the context of the colonial history between France and the Maghreb, and particularly between France and Algeria, the use of the French language in the former colonies has been and continues to be a sensitive issue. Needless to say, the linguistic encounter between French and the local languages of the Maghreb has been a violent one, fraught with ambivalence and tension. Before independence, the North African colonies had undergone a thorough process of inculcation into French language and culture.3 With decolonization, the three countries in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) have experienced an equally thorough and violent process of Arabization. I translate the term ‘Arabization’ from the French arabisation, which is used by several Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals (such as Albert Memmi, Alek Toumi and Assia Djebar) to describe the current linguistic politics that unfold within the Maghrebian projects of national (re)construction.4 It is important here to indicate that such linguistic politics are part of a larger project of postcolonial nation-building in the Maghreb, which revolves around the idea of an Arab identity, imposed and enforced from above as a totalitarian and immutable set of characteristics. Even if politically independent from France, the Maghrebian states continue to be economically and culturally dependent on it.5 During pre-independence, liberation from French colonial rule was seen as the main political objective. However, after independence, constructing a new state/national identity led to the rejection by the new governing bodies (the FLN in Algeria – Front de Libération Nationale, or National Liberation Front; in Tunisia, the Néo-Destour, New Constitutional Liberal Party) of any traces of the French colonial rule, including eliminating the practice of teaching in French, and transplanting a

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model that was equally foreign to the Maghreb: the classical Arabic model taken from Middle Eastern societies such as Syria, Egypt and especially Saudi Arabia. However, the current situation resembles more a case of schizophrenic hybridity: although intellectuals who speak and write in French were persecuted and even executed in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, French continues to be a vehicular language6 for the educated (including the governmental officials who are imposing the project of Arabization). In Tunisia and Morocco, some subjects in university are taught in French and some in Arabic, since certain specialized terms and concepts cannot be translated into Arabic. A lot of ink has been spilt on the violence, ambivalence and tension of using the colonial language by the postcolonial intellectual for the purpose of conveying a message, which will probably not be understood or deciphered by her compatriots (see also Chapter 6). In the case of the Maghrebian intellectuals who write in French, the following question arises: for whom are they writing? Who is the anticipated public of their works? Jacqueline Arnaud remarked that for those Maghrebian authors writing in French who asserted themselves before the independence of Algeria (1962), such as Assia Djebar and Albert Memmi, there was a sharp antinomy between the audience they wished for and the persons who were actually able to read them (Arnaud 1986: 47). Since the large proportion of the masses in the Maghreb were illiterate, the public they targeted constituted the Maghrebian elite, educated in French like themselves, foreigners who disavowed the colonial project, and members of the left in France who felt sympathy for the Maghrebian national movements (Arnaud 1986: 42). After independence, however, the process of French colonization was replaced by a different totalitarian project: that of Arabization. The two projects are strangely similar insofar as both attempt to erase the rich cultural and linguistic multiplicity of Maghrebian societies, and impose an ideal of purity and homogeneity that has never been native to these lands. In post-independence Algeria, for example, the use of the French language has undergone an interesting metamorphosis. Echoing the dilemma of many Maghrebian intellectuals, Alek Toumi poses the following question, which can be found haunting every contemporary narrative written in French by a North African intellectual: ‘How to explain that this instrument of colonization and oppression that was the French language has been transformed within the span of a generation into a genuine tool for liberation, indispensable to the work of every Maghrebian intellectual?’ (Toumi 2002: 2–3).7 What of the political stakes involved by this Franco-Maghrebian hybridity? Is it simply a case of a former colonial master metamorphosing after independence into an instrument of liberation and emancipation? There is much more to this apparently paradoxical situation. One important political stake engendered by this linguistic paradox is the dichotomy between French and Arabic. The perverse dichotomy between French and Arabic enforces a double splitting (to use Homi Bhabha’s term), within the discourse of Maghrebian intellectuals, both at the level of ‘Frenchness’, and at the level of ‘Arabness’.

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With regards to the former, there seems to be a double articulation of ‘Frenchness’ (from the Maghrebian perspective) as an ideal of culture and of political interaction (what Balibar calls ‘ideal Frenchness’) associated with republicanism, secularism and tolerance, and ‘Frenchness’ as a cultural and political imposition of the former colonizer. With regards to the idea of ‘Arabness’ there seems to be a splitting between ‘Arabness’ as an ideal reflection of what is best in Arab and Muslim cultures (knowledge, tolerance, virtue, hospitality), and the ‘Arabness’ understood as Arabization (arabisation). The latter is mirrored in the figure of the Muslim fundamentalist (perceived as backward and ignorant), and in the current projects of ‘national imperialism’ in the Maghreb.8 This double splitting prevents us from perceiving Maghrebian societies as heterotopian spaces (Foucault 1986), inhabited by complex positionings that transcend the oppositions between colonizer/colonized, colonial/ postcolonial and migrant/citizenship. The relations of power that structure hybridity and mobility in the postcolonial context are as much about colonial hierarchies as they are about internal class, racial and gendered hierarchies. Thus, in post-independence Maghreb, the choice between French and Arabic seems to designate a certain political choice between multiplicity/democracy and homogeneousness/totalitarianism.9 Writing in French, however, is not an innocent practice, particularly when the vast majority of people in the Maghreb cannot really afford the luxury of choice. Since the practice of French becomes imbued with certain characteristics, such as openness to the world (ouverture sur le monde) and an aspiration towards the universal (Salah Garmandi, quoted in Arnaud 1986: 61; Memmi 2004: 51), a question haunts the Maghrebian texts written in French: if French is the medium that can transport one towards the universal and the way to attain openness to the world, then upon which sort of world do its doors fling open, and which worlds does it inevitably foreclose? The text that admirably performs the fragile relation between France and the Maghreb, between their puzzling linguistic hybridities and between their discordant political realities, is Assia Djebar’s novel La Disparition de la langue française (2003, The Disappearance of the French Language). The novel revolves around the story of Berkane, an Algerian migrant who has been living in France for the last 20 years, and who decides to return to his native land following the break-up of his relationship with a French woman named Marise. The return to Algeria spurs him to reclaim his Algerian childhood and to transpose his memories into a book he had long intended to write. Berkane’s childhood narrative illustrates the ambiguities of his relationship to Arabic/ Berber and Faraber (a type of French-Arabo-Berber dialect spoken in North Africa), and to French (language of the humanist culture in which he had immersed himself, and, to him, that of political tolerance). The rediscovery of his childhood neighbourhood, the Casbah of Algiers, takes place against the backdrop of an intriguing parallel that Djebar traces between the current state of political degeneration of Algerian society in the 1990s (the decade of civil war between governmental forces and the Islamic fundamentalists), and the degraded state of the architectural landscape in Algiers, marked by

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dilapidated buildings, idle young men, and women veiled in the Iranian style (Djebar 2003: 67). The reason why Berkane wants to recover his childhood Casbah of Algiers is to understand and reconcile his memory of resistance against French colonialism with the bleak postcolonial Algerian political and social realities. In the Algerian postcolony, the anaesthetizing of historical memory takes the place of remembrance and learning, whereby deeply influential moments such as the battle of Algiers become nothing more than the name of a street, thereby impersonally evoking victims of colonial repression. As Chapter 5 illustrates, the memory of the Algerian War translated into a hyper-memory in postcolonial Algeria, a nationalist platform that sustains the legitimacy of a liberation state turned into a military dictatorship. The memory of anticolonial struggle thus becomes anaesthetized by a hyper-nationalist rhetoric and memorialized into national historiography (see Edkins 2003). The personal struggle that Berkane faces is that of understanding the relationship between his past (he had been imprisoned and tortured by French officers for participating in the Algerian resistance) and his present as a migrant. His character embodies the postcolonial contradiction faced by so many Maghrebians: having participated in the anti-colonial struggle, and having suffered torture and incarceration for the freedom of his nation, he ended up leaving for France, the former colonial metropole, in search of freedom and political tolerance. The use of language(s) in the novel is particularly significant: Berkane writes in French, which is the language of memory, as he himself acknowledges (Djebar 2003: 186), and of the lover he left in France, to whom he spoke in his native dialect only in the most passionate moments of intimacy. After his return to Algeria he meets Nadjia, an Algerian woman, a migrant like him, caught between her Algerian past and her present of migration, who awakens in him the memory and the nostalgia of his maternal language. It is with Nadjia that his past, fraught with tragic memories of the struggle for independence, resurges in him and demands to be put into the written word. Memory wants to become narrative. The Arabic/Faraber/Berber past becomes a French narrative in the present. Djebar’s novel is thus also a symbolical reordering of the North African person’s ambivalent relationship with Europe, the land of both colonial violence and anti-colonial memory, and that of political and economic empowerment (with all its violence, tensions, but also opportunities). What her novel also admirably performs is a transcendence of a rigid binary between hybridity, mobility and exile, on the one hand, and nation, citizenship and belonging, on the other hand (see Isin and Wood 1999). Ania Loomba (2005: 153) remarks that current critical accounts of hybridity and political identity ‘simply pit the themes of migrancy, exile and hybridity against rootedness, nation and authenticity’. Instead, it would be far more productive, she claims, to ‘evaluate their ideological, political and emotional valencies, as well as their intersections in the multiple histories of colonialism and postcoloniality’

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(ibid.). Read through these filters, Djebar’s narrative is not a facile celebration of nomadic identity, nor an unqualified praise of exile. It is rather an illustration of the strange complicities between rootedness and rootlessness, exile and immobility, resistance and resignation, authenticity and hybridity, which converge uneasily in the experience of migration. Berkane’s experience of mobility and hybridity is heavy with tension and unresolved desire between his home in France and his home in Algeria. The dilemma he faces is a painful one: he must return to France, the country against which he fought, to escape Algeria, the home for which he fought, and which no longer wants him. This dilemma indicates the varied experiences through which postcolonial citizenship is understood and enacted as a political identification that is both constraining and enabling depending on the socio-political location of the postcolonial subject. I shall elaborate on this particular point in the next section.

Flirting with hybridity and transnational citizenship In a sociological essay that attracted immense discussion and controversy in France, Tahar Ben Jelloun discussed the idea and practice of French hospitality towards migrants, especially towards those coming from North Africa. The author situated himself quite clearly in the discussion, remarking that he belonged to ‘two shores’ (je suis des deux rives), the two different sides of the Mediterranean: France and Morocco. The author meditated on a personal experience in which he was asked by officials from Renault, the French car manufacturer, to hold information sessions with the company’s managers concerning the cultural and social background of their immigrant workers, most of whom came from North Africa. Ben Jelloun noted the fragility of the position he inhabited during these sessions. Although an Arab himself, he was never regarded as an immigrant (immigré), but as an ‘assimilated French person, who wrote and spoke French very well’, to the point of stirring comments such as ‘you cannot even tell you’re an Arab’ (Ben Jelloun 1997: 95–96; emphasis added).10 Within the French context, an immigrant does not simply mean an immigrant regardless of the background; the French term immigré refers specifically to North African and sub-Saharan African persons who came to France as labourers (see Soysal 1995; Sayad 2004). Thus the term carries not only a connotation of race, but also one of class.11 From this dual argument concerning the sense of (non-)belonging of North African migrants as immigrés, and of himself as an Arab living between two shores, one can infer that in-betweenness is really a luxury, a rare commodity afforded only by those elites educated within a French/Western frame. Language in the postcolonial Franco-Maghrebian context is an extremely potent criterion for the demarcation between immigrés and diasporic intellectuals. Since Ben Jelloun implied that his mastery of French allowed him to be identified as an assimilated French person, the politics of speaking French in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland becomes even more acute as it separates

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the assimilated from the inassimilable. This remark is not intended as a simplistic argument constructed around the opposition between the postcolonial diasporic intellectual and the uneducated masses. Rather, this discussion chooses to illuminate the politics of hybridity in the Franco-Maghrebian postcolony. For the postcolonial intellectual, hybridity entails a shifting back and forth between worlds in the manner of his choice. For the immigré(e) the practice of hybridity acquires agonizing dimensions: not only is the choice painfully limited, but also the immigrants (and most particularly their children) never really possess any world. They most certainly do not possess the culture of the host society since they are marginalized and ghettoized (see Chapters 5 and 7), whereas the ‘originary’ societies do not acknowledge them as legitimate candidates to belonging (especially in the case of children born in France coming from immigrant families), since they chose to live their lives somewhere else. Following Blanchard and Bancel (1998), Memmi (2004), and Gafaiti (2003), I thus understand the term immigré(e) to designate not only a racial difference, but also a class difference in the constitution of North African migrants as quasi-French citizens. The relationship between the immigré(e)’s quasicitizenship and the exilé(e)’s citizenship illustrates the political articulations of asymmetrical hybridity and mobility, and the very material character of such articulations. While immigré and exilé as analytical categories are flexible and permeable, their political and material instantiations are far less fluid than usually imagined. Moreover, our current persistence in pitting hybridity against authenticity, migrant against citizen, mobility against fixity defers our awareness of other asymmetries and complexities that do not quite fit well with these neat oppositions. Thus, our fascination with migrancy as always already opposed to the nation-state pushes into the background the tensions among different experiences of migration and mobility, and obscures the racial, gendered and class articulations of such experiences. Stuart Hall indicates that postcoloniality is to a certain extent the transition from difference to différance; from a polarized vision of social and political life to forms of transculturation and cultural translation (Hall 1996: 247). His vision inadvertently valorizes hybridity as inherently positive and disruptive of state-centric discourses and practices. It also assumes that hybridity is the product of postmodernity neglecting the varied hybridities engendered under colonialism with conflicting and paradoxical political consequences. Marnia Lazreg, in her excellent study of torture and imperial identity, mentions that the French colonial military used the term ‘nomadization’ to refer to a military strategy of rapid attacks by small commandos of soldiers who lived and moved like nomads, ‘carrying their belongings with them, [and] roaming over a vast territory’ (Lazreg 2008: 175). As she aptly expresses it, this type of ‘nomadization’ illustrated the ‘exotic desire to go native by outnomading the nomads’ (ibid.). Of what exactly is this shrewd colonial hybridity subversive?12 My preoccupation here lies not only with processes of cultural translation, but also with the manner in which such processes translate into differentiated social and political categories. In this particular case, postcolonial hybridity

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points to the location of the North African migrant as a racialized category, whose lived reality of quasi-citizenship distinguishes her from that of the exilé(e). This political and social asymmetry serves then to render unstable any easy celebration of the hybrid migrant. Ben Jelloun, as an assimilated French citizen, and the North African immigrés, as inassimilable quasi-citizens, are transnational citizens, to use Balibar’s terminology, but their experiences of the transnational are very different (see also Sassen 2005). Their sense of French citizenship goes beyond state boundaries and is performed within the overlapping political spaces of the Franco-Maghrebian borderland (see Balibar 2009: 211–12). Their experiences of transnational citizenship involve various practices of hybridity, but as Ella Shohat (1992: 110) remarks, we must ‘discriminate between the diverse modalities of hybridity, for example forced assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political co-optation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence’. I am thus creating a distinction between different experiences of migration and hybridity: that of the immigré(e), understood as a racialized and marginalized category within contemporary France, and that of the exilé(e), perceived as an experience of mobility and displacement that is privileged, and socially and politically enabling.13 The latter is experienced, among others, by diasporic postcolonial intellectuals, whose sense of multiple belonging, as seen from Ben Jelloun’s declaration, translates both into a comfortable socio-political position, and into a quasi-celebratory experience of hybridity. I have chosen the term exilé for several reasons. First, this term is constantly employed by Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals to refer to their own experience of displacement (such as Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Leïla Sebbar and Albert Memmi). These individuals never refer to themselves as migrants, perhaps because in French such a term (immigré) carries specific race and class connotations as discussed earlier.14 In his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’, Edward Said draws the contours of the exile, and associates the experience of exile almost exclusively with that of the intellectual. Said distinguishes among exiles, refugees, expatriates and émigrés. By refugees he understands ‘large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile” carries within it … a touch of solitude and spirituality’ (Said 2000a: 181). It is rather clear that what separates the refugee from the person in exile, in Said’s perspective, is not only the collective/individual divide (embodied by the contrast between ‘large herds’ and individual solitude touched by a certain grace). What separates the refugee from the exile is also social and political standing, namely class. Said unequivocally indicates that ‘[i]t is not surprising that many exiles seem to be novelists, chess players, political activists, and intellectuals’ (Said 2000a: 181; emphasis added). In Culture and Imperialism, Said makes the bold claim that the intellectual mission of liberation from the rigidities of imperialism is now incarnated by the migrant, ‘whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages’ (Said 1994b: 332;

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added emphasis). It is this privileged centring of the figure of the exilé as redemptory of colonial violence that prompted Marxist historian Arif Dirlik to criticize postcolonialism as ‘the ideology of articulate groups within diasporic populations who challenge earlier configurations of ethnicity and culture with a new consciousness that springs from their own conditions of existence’ (Dirlik 1998: 8–9). Thus I associate the practice of exile (embodied in my analysis by the Franco-Maghrebian exilé), with a certain privilege and a certain sense of entitlement, but also with the ideological formation of diasporic class-based difference. Paraphrasing Kate Manzo’s understanding of the categories of colonialist and colonized, I do not conceive of immigré(e) and exilé(e) as ‘true descriptions of autonomous people, but [as] social categories manufactured in relations of power’ (Manzo 1999: 173). Thus I do not see their difference as absolute difference, but as relations of power within a socio-political continuum.15 Moreover, as pointed out earlier, the socio-political asymmetry that establishes the relation between the immigré(e) and the exilé(e) has been at least partially, within the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, historically constituted by their differentiated access (or lack thereof) to French language and education. As Marie-Paule Ha aptly remarks, in a review essay of Said’s Culture and Imperialism: Hybridity can undoubtedly be an exhilarating and liberating condition when, having mastered both worlds, one feels at home on both sides and is conversant with both cultures, as in the case of intellectuals like Said himself. Yet in-betweenness can also be terrifyingly disorienting and confusing if one is culturally, economically, and politically disenfranchised like the countless Mister Johnsons of this world for whom the in-betweenness is lived more as a cultural limbo, the traditional breeding ground for fundamentalism. (Ha 1995: 157) I am thus interested here in contrasting Stuart Hall’s cautious attachment to a situated hybridity, one that arises from a ‘very specific historical formation’ (Hall 2003: 502), to a facile celebration of hybridity as resistance to rigid citizenship practices. Ania Loomba critiques Homi Bhabha’s hybridized postcolonial subject who is ‘curiously universal and homogeneous – that is to say he could exist anywhere in the [post]colonial world’ (Loomba 2005: 150). Similarly, current theorizations of hybridity operate with an undifferentiated mobile political subject, whose hybridity seems to be a ‘characteristic of his inner life … but not of his positioning’ (ibid.). Thus the mobile subjects of current critical studies on citizenship, whether refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, exiles and others, seem to be inherently opposed to hegemonic practices of citizenship and capital by virtue of their hybridized identities. It is thus under-examined how gender, class or socio-political locations structure their experience of hybridity, and how such hybridity can be employed to

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reconstitute the boundaries of nation and citizenship. It is to this latter aspect that I now turn.

The diasporic intellectual and her others In an article examining the politics of Western feminism and the representation of ‘Third World’ women, Aihwa Ong (2001: 108) remarked that for ‘[Western] feminists looking overseas, the non-feminist Other is not so much patriarchy as the non-Western woman’. Similarly, for the diasporic FrancoMaghrebian intellectual, the Other is not so much the West but the immigré(e). In Hospitalité française, Tahar Ben Jelloun makes an important distinction between his location as a diasporic intellectual who straddles the two shores of the Mediterranean, and that of thousands of North African migrants whose only straddling takes place in the realm of their dreams and illusions: [i]n France, he [the immigré] dreams of the country he had left behind; in his country, he dreams of France. Between the hostility of the host country and the indifference of his country of origin, he carries with him his suitcase filled with objects and illusions. This is his only defence. (Ben Jelloun 1997: 173) As a migrant to Canada coming from Eastern Europe and now living in Hong Kong, I find myself caught by the same contradictory exchange of the object of yearning: in Canada I dream of Romania; in Romania and in Hong Kong I dream of Canada. However, as confusing and heart-wrenching as this emotional negotiation may be, the significant difference is that I do not negotiate my belonging between hostility and indifference. As Ben Jelloun remarks, the faces of migration in France are deeply racialized figures, whose presence evokes the uncomfortable memory of France’s lost empire and glory (see Chapters 5 and 7). The figures of migrants evoked by Ben Jelloun are tragic figures (mainly masculine) who left their native villages in the Maghreb in search of work and a better life in the land of the former colonizer. They soon had to exchange their hopes for solitude and marginalization. The racism with which both parents and children have to live has deep roots in French consciousness, as remarked by Tahar Ben Jelloun, but also by other intellectuals such as Abdelmalek Sayad (2004), Hafid Gafaiti (2003) and Driss Maghraoui (2003). Albert Memmi insightfully suggests in Portrait du décolonisé, that ‘the North African migrant [le Maghrébin] is not a Russian or Romanian migrant, a stranger arrived there by chance, he is the illegitimate child [le bâtard] of the colonial affair, a living reproach or a permanent disillusion’ (Memmi 2004: 97). Gérard Noiriel (1996) proposes in his seminal study on immigration, citizenship and French national identity that the millions of migrants must be allowed to locate their personal narratives within the ‘master narrative’ of French national history. However, in the case of France, the migrant narratives cannot simply

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be located or integrated within a French master narrative, for they dislocate its claims of national homogeneity, and challenge the limits of a very rigid secular and republican master narrative (see Isin and Wood 1999; Benhabib 2002b, 2004; Sassen 2005; McNevin 2006; Isin et al. 2008). It is here that the role of the diasporic intellectual becomes crucial even if fraught with tension. Both Tahar Ben Jelloun (1997) and Albert Memmi (2004: 57) suggest that by exiling oneself from the postcolonial home (now caught in the grips of dictatorial nationalism) the intellectual chooses freedom over silence and oppression; therefore, for the diasporic intellectual the newly acquired mobility is nothing short of salutary. In the case of the migrants, however, their hard-won mobility only allows them to exchange one misery for another. The difference between the immigré(e) and the exilé(e) is not only one of class, but also one of vision of the world, and one of voice. Whose narratives are included in the French secular and republican master narrative? Certainly not that of the immigré(e), but that of the exilé(e). The latter becomes thus the cultural translator between the world of illusion and waiting, and that of hostile indifference and painful immobility. And the language of choice is French.16 At the heart of this issue of cultural translation is the situation of the young people coming from North African families of immigrants (in French they are called beurs). They are usually referred to within French society as the ‘second generation’ (of immigration) even though they are born in France and the only tie with the land of their parents may be the occasional visit or vacation. However, the marginalization and discrimination rooted in the French system relegates them and their families to the physical and symbolical peripheries of French society. The banlieues in which most North African migrants are housed have attracted a lot of attention as spaces of exclusion, violence and hopelessness.17 Their location within French society is a painful and delicate one. As Memmi (2004: 136) remarks, ‘[t]he son of the Maghrebian migrant has still to digest the memory of the colonial domination and that of the exploitation of labour that ensued within the former metropole’. Thus caught between the burden of colonial memory and the need to escape the background of the family they see as overly traditional and antiquated, the young people of North African origin locate themselves as ‘zombies’, as spectres, at the margins of French society.18 The purpose of this analysis is not to provide the reader with a miserabilist image of North African migration in France. I do want to indicate, however, the fragile and violent connection that binds the immigré(e) to the exilé(e). This position of the immigré(e) is a metamorphosis of that of the indigène (native), which characterized most North Africans during colonialism, a position which discriminated according to particular social, economic and political signifiers.19 This metamorphosed identification implies someone who is uneducated, mostly illiterate, on the margins of both the Maghrebian and French societies, such as poor immigrants from the ghettoized suburbs of French cities, and immigrant workers from the rural and urban areas of North Africa. They are not really French, and they are not really Arab. They inhabit a space of confused hybridity that has

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nothing to do with the glamorous postmodern hybridity embraced and experienced by many diasporic intellectuals, and by the hip hybridized artists and fashionistas. Since the body of the French nation does not want them, they do not want it in return. No wonder that during a soccer game at the famous Stade de France, thousands of young Maghrébins whistled in protest as the national hymn of France, la Marseillaise, was being sung (Memmi 2004: 145).20 Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Les Raisins de la Galère (1996, The Grapes of Despair) examines the condition of migrants situated within the grim geography of the French suburban ghettos through the eyes of a young woman, Nadia, born in France to Algerian parents. The social setting of the novel is the fictional suburb (banlieue) of Resteville, near Sarcelles, a notorious suburban ghetto outside of Paris. Tahar Ben Jelloun constructs the social geography of the novel to illuminate not only the degrees of exclusion to which the North African migrants are subjected, but also their relationship to discourses of citizenship and belonging in French society. Thus the fictional denomination of Resteville comes from the French verb ‘rester’ that means ‘to remain, to stay’, which is such an apt characterization of the manner in which migrants are planted on the periphery of great urban concentrations, living in a climate of social and political exclusion and isolation. Escape from these places does not happen often, since the political intent is for the immigrés – those inassimilable faces of French society – to remain/stay on the peripheries. Nadia is a young woman with great intellectual potential, which she uses as her tool to escape the grim environment of the banlieue. Her family are Kabyles (Berbers), and her father works for one of the Renault factories. He started his work at Renault to replace his father, an old chibani, who himself worked to the point of illness, and had to return to Algeria.21 Ben Jelloun’s brief reference to the old grandfather is memorable within the larger narrative of the novel, insofar as it serves to elucidate a genealogy of quasi-citizenship and exclusion. He traces a continuity of marginalization from the old generation of factory workers employed as cheap and mobile labour (who helped rebuild post-war France), to the young generation of disenfranchised beurs, born in grey and grim banlieues, who feel they belong nowhere and have little sense of purpose. This unhappy situation does not imply that the immigré(e) does not attempt to reclaim her ‘rights’ and migrate from the periphery to the centre of French society. This migratory attempt is illustrated in the novel by the location of Nadia’s parents’ house: her father refused to have his family live in an HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré), which is a complex of apartment buildings, partially subsidized by public funds, situated at the periphery of the city, and usually housing poor immigrants and workers. Instead, he used his savings and built a nice house in the middle of the town, an act that aroused the envy of his HLM neighbours and the indignation of the local authorities. The idea of a family of migrants living in a beautiful house downtown (centre-ville) was regarded by the city hall as a direct provocation, because in their eyes, ‘an immigré was supposed to live in the periphery, or at least in a project [cité de

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transit] or in a rent-controlled building [logement social]’ (Ben Jelloun 1996: 16–17; emphasis added).22 The irony is that the mayor is a communist who assiduously attempts to relocate the Algerian family to their ‘proper’ place. Yet again Ben Jelloun’s attention to detail allows the reader to make the connection between the particularity of this story and a long (hi)story of silence and betrayal between the French communists and the anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, and later on, the fate of North African migrants in France. During the Algerian War, the French left adopted the shameful tactics of silence when they shied away from openly advocating for a French Algeria. As Ben Jelloun insightfully remarked in Hospitalité française, ‘the lack of firmness on the part of the socialist left lets loose the spectres of the old right movements’ (Ben Jelloun 1997: 83). In fact, Étienne Balibar suggested that with respect to immigration, there is an artificial divide in France between the left and the right because both ends of the spectrum end up demonizing ‘alien’ workers and both discourses seem strikingly similar as regards the issue of illegal workers (Balibar 2004: 31–33). Balibar exposes the colonial roots of the ‘national republicanism’ visible in the ‘institutional racism’ that plagues the immigration legislation and the institutional systems put in place. Moreover, he incisively indicates that what we are witnessing today in contemporary France is a ‘recolonization of migration’ (ibid.: 41). This process of recolonization entails the reinstatement of the colonial racial hierarchy which locates the immigrant in the ‘proper’ order of French society. It is this perverse location that Ben Jelloun subtly portrays in Les Raisins de la Galère. The fact that an Algerian family should occupy a beautiful house in the centre of Resteville, otherwise a grim suburb, is unimaginable to the communist mayor. Facing the resignation of her parents, Nadia decides to see the mayor personally and to take matters into her own hands. Although only a high school student (she is 15 years old), she makes an appointment with the mayor. The latter assures her that the communists have always defended the interests of the majority against particularisms; therefore, in the interest of democracy her family has to be relocated into a ‘superb HLM’ (Ben Jelloun 1996: 19). In other words, the presence of an Algerian family in a lovely house in the midst of a grim suburb disturbs the homogeneous social landscape. Consequently, they too have to be integrated within the joyless scenery. Ben Jelloun conjures a range of individual and family portraits of immigrés from Resteville and Sarcelles that bring together a fragmented and varied picture of the social life in France’s racialized suburbs. These are not effortlessly hybridized nomads who feel happy not to belong anywhere, desiring to embrace a cosmopolitan chic persona (see also Hedetoft 2004). The characters brought to life by Ben Jelloun are unwelcome guests in a nation that boasts a homogeneous and unitary national history, striving to fit in and to offer better lives to their children. However, fitting in is never a real option, insofar as they (whether the migrants or their children who are born and raised in

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France) are constantly sent back to their origins, whether metaphorically or literally. It is in this ceaseless fluctuation between the symbolical and literal registers of the myth of return that the condition of the immigré(e) is carefully brought to light. The comments made by Nadia’s father mirror the immigrés’ conundrum: even if the immigrée wanted to be integrated/assimilated, her visibility would always send her back to her roots and thus make her suspect. Nadia’s father remarks that even though possessing French citizenship, she would always be taken for an Arab, since ‘our land covers our skins, and puts a mask on our faces’ (Ben Jelloun 1996: 35). According to Ben Jelloun, it is ludicrous to call the children of migrants ‘the second generation’ (this is a common reference to the young Maghrébins), since they are not migrants themselves, but instead are born and raised in France. Rather their struggles and difficulties could be better grasped if seen through the prism of a generation of rupture, and of the discontinuity they represent. The beurs want to distinguish and distance themselves both from their families, whom they see resigned to their marginalization, silent about their exploitation, and fearful to speak, and from the French society at large with which they see themselves at war. Nadia perfectly voices their struggles between the failure of belonging and the limited options lying ahead: Which one is my country? That of my father? That of my childhood? Do I have a right to a homeland [patrie]? I sometimes happen to take out my ID card, oh no wait, it says: ‘national identity card’. On the upper side it is written in capital letters: FRENCH REPUBLIC. I am a daughter of this Republic. First name, last name, date of birth, height, distinctive marks, address, date of issue, issued by, signature of the bearer. Distinctive marks: nonexistent. They have not mentioned anything. Does that mean that I am nonexistent? Not even ‘rebel’ or ‘enraged beur’ [Beur en colère]? (Ben Jelloun 1996: 124) The passage aptly encapsulates the perverse ironies of the status of quasicitizenship with which the immigré(e) has to negotiate. Nadia’s struggle to escape the peripheral social space to which she is assigned also illustrates the tension between her lived reality as an immigrée and her aspiration towards the comforts of an exilée status. As mentioned earlier, the relation that binds the immigré and the exilé is marked by movement and desire between these social positionings. The relationship that binds them situates their claims and desires ambiguously vis-à-vis French citizenship and belonging. I will clarify this statement by reading Bonnie Honig’s relationship between Ruth and Orpah in the biblical story of Ruth as a different understanding of the relation that simultaneously binds and separates the immigré(e) and the exilé(e). For Honig, Ruth, the Moabite migrant, constitutes the ‘model émigré’ who ‘supplements the Israelite order without at the same time diluting or corrupting it’ and ‘refurbishes the order’s boundaries through her conversion’ (Honig 1999: 192). Orpah, on the other hand, ‘figures the Other, whose

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absence keeps the community’s boundaries and identity secure’ (ibid.). Honig’s Ruth is a figure of double articulation: she is both the example of ‘good migrant’, whose difference is incorporated for the benefit and reinvigoration of the Israelite order, and the foreigner, whose difference and exception(alism) is never effaced (and thus also a threat). The exilé(e) inhabits this double articulation, who, on the one hand, has integrated herself so successfully that one cannot even tell she is an Arab (!), but whose difference is also ever so subtly enacted by the compliments she receives on her impeccable mastery of French.23 The exilé(e)’s ‘assimilation’ serves to reconstitute the boundaries of the French identity, and re-inscribe the desirable and assimilable traits of citizenship within the body of the nation. Thus, contra theorizations of postnational citizenship (see Soysal 1995; Hedetoft and Hjort 2002; Benhabib 2002b; Christiansen and Hedetoft 2004), I do not see the figure of the exilé(e) dissolving the boundaries of nation and belonging, or necessarily opposing state-centric practices of citizenship. Rather I see both exilé(e) and immigré(e) enacting belonging within a translocal space, the Franco-Maghrebian borderland, where ‘opposites flow into one another, where “strangers” can be at the same time stigmatized and [quasi] indiscernible from “ourselves”, where the notion of citizenship, involving at the same time community and universality, once again confronts its intrinsic antinomies’ (Balibar 2009: 210; original emphasis). The immigré(e)’s inability and/or refusal to assimilate is not unlike Orpah’s inability and/or refusal to leave her gods and family behind and join Naomi, her mother-in-law, in her return to Israel. Orpah’s figure, in Honig’s interpretation, serves as the symbolic image of fundamental otherness whose stubborn difference is inassimilable and utterly dangerous. Hence her positioning on the outside. In fact, when critiquing Kristeva’s hierarchical cosmopolitanism (advanced in Nations Without Nationalism), Honig herself illustrates the Ruth/Orpah story with the situation of the Maghrebian migrants in contemporary France: ‘[t]hese immigrants [Maghrebi denizens and citizens] resemble Ruth in their willingness to emigrate from their original homes, but they also resemble Orpah insofar as they remain attached to the particular culture of their home countries’ (Honig 1999: 196). Perhaps, though, what both Honig and Kristeva (1993) fail to explore is how such resemblances are fractured deeply by the migrants’ socio-political standing, access to Frenchness and racial identification, and how such different experiences of (un)assimilation translate into asymmetrical claims to French citizenship. I would like to go even further and suggest that the duality, which haunts the migrant’s (immigré) foreignness, also haunts the différance that constitutes the relationship between the immigré(e) and the exilé(e). When Honig (1999: 204) re-reads the story of Ruth as a story of mourning of the severed relationship with her sister (Orpah), she points to the transnational dimension (and possibilities) of the story, whereby political communities ‘interrupt projects of (re-)nationalization by generating practices of affective citizenship that exceed state boundaries’. The writing of the exilé attempts to perform

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precisely this sort of transnational act of mourning, memory and diasporic communion. Within the diasporic space created by the exilé(e)’s writing, the figure of the immigré(e) emerges as the difference from within (the exilé’s other), and from without (the foreignness within and without the French nation).24 The purpose of this analysis is to show how between the diasporic intellectual and France there is a genuine relation of hospitality, which implies a mutual right to protection and shelter (as Tahar Ben Jelloun understands it): the intellectual offers hospitality to French language and culture, just as French society offers the intellectual the space to express herself freely. Such a right is rarely bestowed on the immigré(e). In the afterword to the 1976 revised edition of his novel Les Boucs (The Butts), Driss Chraïbi wonders why it is that several decades after the end of colonialism, the North African migrants in France are ‘still parked at the edges of society and of humanity’ (Chraïbi, quoted in Ben Jelloun 1997: 168, n.1). The answer is that the colonial image of the indigène as the uncivilized ‘native’ who could never attain the status of French citizenship (and hence of full humanity) has never left the imaginary of French society (ibid.: 105; Toumi 2002: 122; Memmi 2004: 97–101).25 This colonial imaginary has an inevitable fluidity that not only permeates various facets of French society (political, aesthetic, juridical, social, etc.), but inevitably infiltrates the imaginary and the representational practices of Maghrebian diasporic intellectuals themselves. This chapter discerned between two political categories in the FrancoMaghrebian borderland: the immigré(e) and the exilé(e). There are more elements that separate than unite them. What separates them is not only a symbolical and literal geography, but also language and their experience of mobility and hybridity. I elaborated, in the first section, on the politics of language in the Franco-Maghrebian postcolony, because it seems that language is one of the primary factors that differentiates and distances them from each other. What I understand by French language is not only the use of the language per se, but also access to French culture, ideas and claims to citizenship. During the colonial Franco-Maghrebian encounter, it was the access to French language and to secular and humanist ideals that drew the line between the évolués and the indigènes. In post-independence Maghreb, it is the use of French language that enables the exilés to feel at ease in both societies and claim belonging to both shores of the Mediterranean, and it is the same French language that disables the immigrés from claiming any form of belonging. The discussion on the politics of language in the Franco-Maghrebian postcolony is also a pretext for the exploration of a relationship, just as uneasy and fraught with ambivalence, between the formerly colonized (in their post-colonial forms as immigrés and exilés), their practices of postcolonial citizenship, and the former metropole, France. This country, as remarked by Alek Toumi, is the subject/object of a dialectic between the image of ‘a cruel and paternalistic West’ (un occident parâtre) that had been

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rejected and fought against in anti-colonial struggles, and the image of a West as the space where the postcolonial intellectual runs for refuge and cure (Toumi 2002: 113). I wanted not only to distinguish between various experiences of migrancy and hybridity, but ultimately to examine the various forms taken by claims to citizenship in the context of postcolonial migrations. These migratory flows between France and the Maghreb constitute a FrancoMaghrebian borderland, a space where citizenship practices and experiences of belonging move beyond rigidly understood borders. Following Balibar (2009) and Sassen (2005), I understand such practices as practices of transnational citizenship, which both reconfigure the relationship between citizen and nation, and yet, in perverse ways – as illustrated in Bonnie Honig’s analysis of the story of Ruth and Orpah – can also re-inscribe its boundaries. The categories of immigré(e) and exilé(e) are social categories constituted through relations of power: asymmetrical claims to belonging in the FrancoMaghrebian borderland stem from unequal experiences of language, hybridity, racial profiling and socio-economic standing. Ulf Hedetoft’s (2004) distinction between ‘migrants’ and ‘cosmopolitans’ within practices of mobility and belonging speaks about a need to differentiate between various forms of displacement and mobility in a globalized world. However, more analysis needs to be undertaken on how class, race, language and socio-political status structure these categories and the relation between them. The investigation in this book revolves more generally around those mutations in political belonging effected by the intersection between colonial legacies and memory, and postcolonial flows of migration. The desire and fantasy ‘to evade, deflect, and take advantage of political and economic conditions in different parts of the world’ (Ong 1999: 113) lies on the horizon of diasporic relocation of both the exilé(e) and the immigré(e), but only the former is able to actualize this desire, whereas for the latter it always remains at the level of failed fantasy. The distinction is not only important, it is crucial in conceptualizing diasporic practices of citizenship. At the same time, it is the relationship between these two social positionings and the movement between them that draws our attention to hybridity and citizenship as heterotopian spaces marked simultaneously by freedom and constraint.

Notes 1 My translation; added emphasis. 2 For excellent critiques of such celebratory positions see Pheng Cheah (1998) and Marie-Paule Ha (1995). 3 The French expression ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ (our ancestors the Gauls) is used nowadays ironically in Francophone postcolonial literature, since it illustrates the absurdity of the French colonial system of education that taught the colonized from North Africa that their ancestors were the Gauls! Moreover, this example illuminates the perverse paradoxes that allow for the colonized (the ‘indigènes’) to assume a common history with their colonizers, but not a common humanity or, indeed, a common claim to Frenchness. For more on this issue see Chapter 6 in this book.

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4 The term has been appropriated by French intellectuals as well, such as Étienne Balibar (1999: 170). 5 France is today by far the biggest trading partner of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. In terms of the continuing French cultural influence, during my travels in Tunisia, I was struck by how much the educational curriculum was influenced by the French one, not only in terms of its structure, but also especially in its content: teaching French history, literature and linguistics is as natural as teaching Tunisian history and literature. From my personal discussions with Tunisian academics, I can venture to state that the former came more naturally. 6 By ‘vehicular language’ (langue véhiculaire), Alek Toumi (2002) means a language of communication in an urban setting. 7 Passages quoted from this work are my translations. 8 Contra Toumi, Étienne Balibar notes, however, that present-day Islam is not a mere regression to a ‘pre-modern religiosity’, but a ‘form of politicizing the religious within the global crisis of the modernization process’ (Balibar 1999: 169).Within this complex process of contestation, there are uneasy and paradoxical alliances being struck, such as the one between the attempt to integrate into the flows of ‘technological globalization’, and ‘the claim to Islam as a universalist ideology’ and as an alternative to Eurocentric ‘figurations of universality’ (Balibar 1999: 169–70). 9 As I am revising this manuscript and as the Arab Spring is unfolding in North Africa and the Middle East, the social and political convulsions that erupted in the former region seem to break precisely this false dichotomy and to reclaim Arabic and arabitude as a political language of democratic tolerance and pluralism. 10 Passages quoted from this book are my own translation. 11 The term appears also in the texts of other French and Maghrebian intellectuals, such as Albert Memmi (2004) and Leïla Sebbar. Hafid Gafaiti, for example, clarifies that the concept immigré has come to designate almost exclusively, within France, persons of North African backgrounds (Gafaiti 2003: 204). Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel devote one of their books to the exploration of the symbolical and material continuities and interruptions within the transition from indigène (native) to immigré (see Blanchard and Bancel 1998). 12 See also Anne McClintock’s captivating analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim for an example of how colonial hybridity (as ‘colonial passing’) can reconstitute imperial privilege (McClintock 1995: 69–71). 13 See Aihwa Ong’s investigation of the distinction between various types of mobility and claims to citizenship in Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (1999) and in Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (2006). ‘Flexible citizenship’ represents the strategy available to certain privileged categories from South-East Asia (mainly professionals) who shuffle between Asia and North America. In Neoliberalism as Exception, Ong makes compelling distinctions between the neoliberal exception, which ‘gives value to calculative practices and to self-governing subjects as preferred citizens’; and the neoliberal exception, which marginalizes ‘other segments of population’ and renders them ‘excludable as citizens and subjects’ (Ong 2006: 16). See also Ulf Hedetoft’s (2004) distinction between ‘migrants’ and ‘cosmopolitans’, and Zygmunt Bauman’s (1998) differentiation between tourists and vagabonds. 14 Assia Djebar (1999) refers to herself as migrante, which is very different from immigré: first, the former designates a processual condition, whereas the latter points to a category; second, the former implies mobility, transgression, whereas the latter indicates fixity. 15 I thank Susie O’Brien for pushing me to make this clarification. 16 Sebbar’s (2003) confession of monolingualism in French and her dramatized agony over its significance for her work is eerily similar to those of Derrida and Cixous (discussed in Chapter 2).

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17 See, for example, Didier Lapeyronnie (2005) and Dominique Vidal (2006). For a more extensive analysis of the banlieues as racialized spaces of exclusion, see Chapter 5 in this book. 18 The characterization of the beurs as ‘zombies’ belongs to Memmi (2004: 137). 19 This argument appears also in Blanchard and Bancel (1998). 20 During the banlieues riots of 2005, when they exploded yet again with rage and despair, a young man of North African origin declared unambiguously: ‘We hate France and France hates us’ (Henley 2005). 21 The chibanis are Maghrebian men (most of them Algerian) who came to France in the 1950s and 1960s, at the end of World War II and after, and who were mostly employed in the building of highways, subway lines, real estate, and in factories. Very few returned to North Africa, and in most cases their families never managed to join them. Their story as a particular category of migrants is an extremely sad one, marked by loneliness, desolation and non-recognition. Although their contribution to the reconstruction of post-war France is immense, they live precarious lives of marginal health, financial benefits and political disempowerment. For portrayals of the condition of the chibanis, see Philippe Bohelay and Olivier Daubard (2002), and also Leïla Sebbar (2004, 2005). 22 All passages quoted from this book are my own translations. 23 I am referring here explicitly to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s experience at Renault. 24 The distinction between immigré(e) and exilé(e) appears particularly poignant in one of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s interviews published in the Yale French Review in 1993. The interviewer Thomas Spear, an American professor of French studies, asks Ben Jelloun how his daughter would deal with her beur identity as she grows older (Spear 1993: 33). The latter replies that one should understand that beurs are those people of North African descent living on the periphery of French cities in miserable conditions, marginalized and constantly subjected to discrimination: ‘Beur automatically designates suburbia, delinquency, problems of assimilation, etc.’ (ibid.). His daughter cannot be a beur, insofar as she has had a very privileged life, encountering none of the challenges and difficulties that the young Maghrébins in France generally do. Also, to be beur implies to assume a certain socio-political identity that makes you part of a larger collective, with whom one identifies through common socio-political and economic marginalization. To be beur also implies a certain conscious political mobilization against a system that discriminates against you. As Ben Jelloun acknowledges, this is not the case with his daughter. 25 For an insightful analysis on the (in)congruities of the image of the indigène with that of the immigré(e), see Blanchard and Bancel (1998).

4

Where have all the natives gone?1 Spectral presences and authenticity in photographic and literary narratives

Why are we so fascinated with ‘history’ and with the ‘native’ in ‘modern’ times? What do we gain from our labour on these ‘endangered authenticities’ which are presumed to be from a different time and a different place? What can be said about the juxtaposition of ‘us’ (our discourse) and ‘them’? What kind of surplus value is created by this juxtaposition? (Chow 1993: 42)

In the previous chapter I examined the production of exilé(e) and immigré(e) as two unequal socio-political positionings fractured along class and racial lines from which asymmetric belonging, hybridity and citizenship is experienced by Maghrebian migrants. Here I choose to explore the regimes of representation and the politics of endowing the ‘native’ with subjectivity emerging from the association between image and text in the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter. The Franco-Maghrebian authors discussed in this book have also been enlisted in a number of photographic projects for a specific purpose. Intellectuals such as Malek Alloula, Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar have been involved in a number of photographic essays on people in the Maghreb and on Maghrebian migrants in France, in which their voice was associated with the skills of celebrated photographers. Aside from the commercial lure of having well-known writers associated with images of the countries from which they originate, the purpose for enlisting their voices is to spell out the truth of the photos, and endow the images with the patina of authenticity and social awareness. The assumption prompting this association is that the voice of the socially engaged intellectual can dispel the violence of images, and make them speak truth to power. As illustrated in Chapter 2 when I discussed Jenny Edkins’s theoretical engagement with the ethics of visuality, it seems to be the subjectivity of the producer and of the consumer of images that structures the presence or absence of the objectified person’s subjectivity. By engaging the analyses of David Campbell, Roland Bleiker and Amy Kay, and Jenny Edkins (Chapter 2) on visuality in International Relations (IR), I aim to go beyond current analytical frames of visual representations in critical IR, which tend to juxtapose ‘authentic’ vs. ‘inauthentic’ ways of representing the ‘other’. Critical engagements with visuality in IR such as those of Campbell,

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Bleiker and Kay, and Edkins, have provided valuable investigations of the modes of representation through which non-Western peoples and societies are captured within the violent visual frame of the West. However, as I indicate below, such critical analyses continue to speak to Western audiences and to search for alternative ways of looking through which other spaces can be visually enacted without violence. In so doing, they fail to question the current geopolitics of visuality in which the Third World is always looked at and hence always the object of the West’s vision. The purpose of this chapter is thus to reflect on how the native’s authenticity, within this particular visual geopolitics, is validated by the voice and gaze of the socially aware (non-)Western intellectual. More specifically, I seek to understand how the natives’ authenticity is produced in photographic and literary narratives through the engagement of the exilé’s voice who speaks with authority for the hypostasized native. The latter functions as a spectral presence hovering over the surface of the image and of the text, supplementing the exilé’s position with her surplus value of authenticity. Thus the uneasy triangulation between image, text and ‘native’ performs more than a mere claim to knowledge of the other: to enlist the voice/text of a socially engaged intellectual to spell the truth of the image implies that not only is the ‘native’ known, but she is successfully witnessed to. I begin with an analysis of Malek Alloula’s famous critique of colonial photography in The Colonial Harem. His attempt to rescue the tattered dignity of the exposed and overly eroticized ‘native’ woman inadvertently produces a perverse hierarchy between the authentic and inauthentic gendered ‘native’. Moreover, Alloula assumes that the truth of his textual critique is sufficient to dispel the violence of the full-blown reproductions of the colonial postcards that accompany his text; the unproblematized reproduction of the photos is very telling of the fragile and always politically unstable support between text and image (particularly in the context of colonial/postcolonial representation). By exploring David Campbell’s articulation of the role of visuality in IR, and Roland Bleiker and Amy Kay’s distinction between ‘humanist’ and ‘pluralist’ photography, I contend that what is missing in critical analyses of visuality in IR is the conceptualization of a global framework in which the Third World is produced as a spectacle, always looked at by the West. I thus argue that the regimes of textual and visual representation present in these Franco-Maghrebian works can be inscribed in an international politics of visuality that produces the ‘native’ for the ‘benefit’ of her appropriation and control. Practices of sanctifying and/or exoticizing the ‘native’ speak about a desire to take possession of an authentic experience long lost in a globalized and (post)modernized world, and should be seen as a not so politically innocent attempt to claim authenticity through the purified image of the ‘native’. Next I explore the triangulation of text, image and ‘native’ in some of the literary texts and photographic essays that enlisted the voices of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar. Here I briefly foreground the notion of ‘spectrality’, which I deploy to indicate two things: first, the precarious status of the ‘native’s’ authenticity in the images and texts advanced as testimony to her authentic

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living; and second, the politics of restoring the ‘native’s’ defiled authenticity by opposing the politics of surface with a politics of depth (see Chow 1993: 29). My analysis of two famous literary pieces by Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade), and Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in their Apartment), indicates how her painstaking effort at retrieving the gendered ‘native’s’ inner dignity ends up mimicking the orientalist intention by removing the ambiguity of the ‘native’s’ inner life. Similarly, Leïla Sebbar’s enthusiastic commentary on multicultural hybridity in the France of the 1980s in Génération Métisse, with its celebration of hip and avant-garde migrants, reinforces the distance between the exilé(e), an ever-cool, artistic and unattached nomad whose identity is non-threatening to the body of the French nation, and the immigré(e). The latter’s enduring attachment to the traditions of the village and her awkward presence in metropolitan France is an embarrassing reminiscence of those who are yet to leave behind their ancestral village and integrate into postcolonial modernity.

Where have all the natives gone? The (in)authentic native woman in the colonial harem Critical discourses in IR have made different claims on behalf of the ‘native’, or of the (‘colonized’, ‘Third World’) other: one claim, mainly advanced by poststructuralist-influenced analyses, purports to open up analytical and discursive spaces to allow the ‘other’ to speak and narrate her (hi)story (Varadharajan 1995: xvi; see, for example, George 1994, 1995); the other claim, generally adopted by postcolonial analyses, has been to bring ‘other’ voices and histories forward (see, for example, Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Darby 2004). The problem with critical accounts of the colonized ‘other’ in IR is that, as already discussed in Chapter 2, either the ‘native’s’ voice and histories are simply absent from critiques of IR (as illustrated by my critique in Chapter 7 of Roxanne Doty’s analysis on anti-immigrantism in contemporary Western societies), or they are largely conceived as innocent victims primarily understood as (and reduced to) a resistant gaze to that of the (former) colonizer. However, as Rey Chow remarked, our (the Western intellectual or activist) view of the ‘native’ other as the ‘non-duped’ is in fact an instance of the re-fashioning of our own endangered sense of selfhood as the ‘non-duped’ of modernity (capitalism, imperialism or globalization): Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold on to an unchanging certainty somewhere outside of our ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped’, which is a not-too-innocent desire to seize control. (Chow 1993: 53) My interest in the Franco-Maghrebian photographic and literary productions of the (in)authentic ‘native’ stems thus from this triangulation between text,

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image and the ‘native’, which suggests a not so politically innocent desire to salvage the ‘native’ (through an appropriation of her voice) to satisfy one’s fantasy of pristine politics. In salvaging the native, there was (and still is) a fantasy of the search for lost origins, which still haunts many texts, be they anthropological, political, literary or otherwise (see Clifford 1986a, 1986b; Chow 1993). To paraphrase Rey Chow’s compelling argument, in retrieving the image and the voice of the ‘native’ again and again, we (authors, academics, researchers, activists, photographers, artists) hope to retrieve an authentic experience of which we feel robbed by the various processes and experiences of modernity and globalization (Chow 1993: 52). We project our fantasy of authenticity and of lost origins onto nativized others, who become the embodiments of authentic living, and of original, untainted worldviews. Clifford names this practice ‘the ethnographic pastoral’, which translates into a selfimposed mission on the part of the researcher, writer or photographer, to salvage extinct natives (Clifford 1986b: 110).2 The problem is that in spite of an increasing awareness in the last decades of this nativistic fantasy, what Clifford calls the ‘allegory of salvaging the native’ is still largely a framework within which we operate. It is after all an empowering fantasy – one that gives us control over the nativized others, who become nothing more than the repositories of our magnanimous and generous assistance. The ideal of authenticity becomes thus, in this context of appropriation, a double-edged sword: in the process of retrieving authenticity, the ‘native’s’ complex subjectivity is erased and hypostasized as either an innocent victim or a resistant gaze, while the same ideal is deployed at times to indicate the defiled and less-than-exalted character of the ‘native’s’ resistance. This ideal is thus strategically positioned, albeit in an implicit manner at times, so as to accentuate the flawed character of the particular representation, its falling short from a specific ideal. It is in this double-edged character of authenticity that the political character and implications of photographic representation need to be understood. I illustrate my argument by looking at Malek Alloula’s critique of the colonial postcards in The Colonial Harem. Alloula (1986) examines a set of colonial postcards featuring femmes mauresques and produced in the first three decades of the 20th century by French photographers, and critiques the perversity of colonial vision, which metamorphoses people into sexualized and exoticized images for the enjoyment of the ‘civilized’ population of the metropole.3 The postcards in question featured Maghrebian women (for the most part) in various poses and scenes, varying from scenes representing (imagined) daily life within North African households to vulgar scenes of bare-chested women in highly eroticized poses. Alloula claims that the postcards have no legitimacy of representation because, first, they are simple emanations of the photographer’s orientalist sexual fantasies which have little, if anything, to do with the reality of Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian domestic life. Second, and this is where the politics of authenticity come more forcefully into play, the women featured by these postcards are not ‘real’ Algerian women, but paid models, for the most part

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prostitutes, who agreed to pose for the camera. The ‘real’ Algerian woman, referred to by Alloula (1986: 17) as ‘the other Algerian’, the great absentee from the photos, who refused to unveil, is also the real subject of the photos, the subject of the photographer’s fetishism, while the paid models seem to be nothing more than the channels and empty vessels of the fetishized representations. Thus Alloula’s double mission in his critique is to subvert the stereotype of the oriental(ized) feminine body, and to disclose the real nature of the colonial gaze (ibid.: 5). The perspective through which he chooses to perform his critique is deeply troubling in many respects. The language he uses for his critique distinguishes between the two types of Algerian women: the ‘real’ Algerian woman is referred to as the Algérienne, whereas the paid model, the fake Algerian woman, her ‘double’ and her ‘stand-in’, is named the algérienne (ibid.: 129, n.6). The algérienne is the inauthentic Algerian woman, nothing but the instrument of the colonial photographer’s sexualized vision. This hierarchization is extremely troubling and telling of several symptoms. The first symptom is that of degraded authenticity. The paid models (most of them prostitutes) are simply the ‘double’ of the ‘real’ Algerian women, the spectral shadows of an ideal of oriental femininity and sexuality that had incited the erotic fantasies of the colonial photographer. The authentic ‘natives’ are the Algerian women whom we do not see in the photos, as the photographer was denied access to the domestic space of Algerian households. Thus in one stroke, the algériennes become the inauthentic ‘natives’, the duped ones who are tainted by the colonial gaze. Since they are nothing more than spectral images of the Algériennes, they are found lacking, or to put it in Alloula’s own words, they are ‘the always … impoverished version of the original’ (ibid.: 18). Alloula (1986: 129, n.10) remarks that the postcards ‘embark upon a process [of abstraction from the real] at the end of which the native no longer exists as such. He or she disappears’. However, the paradox here is that only with the coming of colonialism have people from various corners of the earth become ‘natives’: the ‘native’ as a mode of identification is a product of colonialism (see Chow 1993: 51). One must infer from Alloula’s puzzling statement that what he means by the disappearing ‘native’ is the authentic native, the Algérienne. His mission is thus that of salvaging the authentic ‘natives’ at the expense of the inauthentic ones, who are paraded in front of our eyes as passive and ecstatic icons ‘submitting to the cosmetic make-over’ (Alloula 1986: 62). To paraphrase Spivak, the women in the postcards are triply in shadow (see Spivak 1988). Their voices and choices are never considered, they are only hinted at in the equally spectral evocation of the Algériennes, whose shadows hover over their ‘doubles’, the ever impoverished imitations (as Alloula perceives them).4 Stuart Hall (1997b: 268) remarks that ‘[f]etishism … is a strategy for having-it-both-ways: for both representing and not-representing the tabooed, dangerous or forbidden object of pleasure and desire’. According to Hall, fetishism involves substitution and displacement (of something for another

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something that is both forbidden and tantalizing), and disavowal (whereby the strong attraction towards that forbidden something is both indulged and denied) (ibid.: 266–67).5 Alloula, in his critique, manages to compel the reader that the women in the postcards are displacements and substitutions for something else, for the ‘real’ Algerian women who were the forbidden yet intoxicating ‘objects’ denied both to the sight and to the touch of the colonial gaze. In his approach, though, he denies the reader (and himself) an account of the social and political context in which these women lived as prostitutes during the French colonial rule, while indulging in the act of objectifying them as nothing more than impoverished imitations of an original one cannot discern in the postcards. Thus, Alloula, while making plainly and painfully visible the exposed bodies of the algériennes, and concealing himself under the cloak of the invisible and sympathetic critic, fails to name his own fetishism: the authentic ‘native’ whose presence is obscured by the body of its inauthentic copy. Another problem with Alloula’s critique is that it assumes that its textual force is more than sufficient to reverse and dissipate the violence of the images he chose to reproduce in his book. The full-blown captions of exoticized and sexualized bodies exert a mesmerizing and hypnotic effect on the viewer: one cannot stop looking, and the text becomes somewhat superfluous, an appendix to the image. Both Carol Schloss and Marnia Lazreg consider Alloula’s critique to be redundant when considered in association with his exposure of the photos in question: the women are once again violated, and exposed to an even wider audience (than the intended original one) (Schloss and Lazreg, quoted in Vogl 2003: 164).6 In an article on geopolitics and visuality, David Campbell addresses the ‘shift from the social construction of the visual field to the visual performance of the social field’ (Campbell 2007: 357). Putting forth the notion that ‘the photograph is a construction that obscures its own production’, Campbell encourages the reader to see photographs not as ‘icons’ or ‘indices’, but as ‘symbols’ (ibid.: 379).7 He suggests that photographs (images in general) are as much part of power relations as they are generators of power relations, which structure our views of the world, and our encounters with others (ibid.: 361). Examining the photographic coverage by the media of the Darfur conflict, Campbell points to the ways in which such images are inscribed within a larger context of a political and social representation of the African continent. It is presented as a place ridden with wars, famine and diseases, thus foregoing the social, political and historical specificity of the Darfur conflict (see also Bleiker and Kay 2007). This stereotyping of the Darfur conflict as yet another example of African tribalism deters the international public from being properly informed about the conflict, and prevents any efficient or politically meaningful assistance to the people caught in this crisis. Campbell’s preoccupation lies not with the accuracy of representation (in images) of the sites of conflict and of the people involved in them. Rather, he is more concerned with the ways in which ‘sites (and people in those sites) are enacted

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through sight’ (Campbell 2007: 380). More specifically, the crux of the issue is the grand narrative in which these images are inscribed, and the generalized message they are conveying. He thus disavows the ‘unfortunate tendency to slide back into reductive treatments of visual images as all-powerful forces and to engage in a kind of iconoclastic critique which imagines that the destruction or exposure of false images amounts to a political victory’ (W.J.T. Mitchell, quoted in Campbell 2007: 359; my emphasis). I reproduce this quotation to indicate the problematic character of Alloula’s critique of the colonial postcards, which assumes that his exposure of the falseness of the colonial images ‘amounts to a political victory’, or as he himself puts it, exorcizes the ‘evil eye’ of the colonial gaze, by ‘return[ing] this immense postcard to its sender’ (Alloula 1986: 5; my emphasis). This implied claim to political victory over the falseness of the images was also subtly enacted in Jenny Edkins’s article ‘Exposed Singularity’ (discussed in Chapter 2), where a distinction insinuated itself between the authentic subjectivity of the portrait-photographs taken by Salgado, and the state-imposed (and hence inauthentic) mug-shots of the Tuol Sleng childprisoners. It is not the authentic/inauthentic distinction that is problematic, but rather how it is used and for what purposes. In an article on the politics of representation of HIV/AIDS in Africa, Roland Bleiker and Amy Kay (2007) critique what they call ‘humanist photography’, for the way in which it enacts grand narratives of decontextualized suffering, famine and pain, which are emblematic within the global circulation of stereotypes of Africa as a continent of deprivation and misery.8 They suggest ‘pluralist photography’ as an alternative mode of representation, in which subjects affected by the HIV virus take the photographic practice in their own hands and share with the public their story of what it is like to live with HIV. In this alternative approach, people living with the disease are no longer objects of photographic (and political) pity, reduced to images of decaying bodies, but agents telling their own story and offering a message through their perspective. Bleiker and Kay (2007: 152) claim this constitutes a more democratic mode of representation, whereby people who are usually seen as passive receptacles of representation undertake the practice of representation themselves and are thus involved in the creation and dissemination of meaning. Both Bleiker and Kay thoughtfully reflect on both the potential and the limits of this alternative representational practice (ibid.: 157–58). They acknowledge that it is neither authentic nor devoid of power relations (ibid.: 157). What I find intriguing is their juxtaposition of humanist and pluralist photography as different modes of representing the marginalized non-Western ‘other’. What is thus missing in their analysis is an interrogation of the medium of representation (photography) within a global context in which Africa (and the rest of the Third World) is always looked at by the West. The preoccupation of critical analyses on visuality in IR seems to be more with which mode of representation would be more authentic and less violent, and less with a regime of representation in which the Third World is always looked at and

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witnessed to. Bleiker and Kay’s analysis indicates that in ‘pluralist photography’ the Third World is always looked at through its own eyes, which renders it less problematic and more empowering. What is not clear, though, is the geopolitics of a practice of visuality that aims to bring the Ethiopian children’s own photo accounts of living with HIV ‘in contact with western audiences’ (Bleiker and Kay 2007: 158; my emphasis). Of course, the mode of representation is different, and the Western ‘expert’ is a socially engaged documentary photographer (Eric Gottesman) and not the ubiquitous ‘parachute reporter’ who is flown in and out of ‘disaster zones’ solely with the purpose of taking a few stereotypical shots that would ‘grace’ the cover of international media (ibid.: 145). However, the target audience is the same (Western audiences) and the larger global frame of the Third World’s (in)authentic image being looked at by the West remains largely unquestioned. To put it differently, there is little analysis in IR, even among critical approaches, which examines how ‘the Third World is produced as spectacle’ for the consumption of the First World, to satisfy desires either of entertainment or of ‘spiritual enrichment’ and social awareness (Chow 1991b: 84; see also Orford 2003). By exploring the photographic essays with which a number of FrancoMaghrebian intellectuals have associated their voices, I am not interested in exposing the falseness or artificiality of the photos themselves. Rather, I focus on the ‘interlocking relations’ among literary texts, images and ‘natives’, since the geopolitics of literary productions and the ways in which visuality is deployed in its support are rarely examined in IR.9 There is an implicit impulse present in Alloula’s critique and in Bleiker and Kay’s analysis, of replacing the rhetoric of the image/surface regarding the representation of the ‘native’ with a rhetoric of depth and meaning. Such an exchange, as is examined below, speaks more about the desire of the gazer to produce a ‘genuine’ subalternity and thus to take control of an authentic experience imagined impossible in a world of surfaces rather than about a search for a more genuine representation of the ‘native’s’ subjectivity.

The ‘native’ as spectral presence in photography and literary narratives The idea of spectrality deployed here is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on the spectre or the phantasm, which appears in Monolingualism of the Other and Spectres of Marx, and by Mireille Rosello’s discussion on ‘ghostly encounters’ in her Performative Encounters: France and the Maghreb. Derrida uses the notion of ‘spectrality’ to refer to a moment that no longer belongs to time, a somewhat timeless moment: ‘the apparition of the spectre does not belong to that time’ (Derrida 1994: xx). In the ‘Exordium’ to his Spectres of Marx, Derrida associates the terms of ghosts and spectrality to a certain ideal of justice (and responsibility), which must take into account ‘the principle of respect for others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born’ (ibid.: xix).

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This notion of spectrality as justice involves the idea of haunting. Derrida’s argument is that ‘haunting is historical, … but it is not dated’ (ibid.: 4). The word used in French by Derrida is hantise, which, aside from meaning the action of haunting, also implies obsessive fear, a ‘fixed idea, or a nagging memory’ (see Derrida 1994: 177, n.2). What I am particularly intrigued by in this section is not only the idea of haunting per se, but especially the other meanings associated with it, such as obsession, memory, fear. In fact, Mireille Rosello, in her study of the performative encounters between France and the Maghreb, discusses the practice of ‘hauntology’, through which ‘[n]ot only do the living come to talk to the dead (to their dead), but they also meet other people, individuals that history forbids them to befriend’ (Rosello 2005: 129). These forbidden (post)colonial encounters address the politics of obsessive fear and nagging memory, which I explore in the context of the gendered spectral presences of some of Assia Djebar’s literary productions (L’Amour, la fantasia and Femmes d’Alger), and Leïla Sebbar’s collaboration in the Femmes d’Afrique du Nord. Cartes Postales (1885–1930). This exploration of Franco-Maghrebian texts and images focuses not only on the politics of representation in general, but more specifically on the politics that stem from the retrieval of the ‘native’s’ voice and image. I also argue here that such presences are rendered both in text and photography as spectral presences touched by timelessness, futility of action, simplicity, and doomed to haunt our imaginary as symbols of an authenticity long lost. As mentioned earlier, the uneasy triangulation between image, text and ‘native’ performs more than a mere claim to knowledge of the other: to enlist the voice/text of a socially engaged intellectual to spell the truth of the image implies that not only is the ‘native’ known, but that she is successfully witnessed to. Paraphrasing Rey Chow’s argument in Writing Diaspora, I argue that the politics of ‘native as image’ is rarely explored, in the sense that there is always a tendency to pit the politics of depth against the politics of image (surface) (see Chow 1993: 29). This practice implies an attempt to restore the inner truth of the ‘native’, by substituting the ‘bad’ image with a ‘correct’ image that both annihilates the former and validates the ‘native’s’ authenticity (ibid.). In the cases that I examine below, the restoration of truth and authenticity is done through associating textual commentary with images, in an effort to illuminate both the truth of the images in question and, to a certain extent (in some cases subtle, in others more explicit), to confirm the authority of the voice that links the text to the image. The gendered ‘native’: between a picture and a thousand words In L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade), Assia Djebar deftly weaves together present and past history, first- and third-person narrative, to tell the story (or rather the stories) of Algeria, from its conquest by the French in 1830 to its postcolonial present. The book is published as a novel, but its content is a mixture of fiction, autobiographical narrative, historical

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narratives and personal interviews. Djebar’s novel is an act of haunting, as its narrative addresses both those others who are no longer here/there, and those who are not yet born. However, it is also an act of nagging memory and obsessive fear, as the author feels compelled to tell the story(ies) of Algeria, so as to resurrect the ‘nomadic memory’ (mémoire nomade) and ‘the cut off voice’ (voix coupée) of the colonized Algerian woman (Djebar 1995: 313). In fact, as Djebar suggests, both in this narrative and in Femmes d’Alger, it is the feminine voice that constitutes the reality-woman (réalité-femme), not the feminine body, as the body could wound all gaze directed at it (il blesserait chaque regard) (ibid.: 255). Consider the following scene in the novel: a group of veiled Algerian women are travelling to a local sacred place, when they are informed that a man approaches. They readjust their veils, which had slipped on their shoulders, and cover themselves carefully, but soon they are curiously relieved by the fact that the man was French, and so they feel they can relax about their attire. The narrator makes the observation that the usual prudishness is needed no longer, since ‘the passer-by, because he is French, European, Christian, does he really have a gaze?’ (ibid.: 179).10 The answer is a negative one: since he is a foreigner, a stranger (un étranger), he only thinks he has taken them unawares, he only imagines to have seen them (ibid.: 180). In other words, his power of vision (and hence his power in general) lies only in his imagination, Djebar suggests. Alloula made a similar claim in his critique of the colonial postcards: the foreign photographer, just like the foreigner who happened to pass by, only imagined to have seen the Algériennes, when in fact, in Alloula’s view, he only captured the algériennes. As imagined and illusory as the colonial power of vision is thought to be here, the material power that was enabled by such a vision made itself felt painfully and violently on the bodies of women. The colonial postcards constitute a visual and symbolic violence, as much as they constitute a material violence of the exposure of the bodies of the ‘natives’. The move intended by Djebar is to restore the Algerian women’s subjectivities, and to reverse colonial violence by making the colonial gaze futile and ineffective. This move of reversal prompts her to state that: the native, even when he seems subdued, is not defeated. He does not raise his eyes to gaze at his conqueror. He does not ‘recognize’ him. He does not name him. What is a victory if it is not named? (Djebar 1995: 83) The episode, from which this quote is extracted, refers to the refusal of the Algerian women taken prisoner by the French, to look at their captors and acknowledge their presence. In this manner, Djebar attempts to salvage the defeated ‘natives’ by denying the colonizers their victory. Instead of generalizing the ‘native’s’ pride and her refusal to be defeated, perhaps a more effective move would have been for Djebar to examine the ‘native’s’ defeated and ‘defiled image’ in that particular historical moment without attempting to

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sanctify and rescue the ‘native’s’ dignity. This episode constitutes as much the famous postcolonial returned gaze, as it points to a hauntingly obsessive fear of not being able to tell the story. It also points to a nagging memory of the historical and societal erasure of the feminine voices. As the story is told in French, the language of the colonizer, Djebar ponders obsessively, throughout her narratives, over the inevitable violence, veiling and omissions that her choice of language engenders.11 As she puts it, to write autobiographically in the opponent’s language (la langue adverse) amounts to choosing another veil (Djebar 1995: 302). To the defiled image of the ‘native’ Djebar constantly attempts to juxtapose a salvaged and luminous image, one that attempts to restore the inner truth of the ‘native’, her true self. The problem that arises with this practice, aside from the tenuous binary that is created by opposing the politics of image (surface) to the politics of depth (Chow 1993: 29), is that this salvaging is done in a language (French) that is not only the langue adverse. It is also a language little spoken or understood by those whose subjectivity she wishes to restore. For whom does then she speak the story(ies) of the Algerian women? Why does she not speak to the Algerian women whom she calls her ‘departed sisters’ (soeurs disparues) (Djebar 1995: 285)? I am not advocating for the imperious necessity of using only the ‘original’ language when addressing one’s interlocutors,12 but the fact that the medium in which she chose to write the story of her Algerian sisters is French begs many questions. In this sense, are Djebar’s ‘departed sisters’ her interlocutors or are they spectral presences that haunt the surface of the narrative? Although Derrida’s use of spectrality is that of spectrality as justice (and responsibility), of ghostly revisitations that transcend dated time, I find this timelessness of the spectral presence to be depoliticizing. I do not mean here that Djebar historically decontextualizes the Algerian feminine presence; on the contrary, in L’Amour, la fantasia, the various feminine characters are presented within their particular time. However, I do argue that by constantly attempting to restore the women’s depth, she decontextualizes these feminine presences as women, meaning that they are doomed to hover over the narrative as sanctified spectres, images of exclusion and oppression. Femmes d’Alger is a meditation, through story and commentary, on Delacroix’s famous painting that shares its name with that of Djebar’s book. Djebar describes the episode where Delacroix sketches the scene of the harem in Algiers: Monsieur Poirel, chief engineer in the harbour of Algiers, and a lover of painting, convinces his Algerian employee, after lengthy discussions, to allow Delacroix to enter his home and sketch a family scene. Djebar reflects for several pages on the beauty of the masterpiece, and sees it as the first painting to approach a feminine Orient without falling into the earlier clichés of oriental nudity and sensuality (Djebar 2002: 228). Djebar’s evocation of Delacroix’s act of painting struck me as problematic for several reasons. First, Djebar does very little to explore the power relations between Monsieur Poirel and his Algerian employee, who was obviously coerced into

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consenting to have his private life exposed in a painting. Djebar briefly mentions it (ibid.: 233), but does not explore it. Nor does she do much to question Delacroix’s representation of the family scene. The issue here is not the veracity of the representation, but the re-performance of a set of fantasies (a longing for the gendered ‘native’s’ authenticity), whose symbolic violence Djebar does little to unsettle. She seems so entranced by the painting that she is compelled to state that with Delacroix’s painting, ‘the vision, utterly new, has been perceived as pure image’ (Djebar 2002: 225). This utterly new vision, although new in its aesthetic valences, is not so new with regard to its symbolic content. The women act as fetishized images of Delacroix’s own fantasies of authenticity. They are the remnants of a long lost ideal of womanhood: submissive, household-bound and representing, in the painter’s own words, ‘the woman in the gynaecium looking after the children, spinning wool, and weaving wonderful fabrics. It is the woman as I understand her!’ (ibid.: 248, n.1). This enactment of the fantasy of authentic womanhood and femininity prompts Delacroix to exclaim: ‘This is beautiful! This is just as in Homer’s time!’ (ibid.). In her reading of European Orientalist painting (Delacroix, Ingres, Matisse, Picasso), Moroccan sociologist Fatema Mernissi points to how ‘[t]he tragic dimension so present in the Muslim harems – fear of women and male selfdoubt – is missing in the Western harem’ (Mernissi 2001: 16). As mentioned earlier, Delacroix sees only supine women offering themselves and their secrets to his aestheticized and fetishizing gaze. He cannot and does not capture the politics of the harem, insofar as he is seduced by the image of idealized (orientalized) femininity. Both the photographer of colonial postcards in Alloula’s Colonial Harem and Delacroix in Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger share that ‘fetishist compulsion’ (Djebar 2002: 226), which prompts them to capture the feminized other’s image, whether in painting or photography. Why is the painter treated so leniently and the photographer so harshly? Is the aestheticized gaze one that can be forgiven? Is the aesthetic the criterion for discerning between symbolic and material violation, on the one hand (such as that of the colonial photographer), and mere artistic transposition on the other (in the case of Delacroix)? A similar innocuous distinction seems to be operating in Jenny Edkins’s article, discussed in Chapter 2, between the benign photographic capturing of the ‘native’ by the socially engaged photographer (Sebastiaõ Salgado), and the depersonalizing and inauthentic mug-shots taken on behalf of the state. I would contend the difference between the two is much more tenuous than assumed by Djebar: both the photographer and the painter operate within a regime of representation that subjugates the colonial other’s image as ‘pure image’ and nothing more. Gazing at the female characters constructed in L’Amour, la Fantasia and in Femmes d’Alger, one has the feeling of shifting from images of sanctified ‘natives’ (heroines becoming symbols of resistance and determination, particularly those in the colonial era), to passive and resigned ones (women absent to themselves, without hope or escape, which seems to be the feminine condition

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in postcolonial Algeria). In fact, Djebar’s collection of stories (Femmes d’Alger) constitutes a reflection on the condition of women in post-independence Algeria, when the nationalist project takes full force. The betrayal of Algerian women’s hopes and aspiration for the arrival of independence is unimaginable, and Assia Djebar’s sensitive and subtle narrative evokes such a betrayal with emotional and compelling force. The Algerian women’s contribution to the national struggle of resistance against the French colonizers had been tremendous: women from all spheres of society (from prostitutes to the social elite) had become involved and had devoted themselves to the cause of a free Algeria. Algerian women had fought alongside men and many times had been revered as heroines. With the coming of independence, they saw their dreams shattered, and witnessed their condition experience a tremendous regression in terms of their visibility on the public scene of Algeria. Djebar poetically articulates this feminine exclusion, suggesting that ‘[t]he barbed wires do not close off the little streets any longer, instead they adorn the windows, the balconies, all the exit ways towards the outside … ’ (Djebar 2002: 111). It is this same exclusion that she attempts to bring into focus, this time through Picasso’s painting, in the postface of her book, aptly entitled ‘Regard interdit, son coupé’ (forbidden gaze, sound interrupted). Djebar’s intention is to contrast Delacroix’s submissive harem to Picasso’s liberated Algerian women, but Picasso’s ‘liberated’ women are nude ‘odalisques “oozing” with brutal sex’ (Mernissi 2001: 109).13 Djebar suggests that it is this brutal nudity (a symbol of liberation in her view) that anticipates the tradition of the bomb carriers (les porteuses de bombes) during the Algerian War of Independence (Djebar 2002: 245). One of the problems of the juxtaposition between Delacroix’s and Picasso’s representations of the Algerian woman (with the implicit binary of prisoners/liberated), is that both operate within a regime of representation that only apparently opposes images of harem and hamam (Djebar’s porteuses d’eau – the water carriers inside the hamam, suggesting resignation and passivity), to those of the bomb carriers (porteuses de bombes, suggesting liberation and self-determination). In fact, it performs them as two faces of the same coin: between the image of the supine odalisque (forever interred in the harem), and that of the sanctified ‘native’ literally sowing destruction around her (in a public space), the only real choice left to the ‘native’ woman is that of self-immolation. In Women of Islam, Djebar opens the photographic essay (containing photos published by Magnum, and representing different Muslim women from around the world) with a commentary on the complex condition of Muslim women, which attempts, in her own words, ‘to stop them [the photos] telling lies’ (Djebar 1961: 9).14 Susan Sontag (2001: 107) argues that ‘[m]oralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture’. Hence the practice of enlisting the services of intellectuals who are socially engaged, and whose purpose is ‘to spell out the truth to which the photographs testify’ (Sontag 2001: 107–8). Djebar’s assumption, much like Alloula’s, is that her voice can dissipate the violence of the image (whether as painting or photo).

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Her encounter (narrative or photographic as in Women of Islam) with the gendered ‘native’ is both paradoxical and complex. All of Djebar’s narratives constitute both reflections on and exhortations towards the liberation of Muslim women. Such narratives are moved by the desire to do justice both to the colonial woman (whether in the hypostasis of the fierce and determined ‘native’, or in that of the supine odalisque), and to the postcolonial one (the betrayed and hopeless post-independence woman),15 but she attempts to do so by almost petrifying her characters in poses of pain, self-immolation, heroic sanctity and despair (the ultimate victims), transforming them into spectral presences doomed to haunt our imaginary. As Rey Chow suggests, attempting to fill the empty and defiled image of the ‘native’ with meaning and subjectivity is problematic in itself, since it points to the desire of control, and to a fantasy of displacing our inauthentic experience onto the ‘native’s’ imagined purity and depth (Chow 1993: 29). In the process of filling the defiled image of the ‘native’ with meaning and subjectivity and thus haloing her with the status of authentic ethnic resistance, the postcolonial intellectual evacuates her own subjectivity of the ‘ethnic me’ dimension (Trinh 1989). A question that would have been interesting to encounter in her narrative (Femmes d’Alger) is ‘Where is that ethnic me? The Other?’, which Trinh T. Minh-ha addresses in regards to the treacherous nature of the term ‘native’, depending on who utters it (ibid.: 52). In other words, how does Djebar’s Algeriance (to use Cixous’s word) frame the condition of her sisters, Algériennes and algériennes? Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) examines how the diasporic intellectual engages in a ‘we, the natives’/’they, the natives’ strategic differentiation in and through the process of writing. In her incisive critique, Trinh notes how writing has a peculiar social function for Third World writers – that of ‘alleviat[ing] the Guilt’: Commitment as an ideal is particularly dear to Third World writers. It helps to alleviate the Guilt: that of being privileged (Inequality), of ‘going over the hill’ to join the clan of literates (Assimilation), and of indulging in a ‘useless’ activity while most community members ‘stoop over the tomato fields, bending under the hot sun’ (a perpetuation of the same privilege). In a sense, committed writers are the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience. (Trinh 1989: 10–11) Such Guilt effects a paradoxical distanciation between ‘we, the natives’ assumed by the engaged/committed postcolonial writer and ‘they, the natives’ of the sanctified others: the former ‘native’ status can confer someone the right to make a claim to an origin, a place of extraction, and thus make reference to ‘our innate qualities’ and to a sense of belonging, whereas in the other case, the same status entails an ‘aura’ of inferiority and stubborn non-Europeanness

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(Trinh 1989: 52). As Trinh remarks, ‘the distance [between the two] is plain, but the appearance remains intentionally ambiguous’ (ibid.). Neither Djebar nor Sebbar, examined below, reflect on how the projection of a rescued and undefiled ‘ethnic’ other evacuates the ‘ethnic me’ of their writing. The surplus value of the authentically ethnic ‘native’ enriches the diasporic intellectual with a patina of authenticity while affirming the socio-political distance that separates them. Note, for example, how Sebbar (in Sebbar et al. 2006) distances herself from the gendered ‘natives’ on whose photos she comments in Femmes d’Afrique du Nord. Here she offers a commentary to a collection of colonial postcards (a collection similar to that in Alloula’s work). She entitles her intervention ‘Les femmes du peuple de mon père’ (The women of my father’s people), and opens it with the following line: ‘The women on the postcards are not my father’s sisters, they are not his young aunts, nor his mother’ (ibid.: 7).16 She then goes on to describe the condition of these women from the margins of society, as orphans who could not make a living and became prostitutes. She thus retraces their trajectory as orphans adopted by the Catholic missions run by the White Sisters (Les Soeurs Blanches), and then lost to the street. However, the need to distance these women from her father’s family seems intriguing. This distanciation eerily echoes Alloula’s own distancing between Algériennes and algériennes: these women (algériennes) are not the Algériennes that constitute her father’s family. Sebbar’s implicit assumption is that these women, although from the same ethnic stock as her father (Algerian), are ‘natives’ in a way she is not.17 I should clarify here that Sebbar’s tone and analysis intend to be sympathetic, but there is a patronizing undertone that constantly structures her encounter with the colonial gendered ‘native’. This patronizing sotto voce can be heard, for example, when Sebbar offers the ‘good’ example of the first female French ethnographers in the Maghreb, who photograph the ‘native’ women attentively, in a sisterly manner and benevolently (Sebbar et al. 2006: 18).18 Similar to Edkins’s reading of the Cambodian photos, it is thus the subject of vision (the one who possesses the privilege of looking), who decides the benign or malign nature of the photograph, and not the act of capturing someone’s image. Towards the end of her intervention, Sebbar suggests she would have liked to show these photos to her father, and that she would have ‘imagined on his behalf the destiny’ of each of her ‘African sisters’, her ‘estranged sisters, the women of his people’ (ibid.: 18). The point is here that only the privileged voice and subjectivity can afford the luxury to imagine the destiny of her ‘native’ others, in the absence of their voices … ‘Génération métisse’ and postcolonial cool The photographic essay Génération métisse, in which Leïla Sebbar has collaborated, alongside Amadou Gaye and Éric Favereau, was published in 1988. The 1980s constituted an important phase within French society, in the struggle of migrants and their children for rights and recognition. As a number of

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researchers remarked, the 1980s can be characterized as a ‘time of paradoxes’, when both the struggle for migrants’ rights had gathered tremendous force, but also when far-right movements such the National Front (Front National) had made an important impact on French public opinion, calling for a France that was only for the French (Blanchard et al. 2003: 206–11). At the time, the public discourse had been one dominated by stereotypical representations of migrants (especially the ones from former colonies, such as North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia and the Caribbean) as ‘savage immigrations’ (immigrations sauvages) that supposedly undermined the pure French character of the nation, burdened the economy and were the root problems of a rise in criminality. Blanchard et al. suggest that it is in this period (beginning with the 1980s) that the links between current international politics (the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the Gulf War, France’s foreign policy towards Arab states, etc.) and the history of migration in France come into full focus and acquire particular poignancy. The migrants’ situation became thus visible (in the case of the Arab communities) through a number of public protests, but also through various literary, photographic and aesthetic productions, which attempted to confer complexity, depth and voice to the Arab migrants. Génération métisse is one such initiative, and its title is the adopted slogan of anti-racist movements in France: ‘black, blanc, beur’ (black, white, beur) (see also Chapter 5). The purported mission of this photographic essay is to make visible not only a different side of France, but also a different side of immigration, the aesthetic (and aestheticized) and artistic one. The photos represent images of various artists, more or less known in France: singers, musicians, dancers, fashionistas, models, painters, sculptors and entertainment stars. The vibe of the photos is one of endless métissage (hybridity) between cultures and aesthetic trends, uprootedness, intellectual and social nomadism – briefly, all the parameters that constitute postcolonial cool. This message is important because not only does it serve to subvert the French national imaginary of homogeneity, but it also points to an alternative representation of migrants, one which does not revolve around a misérabiliste discourse and imaginary. The people portrayed by the essay are mostly young, talented, creative and famous (some only within their communities, others on a national or international level, such as fashion designers and entertainment stars). The photos emanate a lot of youthful energy and dynamism. There are a number of issues, however, that arise not only from the photos themselves, but also from the text that accompanies them. Leïla Sebbar’s text constitutes the commentary that accompanies the photos. Her essay is imaginative and retraces various migrant trajectories in music, dance, fashion, art, theatre and television. However, just as in Femmes d’Afrique du Nord, Sebbar’s imaginative writing focuses implicitly on her capacity to create. She starts her essay with ‘[o]nce upon a time … ’, and then moves on to suggest that the (hi)stories she is about to share (create) are a continuation of the Arab tales, which told of good and evil genies (Sebbar 1988: 28).19

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Why would Sebbar choose to comment on the cultural métissage in France within a narrative that aims to be a continuation of a good story from Arabian Nights? This whimsical approach depoliticizes particular aspects of current migrations, such as the global racial hierarchies in which they are embedded, by inscribing them into a discourse and imaginary of timeless fantasy, almost levelling the differences between past and current migrations. This can be seen from her remark that ‘[i]t is enough to look at a map of the world, or even at several maps, from different epochs, and read them with our eyes as one would decipher a text’ (Sebbar 1988: 28; my emphasis). Sebbar thus assumes not only that looking at maps of the world (from different epochs) easily unlocks their secrets, but also that if one wants to know the secret of migrations, one should look at maps of the world: [o]ne would have been able to distinguish [by reading the maps], … the sketch of happy or tragic stories in the history of commerce, of the slavetrade triangle, of colonial conquests, of wars of independence between Europe and the far away [outre-mers] continents, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean on the one hand, and to the Pacific on the other. (Sebbar 1988: 30) Her romanticizing mapping of migrations obscures the ways in which geography started out as an imperialist endeavour (see, for example, Said 1994a: 215), and constructed ‘the Orient as a geographical space to be cultivated, harvested, and guarded’ (Said 1994a: 219). In the same move, her gaze takes Europe as the main reference of seeing the world, with the Atlantic on its left, and the Pacific on its right, thus mimicking the Eurocentric view of the world. Another problem with Sebbar’s commentary is that it exoticizes those of whom she talks, which is, I suppose, inevitable, once she staged her intervention as a modern continuation of the Arabian tales. If Éric Favereau’s introduction to the photographic essay is a carefully politicized discussion on the politics of exclusion of migrants, but also on the internal politics of anti-racist movements, Sebbar’s commentary chooses to hover in the domain of fantasy, where characters are unattached nomads (nomades sans attaches) (Sebbar 1988: 86), uprooted beings (déracinées), and cosmopolitan hybrids, who claim to feel at home only in the realm of the image (je suis de là où je fais de l’image) (ibid.: 104), and whose self-avowed mission is to capture the gaze of the Other (capter le regard de l’Autre) (ibid.: 112). Sebbar’s vision of postcolonial cool depoliticizes the migrants’ struggles for the right to difference but also to recognition, romanticizing hybridity and exoticizing the bodies of the artists on whose images she comments. In this tell-tale world she forges, there are no tensions and conflicts that cannot be surpassed through the aesthetic. Susan Sontag remarked that the problem with aestheticizing the political is that it absorbs its political content and transforms it into a ‘timeless image’ (Sontag 2001: 107), or into an ‘object of

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enjoyment’ (Benjamin 1978: 262).20 Sebbar never interrogates the value of the images as images, as surface; instead she attempts to make them speak her romantic story of postcolonial multiculturalism that breaks all barriers. An engagement with the politics of multiculturalism in France would have had to start with a problematization of the image as the medium to propagate knowledge about the orientalized other and with the role of visuality in forging and disseminating racialized images (see Blanchard and Bancel 1998; and Blanchard et al. 2003).21 What exactly makes the photos on which Sebbar speaks with authority, continuous and discontinuous with the racialized images propagated for the last couple of centuries? The regime of racialization within which these photos and Sebbar’s commentary operate is not one limited to skin colour. To use Anne McClintock’s phrase, there is a ‘triangulation’ between gender, class and race within the interaction between image and Sebbar’s text, which resurrects unsettling hierarchies. First, there is an implicit valorization of these young people’s talent and education as difference, thereby indicating to the reader that they do not fit the mould of the poor uneducated (mostly African) migrant. They are different. Furthermore, the exclusive focus of the photos on artists and intellectuals signals another difference, a temporal difference: these migrants, in their hybridity (both cultural and physical), are modern or rather modernized; as such, they have nothing in common with the anachronism of their background. Sebbar’s inadvertent message is that art transforms these young people from problem migrants to celebrated hybrids. Hybridity is thus, in Sebbar’s textual commentary and within the narrative performed by the photos themselves, effectively fetishized. As noted earlier, fetishism involves disavowal, a strategy whereby an attractive and powerful desire is simultaneously indulged and denied (Hall 1997b: 267). What is being displaced within the narrative of Génération Métisse is the desire for sameness or assimilation. The young artists are recognized as full subjects only insofar as they belong to a hip and modern lifestyle that reassures the reader/consumer/viewer of their modernity. However, as Robert J.C. Young compellingly argues in his Colonial Desire, the notion of hybridity is ever haunted by its past and by its implicit reference to ‘racial purity’ to the point where: [t]here is a historical stemma between the cultural concepts of our day and those of the past from which we tend to assume that we have distanced ourselves … Hybridity in particular shows the connections between the racial categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourse … (Young 1995: 27) Young thus traces the complicities between racial hierarchies and cultural production, since it was ‘through racial relations that much cultural interaction was practiced’ (Young 1995: 180). Thus I argue that Sebbar’s attempt to graft diversity into singularity, to paraphrase Robert Young, performs a

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double move of displacement through sameness and difference. The hybrid generation portrayed by the photos exude exoticism through their difference, but their modern lifestyles and hip preoccupations serve to alleviate the anxiety of their difference, and to locate them within a reassuring standard of the ‘model’ migrant. Such a ‘model’ migrant not only integrates successfully within the host society, but her presence is also seen as a benign/non-threatening addition to its culture. As Sebbar expresses it, the value of their hybridity lies in the fact that they are ‘unattached nomad[s], wandering through the ages’ (Sebbar 1988: 86), having forgotten their ‘background’, and having broken all strings to their ‘origins’.22 There seems to be thus a tacit valorization of hybridity as non-belonging, as denial of belonging. Sebbar implicitly solidifies a social and racial hierarchy within the performance of hybridity when she concludes her commentary by suggesting that ‘their nomadism [that of the young artists who represent the hybrid generation] … is a happy and fecund nomadism, because it affirms its hybridity’ (Sebbar 1988: 118). This celebration of hybridity as an act of nonbelonging divides one’s hybrid identity into two poles: the traditional (‘native’) pole, and the modern (emancipated) one. Therefore note that non-belonging is constantly (albeit tacitly) connected to the traditional pole, insofar as these young artists have broken links with their cultural backgrounds, and find belonging only in the (highly modernized) realm of art. The realm of cultural and artistic production privileged by Sebbar’s commentary is never a neutral or a colour-blind one, but one that favours the non-traditional types. More to the point, the strategy through which hybridity is fetishized as commodity for the consumption of the lover of exotic cool, renders the subjects cum objects of the photos as reassuringly different from their ‘traditional’ backgrounds, as it tacitly relegates the absent others (the non-intellectual, non-artistic migrants stuck in the banlieues) to an anachronistic space.23 To paraphrase McClintock (1995: 59), the idea of hybridity is performed as ‘the voyeuristic consumption of commodity spectacle’, whereby it is consumed as a ‘national’ spectacle, simultaneously aimed at reconstituting the French nation as a multicultural space, and at unproblematically incorporating the images of the hybrid artists into the ideal of French citizenship that reads ‘(non-threateningly) different and thus the same’. Furthermore, the feminine value of the women’s bodies captured in the photos is coeval to their exotic value: the ‘other’ woman can be rendered feminine only insofar as she is exotic, mysterious and wholly other. Within the narrative space imagined by Génération Métisse, women are portrayed either as garbed in traditional attires proudly exhibiting their difference, or in ‘modern’ clothes sensually exhibiting their bodies. In both instances the racial signifier operates as a fetishized commodity that mediates their cultural difference, and saturates the viewer’s imaginary. Discussing the failure of the anti-racist movements in the 1980s to effect social change with regard to the situation of the migrants, Blanchard and Bancel link such a failure to their media success, since:

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[t]he antiracist movement was at times poorly served by a media strategy that was devoid of a social content. The movement has undoubtedly failed to take into account the importance of the mental gap created on the issue of immigration, by picturing ‘exotic’ migrants as populations that could not be ‘integrated’ [non intégrables], by virtue of their exoticism, in the eyes of a strong minority of French. Focusing on a discourse that was exclusively ethical in order to oppose the racist theses of the National Front, the antiracist movement is a victim of its own incomprehension of the historical nature of the representations that had concerned the ex-colonized migrants, without even mentioning the countries of origin of these migrants of which the greatest majority of French people and social activists are completely ignorant. (Blanchard and Bancel 1998: 85)24 Sebbar’s commentary is inscribed precisely within this media strategy, characterized by a socially void content, the primary mission of which is joyfully to celebrate hybridity, without pondering on the consequences or on the politics of such a celebration. Éric Favereau’s introduction does attempt and succeeds in presenting both a history of the racism faced by beurs in the 1980s, and in informing the reader of the tensions and conflicts within their struggles for recognition. However, Sebbar’s commentary, which takes most of the essay, places a certain finality on these struggles, as if to say that art conquers all. If, with Malek Alloula’s analysis of the colonial postcards, we are confronted with two types of ‘natives’ (Algérienne and algérienne), Sebbar’s commentary reveals a resonant absence, which is not insignificant in its implication. The reverberating absence of those migrants trapped within the geography of the suburban ghettos, and whose experience of hybridity is not celebratory but agonizing, serves as the negative pole of the hybrid generation’s experience of integration and assimilation.25 Within the textual and visual narrative of Génération Métisse there is a subtle but forceful hierarchy between Hybrids and hybrids, which disturbingly maps over binaries of tradition/modernity, traditionalist/hybrid, ‘problem migrant’/‘model migrant’. The former’s subdued hybridity, celebrated as non-belonging, becomes the foil of the latter’s untamed hybridity, experienced as agony. Éric Favereau’s introductory commentary to Génération Métisse seems to be more concerned with those migrants from the margins of French society. However, such a concern is effectively displaced and neutralized by Sebbar’s fantasy narrative and by the glamour of the photographic focus. As illustrated by the analyses of David Campbell, Roland Bleiker and Jenny Edkins’s articles on visuality in IR, I argued in this chapter that the regimes of textual and visual representation present in the Franco-Maghrebian works discussed here can be inscribed in an international politics of visuality that produces the ‘native’ for the ‘benefit’ of her appropriation and control. Practices of sanctifying and/or exoticizing the ‘native’ speak about a desire to take possession of an authentic experience long lost in a globalized and (post)modernized

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world, and tend to claim authenticity through the purified image of the ‘native’. A research agenda for perceiving the ‘native’ as ‘indifferent defiled image’ (as advocated by Chow 1993: 53) would thus begin by questioning the premises for such practices of sanctification and commodification, and explore the fertile position of the Native Informant as mediator of postcolonial difference.26 Rey Chow (1993: 29) suggests that these practices of purifying the ‘defiled image’ of the ‘native’ and endowing it with depth and subjectivity are never innocent or noble. This is precisely what Bleiker and Kay, and Edkins’s readings of visuality in IR fail to highlight. As argued in this chapter, these readings overlook how, within current geopolitics of visuality, the image of the ‘native’, whether produced by a socially engaged intellectual or by a ‘parachute’ reporter, is ultimately commodified for the (moral and/or commercial) consumption of the West. Thus Alloula’s, Djebar’s and Sebbar’s readings over the ‘native’s’ shoulder attempt to sanctify ‘the defiled image with pieties and thus enriching [them]selves precisely with what can be called the surplus value that results from exchanging the defiled image for something more noble’ (Chow 1993: 30). In this commodification of ‘native’ subjectivity, various subjectivities are produced: heroines and saints that ooze with determination and energy, passive and oppressed odalisques absent to themselves, and sad, claustrophobic images of postcolonial Muslim women with no escape from oppression in sight (except through education perhaps), and postcolonial hybrids posing as unattached nomads and oh so cool bohemians. If my concluding comments seem unduly harsh, I would like to qualify this by a few additional comments. I found Djebar’s technique of writing history through a literary lens to be innovative and creative. In the name of an ‘historicized memory’ (Pierre Nora’s phrase), Djebar (and other Franco-Maghrebian writers) attempt to reflect on their own history, both as individuals and as a collective. One could thus make the case that Franco-Maghrebian authors are writing a history of silences and about silences (‘stories about the absence of stories’, cf. Rosello 2005: 111). Thus their histories become a supplement to other missing stories and voices. However, supplementing missing stories has its own politics that is not innocent of the sort of nativistic fantasies, which some of the authors are perhaps keen to disavow. As Trinh T. Minh-ha has put it, ‘a conversation of “us” with “us” about them is a conversation in which “them” is silenced’ (Trinh 1989: 67; see also Mato 2000). Like Walter Benjamin’s collector, Assia Djebar’s innovative historiography attempts the same process of excavating, collecting and preserving only the choicest pieces, so that the past can speak in its own voice (see Sontag 2001: 76). Although she disavows ‘speaking for’, opting instead for an ambiguous ‘speaking next to/very close to’, by using the medium of the French language (albeit in a subversive manner) in order to speak to her Algerian sisters, she inevitably traces a tension between her desire to speak next to/very closely to, and the inevitable practice of ‘speaking for’. In the following chapter, I pursue my investigation of authenticity and its links with the trauma and memory of the FrancoMaghrebian colonial encounter in the intimacy of cinematic narratives.

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Notes 1 The question belongs to Rey Chow in Writing Diaspora (1993). 2 This statement stands in need of qualification, insofar as both the reference and the argument about anthropology’s object might seem somewhat dated. However, I defend the argument on the following grounds: in an article entitled “Rearticulating Anthropology” (2005), James Clifford discusses, among other aspects, the ways in which anthropology’s objects, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘exotic’, have undergone alteration. In here, Clifford states that ‘for many in the discipline, the former emphasis on the exotic and the marginal remains a valued, defining feature, albeit in need of postcolonial reconception’ (Clifford 2005: 41). Moreover, anthropology’s telos, identified by Clifford as ‘Man’ (and newly transformed into ‘humanity’) still haunts our imaginary, in spite of the efforts of radical poststructuralists to do away with the masculinist signifier (ibid.: 44). 3 The expression femmes mauresques means ‘Moorish women’, but in the context of colonial North Africa, it specifically refers to the portrayal of North African women in colonial photography. This circulated widely in the form of postcards sent to the metropolis from the colonies. Femmes mauresques is imbued with the notion of the exotic gaze of the colonist that enclosed these women within an imagined and highly eroticized harem of desire and hidden pleasures. 4 It is interesting that women from both categories, so clearly delineated by Alloula, participated in the Algerian War of Independence, and made enormous contributions to the building of the Algerian nation. This aspect is never mentioned by Alloula. Many of the ‘substitutes’ whom Alloula examines in the photos (or others like them) joined the ranks of the Algerian resistance against the French colonial occupation. Their voices and their images appear in the texts of Assia Djebar (L’Amour, la fantasia), discussed later in this chapter, and of Leïla Sebbar (2004, 2005). As I discuss in Chapter 5, when I engage the cinematic production of the FrancoMaghrebian borderland, the social backgrounds of Gillo Pontecorvo’s porteuses de bombes depicted in his masterful The Battle of Algiers is ambivalent at best. 5 For a different analysis of the strategy of fetishism within the (post)colonial context, see Homi Bhabha’s ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Location of Culture (2004a). 6 Other critiques of Alloula’s Colonial Harem can be found in Chow (1993), Woodhull (1993), Ferrié and Boëtsch (1995), and Vogl (2003). 7 For ‘classic’ critiques of the claim of photography to representational legitimacy, see Barthes (1982), Baudrillard (1987), Hall (1997a, 1997b), Sontag (2001). 8 For an analysis of humanist photography in post-war France and its function in reconstituting Frenchness, see Hamilton (1997). 9 I paraphrase here Rey Chow’s expression ‘interlocking relations among war, racism and knowledge production’ (Chow 2006: 39). I believe this would be the perfect (or at least a far more accurate) description of the field of IR. 10 My translation. The quotes given here on from this novel are my translation. 11 Assia Djebar advocates against ‘speaking for’ or even ‘speaking on’ the ‘other’; instead she imagines ‘barely speaking next to [près de], and if possible very close to [tout contre] … ’ (quoted in Rosello 2005: 7). Rosello comments that this prescription implies ‘the art of combining contact and opposition’ (ibid.), but as I argue later, Djebar’s use (and choice) of French in order to speak very close to or next to Arab women (for whom she writes in solidarity) implies more a tension between her desire to speak very close to/next to and the inevitability of ‘speaking for’. For a more in-depth analysis of the politics of language in the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, see Chapter 3 in this book. 12 See Chapter 7 for a more extended discussion on the politics of using the colonial language in the cases of Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o and Léopold Senghor.

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13 Odalisque is a term related to femmes mauresques: although meaning ‘chamber maid or slave’, the odalisque ‘was metamorphosed by Orientalist painting (see Jean August Dominique Ingres) into the sublimated image of the one enclosed by the harem’ (Alloula 1986: 130). 14 A similar project is Djebar’s Chronique d’un été algérien (1993). 15 In this context, the example of Marc Garanger’s photos of Algerian women comes to mind. Serving in a French contingent during the Algerian War, Garanger is asked to take photos of the people of several villages for the purposes of population census and thus control. He is thus the photographer-soldier. The villagers are forced to have their pictures taken. Years later, Garanger (1982) publishes a few photographic albums with the pictures he had taken during his Algerian stay. The element that struck me, when looking through the photos and the captions that accompanied them, is Garanger’s refraining from ‘doing justice’ to the people he photographed, by trying to imbue their images with meaning and depth. He made it clear that his mission there was violent in every way, that the experience of war shocked and disgusted him, and that he sympathized with the Algerian cause. Femmes Algériennes 1960 opens with a brief hand-written statement, in which he states that the women were forced to have their pictures taken, and that this is an attempt to testify to them. At the back of the album, the same text is published in Arabic, a testimony to the Arab reader of the photographer-soldier’s violence. I do not claim that his approach is exemplary. There are troubling aspects attached to it, which I do not have the space to explore here. However, I would like to point to the lack of interest of the photographer (soldier, in this case) to sanctify the ‘natives’ either in image or in narrative, and redeem their truth. Garanger seems to imply that words will never make the images speak truth. See also his photographic rendition of the Algerian War in Garanger (1984). 16 My translation. 17 As Ann Laura Stoler points out, colonial categories such as ‘native’ (indigène) racialize in deeply ambivalent ways, insofar as racial categories do not discriminate only according to binaries of whiteness/non-whiteness, but also according to class, social standing and gender (see Stoler 1989). Thus within the French colonial context, pieds noirs (French colonial settlers) born in North Africa, even though of European extraction, were viewed by metropolitan France as backward and thus closer to ‘natives’ than to French. As Albert Memmi points out in his Portrait du colonisé, however, there was a clear hierarchy between the pieds noirs and the ‘natives’, which privileged the former (see Chapter 6 in this book). For illuminating discussions on the treacherous symbioses between race, class and gender in the colonial context, see Stoler (1995) and McClintock (1995). 18 One of the benevolent ethnographers to whom she is referring here is Germaine Tillion, a French anthropologist who researched the Berber communities in Algeria in the 1930s and the 1940s. Tillion acted as a liaison for the French government during the Algerian War, when she attempted to mediate between the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) and the French authorities. She was one of the French intellectuals to condemn the use of torture during the Algerian War by the French, but her public stance towards the idea of Algerian independence was closer to Camus’s proposal for a Franco-Algerian reconciliation (see Chapter 6), which relied on a moral equalization of the Algerian and the French (see LeSueur 2005: 163–68). Therefore her ‘benevolence’ towards the ‘natives’ – whose photographs and knowledge she was keen to capture but whose claim to independence she ignored – stands in need of careful qualification. 19 My translation. The quotes that follow from this particular book are my own translations. 20 This is certainly a common critique levelled at the photography of Sebastiaõ Salgado. There are, however, many who find his work politically inspiring, such as Eduardo

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22 23

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Galeano (1992) and David Campbell (2003). Bleiker and Kay (2007) also defend Salgado’s work. Scholars such as James Clifford (1986a), Stuart Hall (1997a), Jean Baudrillard (1987) have argued that the fascination with seeing and with images is a trait of Western civilization and of Western ways of living. Johannes Fabian argues that Western imagination is profoundly visual in nature, ‘constituting cultures as if they were theatres of memory, or spatialized arrays’ (Fabian cited in Clifford 1986a: 12). For similar analyses see Martin Jay (1986), Michel Foucault (1989), and Johannes Fabian (2001, 2002). In several instances she mentions, quasi-approvingly, that several of her ‘characters’ do not speak their ‘native’ languages. Furthermore, this commodification of hybridity echoes Walter Benjamin’s own concern, expressed in his essay ‘The Author as Producer’, with ‘[t]he transformation of the political struggle from a compulsion to decide into an object of contemplative enjoyment, from a means of production into a consumer article’ (Benjamin 1978: 264). My translation. These themes are further developed in Chapters 5 and 7. I say ‘begin’ because this book constitutes the beginning of thinking about moving beyond the sanctification of the ‘native’. I do not have answers here about what exactly a research focusing on the ‘defiled and indifferent image’ of the ‘native’ would look like. However, I have indirectly addressed this issue elsewhere, in an analysis of the enduring fascination of academic research and media focus with the figure of the anti-communist dissident from Eastern Europe (see Sajed 2011).

5

The Franco-Maghrebian borderland as cinematic space Memory, trauma and authenticity

Building on the focus on visuality in the previous chapter, I engage here the issue of memory as mediated in several cinematic narratives. More specifically I explore here the cinematic engagement with the Algerian War and with the postcolonial wounds left gaping by the indescribable violence of this moment of decolonization. The linkage between (French and Algerian) cinematic productions of the last several decades and the work of (post)colonial memory has been highlighted and investigated by many scholars (Dine 1994; Ross 1996; Stora 1997, 1998; Hargreaves 2005; Khanna 2008; Loshitzky 2010; Oscherwitz 2010). My intention is to capitalize on three cinematic narratives, namely Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), and Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), to illustrate two points: first, how colonial memory works its way through the visual in the absence of a clear public and political engagement with the colonial past both in France and in North Africa. The cinematic ‘working through’ is always incomplete, however, as the memory of (post)colonial violence ‘exceeds the bounds of acceptable realism’ (Khanna 2008: 123). Unlike many critical readings of cinema in International Relations (IR), this analysis does not start from the implicit premise that our reading of cinematic narratives untangles the complicated web of repressed political truths lying hidden within them. Rather I choose to investigate how these three cinematic narratives choose to project and reflect on (or question) their own authenticity as they engage (or disengage from) the memory of colonial trauma. An important lacuna in critical cinematic readings in IR is the insufficient attention given the mutual constitution of memory and trauma in world politics through the colonial experience and into the postcolonial present. My critique of Edkins’s work on the politics of trauma in the constitution of national memory aims to highlight this lacuna (see Edkins 2003). Edkins provides a fascinating account of how moments of trauma are appropriated into national space to re-solidify and re-legitimate the boundaries of the nation-state. However, her analysis ultimately reconstitutes these boundaries when she treats the moments of trauma she examines as discreet historical moments unrelated to (post)colonial violence or to the space of the Third World. Michael Shapiro’s work on cinematic geopolitics, on the other hand,

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gestures towards intertwined histories of (post)colonial violence (see Shapiro 2009). But his analytical framework relies on the assumption that cinematic space constitutes an alternative space where the trauma of imperial violence is exposed and worked out. This chapter aims to highlight precisely the impossibility of the cinematic medium to contain the trauma of colonial memory, relying instead on an examination of its political effects and its implication in a wider geopolitics of visuality and representation. Second, this chapter seeks to understand how postcolonial cinematic narratives speak about our inescapable desire and fantasy for authenticity. I choose these three cinematic narratives not only because of their international critical acclaim, but also because they constitute (more or less conscious) cinematic reflections on the Franco-Maghrebian encounter produced by ‘foreign’ directors, seen as outsiders to this encounter.1 Here the question of authenticity rises in a dual manner: both the authenticity of the directors and of the ‘native’ subjectivity produced by their cinematic scapes, have been called into question.2 Moreover, the directors themselves self-consciously employ the trope of authenticity either as a technique of representation through documentarystyle filming, which is meant to evoke a sense of immediate (and unmediated?) and urgent reality, and as a subversive technique of undermining our certainty about mediated reality (in the case of Haneke’s Caché). All three cinematic productions engage practices of memory in various forms. Pontecorvo’s epic on the struggle of decolonization aims to constitute a memory of the present, and a testimonial of the historical moment of decolonization. Both La Haine and Caché subtly reflect on the legacies of colonial violence in the postcolonial present. They constitute allegories ‘on the blindness of postcolonial Europe to read its present in light of its recent past’ (Loshitzky 2010: 101). The first section explores the various tropes of memory that the three cinematic narratives produce, and seeks to make explicit how the working out of the trauma of colonialism and decolonization in the cinematic space is always incomplete. In the context of French colonial rule in Algeria, one of the most traumatic ‘moments’ in the episode of decolonization was the use of torture.3 By reading the transfiguration of traumatic memory in the cinematic space as incomplete, I position the three cinematic exercises examined here between the ‘acting out’ and the ‘working through’ of trauma. Dominick LaCapra (2001), in his study on history and trauma, distinguished between two forms of traumatic memory: ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ memory. The former refers to a repetitive re-living of the traumatic past and to an inhabiting of the present of the trauma time ‘with no distance from it’ (LaCapra 2001: 143). The latter implies a self-conscious effort of the traumatized individual or collective to overcome the trauma time by gaining a certain critical distance from it (without disavowing it) and thus re-establish the boundaries between past, present and future. As LaCapra points out, ‘working through’ does not entail ‘avoidance, harmonization, or simply forgetting the past’ or erasing the scars of the past, but rather accepting the scars and thus coming to terms with the traumatic experience without attempting

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to attain some form of healing or closure (ibid.). By examining the relationship between traumatic memory and the crisis of imperial identity (Battle of Algiers), the banlieues as spaces of colonial memory (La Haine), and the return of the repressed (Caché), I argue that within these three cinematic spaces colonial traumatic memory is both acted out and worked through without a sense of final closure or even disclosure. As explained later, this chapter interprets these cinematic narratives as visual fragments caught in complex intersections between memories of trauma, perceptions of political community, and mutations in visions of citizenship, belonging and resistance. The second section moves to investigate the types of worlds these three cinematic spaces produce. Michael Shapiro in his Cinematic Geopolitics indicates that the value of a ‘critical film’ is that it ‘articulates a world rather than merely a specific human drama’ (Shapiro 2009: 11). The question being examined here is: what kind of worlds do these three cinematic narratives articulate? Post-war Europe has been touted as new Europe – an expression that reflects both the newness and the uniqueness of the unfolding panEuropean project and the economic recovery and take-off of post-imperial Europe. A reading of these cinematic texts reveals not only different and repressed aspects of this new Europe, but imagines Europe as a set of overlapping borderlands made up of intersecting histories and experiences from ‘elsewhere’. Thus reading Battle of Algiers alongside Kristin Ross’s study of decolonization and modernization in France points to ‘the colonization of the everyday’ in France as a cathartic strategy of purging the dirty character of the ongoing Algerian War (Ross 1996: 121). La Haine is seen by Yosefa Loshitzky in her study Screening Strangers as an ‘emblematic film on and of the new Europe’ (Loshitzky 2010: 96; see also Ross 1996: 196), which explores the racial economy of ‘the experience of migration from the colonial periphery to the postcolonial metropolis’ (Loshitzky 2010: 96). Finally, Caché can be read as an allegory of the Western refusal to tell its history in such ways as to ‘bring forward the perspective of the world’ (Trouillot 1995: 107). These three cinematic scapes articulate a Franco-Maghrebian borderland haunted by colonial traumas experienced as postcolonial malaise. The final section of the chapter engages the issue of authenticity. If the previous chapter examined the Franco-Maghrebian intellectual’s claim to authenticity through the purified image of the (post)colonial ‘native’, this chapter takes the investigation of authenticity further by looking at debates over the authenticity of both the directors who produced these cinematic scapes, and of the type of postcolonial subjectivity that emanates from their narratives. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s remarks on the relational character of authenticity understood ‘as a relationship to what is known’, as an honest opening to ‘the present as it re-presents [the] past’ (Trouillot 1995: 148), throw further light on what is at stake in both ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ the trauma of colonial memory. This chapter thus suggests that a reading of these three cinematic narratives provides an insight into how this specific historical trauma continues to constitute in important ways the postcolonial present.

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Tropes of memory I chose to engage the work of memory surrounding the Algerian War and its postcolonial reverberations not only because it is this war that arguably best encapsulates the overwhelming violence of French colonial rule, but also because its painful traces have shaped in profound ways French and Algerian nationalisms, postcolonial subjectivities, and the link between migration and citizenship in France. Marnia Lazreg (2008: 189) claims that the Algerian War was and continues to be a ‘battleground of memories that reached as far back as the eighteenth century and rebuilt themselves as the war unfolded’. For the Algerians engaged in the anti-colonial struggle, the memories of 1830 when French military troops conquered Algeria in an orgy of violence, and of the massacres of Sétif and Guelma in 1945, never dimmed from the collective imagination.4 For the French fighting for the preservation of French Algeria, the defeat of French colonial troops at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 by the Viêt Minh troops (which spelt the loss of Indochina) and (curiously enough) the memory of French Resistance against the Nazi occupation constituted a web of memories from which they drew moral justification for their colonial position.5 However, it is not far-fetched to claim that for both sides ‘the Algerian War has been read as the ultimate episode of a war of conquest that never really ended’ (Durmelat 2005: 146). On the other hand, once the war ended with the independence of Algeria, the memory of the war on both sides of the Mediterranean transfigured in contrasting ways: in France, the memory of the Algerian War has been for the longest time a painful and embarrassing colonial wound the attempted burial of which took the form of amnesia. In Algeria, the memory of the war became a hyper-memory constantly re-enacted in repeated commemorations, as the new Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) government established it as the founding moment of the nation and as the source of its legitimacy, which subsequently underpinned the shift from liberation state to military dictatorship (see Stora 1998). I focus here on the transfigurations of the memory of the Algerian War in three cinematic narratives. These narratives gesture in different ways to ‘the traumatic dimension of the political’, and expose the betrayals and ambivalence of contemporary political categories such as nation, citizenship, multiculturalism and resistance (Edkins 2003: 9). It is thus not with the notion of memory per se that I am concerned in this chapter, but with that of traumatic memory within the colonial and postcolonial contexts of the Franco-Maghrebian borderland. One of the arguments advanced in this book is that the violent colonial encounter between France and the Maghreb produced a borderland, which is a concept that refers both to a physical spatiality (both sides of the Mediterranean) and to an ideational-affective space constituted through the intersections between various subjectivities, identities, memories and claims to belonging. This chapter thus zooms into practices of ‘working through’ and ‘acting out’ traumatic memory as mediated by cinematic narratives, and reflects on how colonial trauma suffuses the types of socio-political

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identities and practices that have emerged in the Franco-Maghrebian postcoloniality. Why cinematic narratives? The claim of cinematic narratives to undertake the work of memory in the Franco-Maghrebian context is ambivalent at best. Many scholars of the Algerian War and of its representations in literature, art and visual narratives have been puzzled by the lack of substantive cinematic engagement with this traumatic event in France, and have advanced various explanations for this specific lack (see, for example, Stora 1997, 1998). In comparing the traumatic impact of the Algerian War on French society with that of the Vietnam War on American society, historian Benjamin Stora claims that the reason why there is a profound reluctance to engage cinematically the war in France is that the percentage of French soldiers in the Algerian War was much higher than that of the American soldiers when compared to the overall population (Stora 1998: 293). Moreover, unlike American soldiers, who usually came from peripheral social groups, French soldiers were enlisted from all strata of French society (Stora 1998: 293–94). These factors entail, in his view, that the Algerian War has had a deeper impact on French society, and thus explains why the memory of the Algerian War continues to be repressed. This neat and unconvincing logic also prompts Stora, arguably the best-known scholar of the Algerian War in France, to make the dubious claim that ‘Americans have “exorcized” [the traumatic memory of] Vietnam and have rid themselves of this obsessional problem’ (Stora 1998: 292). Stora offers as ultimate proof for this claim the countless films produced by Americans on the topic of the Vietnam War. There are several issues with this logic of cinematic representation. First, it assumes that the cinematic medium possesses somehow that transparency, which allows it both to act as a mirror to the past (and thus provide a visual history of the past) and to undertake the work of ‘mnemohistory’, meaning to summon the past as it is remembered in collective memory (Jan Assman, quoted in Bell 2006a: 2). Second, it simply assumes that it is through the visual (in this case cinema) that the work of traumatic memory is best assumed. ‘Imaging the Franco-Algerian conflict’ – to use the expression of Philip Dine, expressed itself in France primarily through the written word: a host of memoirs, diaries, journals, letters, novels and short stories, as well as various academic works have been published both during and in the aftermath of the conflict (Dine 1994: 7).6 Stora claims that these personal(ized) accounts of the war have brought out in public ‘what the image has repressed’ and thus that there is a ‘non-compromise between the written word and its visual representation’ (Stora 1997: 181). Again, the implicit argument being made here is that the cinematic image acts as catharsis for the trauma of horrific war violence (Stora 1997: 193), and so French society would be well served to engage this war visually through cinema if it is to exorcise the demons of its colonial past. My concern with this type of argument is that it views the cinematic medium as a self-enclosed representational space that has the power and the autonomy to both ‘act out’ and ‘work through’ traumatic memory.

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This imagined autonomy of the cinematic medium to work out conflicts (whether personal, historical, social or political) and to enclose repressed political and social desires (the escape of which on the cinematic screen might alert the viewer to unacknowledged narratives) is problematic for several reasons. It overlooks that the cinematic genre is itself a specific cultural product enmeshed in a variety of relations of political economy, power and social structures. I am not claiming here that making films about the Algerian War would be useless and pointless. Rather I am questioning the belief invested in the power of the visual to resolve socio-political conflicts and to offer the key to some ‘true reality’ (no doubt alternative and politically correct) that awaits our decoding.7 When Stora laments the lack of substantive cinematic engagement with the Algerian War in France, he overlooks precisely the political economy of the visual in America (which makes possible the spectacular and largely self-indulgent Hollywood productions) and inadvertently fetishizes the visual as the privileged medium of ‘acting out’ collective trauma.8 Rather, a more useful line of inquiry would be to explore the relationship between French society and the ‘medium itself ’ of cinema and to understand the ideological contexts that made French cinema possible (see Dine 1994: 219; and Ross 1996). In this sense, I am not interested here in exploring the cinematic medium as an alternative socio-political narrative that spells repressed truths, but rather in reading the proposed three cinematic narratives as always incomplete transfigurations of traumatic memory. The trauma time their narratives subtly (and not so subtly) evoke does not function as a challenge to the linearity of official memory (see Edkins 2003), but is itself an ideological product of specific socio-political positions (e.g. Marxist, anti-modernist, anti-bourgeois structures of thought). More specifically, such cinematic narratives can be seen as instances through which the colonial trauma continues to constitute the postcolonial present. Thus they are not exorcizing past violence (which would involve some kind of successful disclosure), but visual fragments caught in complex intersections between memories of trauma, perceptions of political community, and mutations in visions of citizenship, belonging and resistance. In an age of ‘“multiphrenia” of memories that are exteriorized in print, film, photograph, and cinema’ (Kenneth Gergen, cited in Ray 2006: 137), it is worthwhile exploring the politics of (post)colonial memory as it plays out in cinematic texts. Battle of Algiers (1966): torture and the crisis of French imperial identity Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, released in 1966, four years after the end of the Algerian War, covers a significant moment in the war, which is the successful campaign led by General Massu and his paratroopers in 1957 in eliminating the FLN’s cells in Algiers. The episode is known for its sheer brutality: the reprisals against European and Algerian civilians, the use of urban guerrilla tactics (such as the bombing of public spaces), and the use of torture by the

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French troops. Saadi Yacef, the co-producer of the film, was also a known FLN leader in Algiers and thus a very active participant in the battle of Algiers. In the film he plays the role of Jafar, an FLN military commander. The film opens with a scene in which a group of French paras (the short name for paratroopers) have just finished torturing an Algerian man. He is shaking violently from his ordeal, his body is weak, his bones are protruding through his skin and wounds from the torture mark his body. He had succumbed to pain and given up the location of Ali La Pointe, an important FLN leader considered a terrorist by the French. It is no accident that the film opens with a scene of torture since it is the use of torture and the memory of it that ‘fed a steady stream of French narratives that unburden the self as they shed light on the core of a dishonorable war’ (Lazreg 2008: 2). In a sense, the use of torture by the French army during the Algerian War crystallizes the politics of colonial memory in France. The issue of torture in Algeria begs a couple of questions: why was the use of torture during the Algerian War such a controversial and incendiary issue? After all, various forms of atrocities had been perpetrated by French troops in Algeria since its conquest in 1830. As pointed out earlier, French Algeria was founded in an orgy of violence. So why was it then (in the 1950s) that torture had become scandalous and objectionable? Moreover, why has the issue of torture been so central to the memory of the Algerian War? Rumours of torture (especially through letters sent back home from French soldiers in Algeria) had been circulating among the French public for several years following the start of the war, but it was not until the publication of several testimonies that the issue turned into a full-blown scandal. In 1957, several prestigious French newspapers such as L’Humanité, L’Express, Témoignange Chrétien and France-Observateur publicized stories and testimonials of torture (Stora 1998: 55; see also Obuchowski 1968). However, the publication of several book-length testimonials of torture had a devastating impact on French public opinion. Djamila Bouhired’s story of torture and sentence to death by guillotine, written by Georges Arnaud and Jacques Vergès, her lawyer, and published by Éditions du Minuit, publicized the issue of Algerian women’s rape and torture by the French army (Stora 1998: 56; also Lazreg 2008: 159).9 According to Alistair Horne, Djamila Bouhired is one of the three women portrayed by Pontecorvo in Battle of Algiers, entrusted to carry bombs in their baskets and leave them inside designated public locations (Horne 2006: 185). The testimonial that scandalized the French public to its core, however, was that of Henri Alleg’s La Question, published in 1958 by Éditions du Minuit. Alleg was a French journalist working in Algiers for the Alger républicain, a leftist newspaper that had a very strong anti-colonialist stance during the war. Alleg himself was member of the Algerian Communist Party and a staunch advocate for a free and independent Algeria. James LeSueur, in his introduction to the English edition of Alleg’s testimony, notes that the reason why Alleg’s experience of torture became ‘the crucible for public protest against

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the French military’s methods’ was that the French public could more easily identify with the suffering of another co-national than they could with that of Algerian nationalists (LeSueur 2006: xvi). Over 60,000 copies of Alleg’s book sold out within weeks of its publication. The book was considered subversive by the French state and banned within one month of its publication (Stora 1998: 57). LeSueur notes that Alleg’s La Question was the first book to be banned in France since the 18th century (LeSueur 2006: xiv). Although Alleg’s testimony of his month-long torture at the hands of the Tenth Paratrooper Division is deeply harrowing and heartbreaking, he confides that his was not an exceptional case, and that the Muslims arrested had gone through far worse forms of torture (Alleg 2006: 34). The use of torture in Algeria was in no way exceptional, given that French soldiers had honed their skills in Indochina and, before that, in the countless campaigns of ‘pacification’ carried out in the colonies (LeSueur 2006: ix). In fact, several scholars make the case that torture was not simply an epiphenomenon of the Algerian War, but that it had long been a weapon of colonial control (see Cole 2005; Durmelat 2005; LeSueur 2006; Lazreg 2008). These scholars claim that the use of torture was a crucial linchpin in a colonial ideology that depended for its legitimacy on the de-humanization of the ‘native’. The recurrent use of violence enacted the constant iteration of colonial rule and authority (see also Mbembe 2001; and Sigg 2002).10 As Joshua Cole compellingly argues, colonial violence should be seen not only as an instrument but also as a ‘form of communication’ that establishes a type of proximity and relationship between the two parties with far-reaching repercussions for the manner in which colonial hierarchies and positions of authority are subsequently established (Cole 2005: 131). Since the continuation and the preservation of colonial rule relies on this type of violence, the latter becomes not only a tool but also ‘the goal itself ’ (ibid.). The question posed earlier returns now: why is it during the Algerian War, in the decade of the 1950s, that torture caused such an uproar among the French public when it had been used for the last 130 years in that colony? Because the memory of the tortures inflicted by the Gestapo on the members of the French Resistance was still fresh and vivid in the collective imagination of the French. The memory of the Vichy years (1940–44), when France endured the humiliation of the Nazi occupation and was privy to the torture and killing of French resisters, was too close for comfort. Jean-Paul Sartre opens his preface to Alleg’s La Question with the following moral dilemma that the French faced at the time of the Algerian War: In 1943, in the Rue Lauriston (the Gestapo headquarters in Paris), Frenchmen were screaming in agony and pain: all France could hear them. In those days, the outcome of the war was uncertain and the future unthinkable, but one thing seemed impossible in any circumstances: that one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name. (Sartre 2006: xxvii; my emphasis)11

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Sartre was of course factually wrong: men ‘elsewhere’ had been made to scream in the name of French people for several centuries, so such an occurrence during the Algerian War was not only possible but routine. However, in summoning up the memory of Vichy France and of Nazi tortures against the French Resistance, he gave voice to the memory hovering over the minds of the French. The issue of torture during the Algerian War was a scandal not so much due to the moral burden of the deed itself, but because it was undertaken by the same French army (and sometimes by the same French officers) that had been victorious against Nazi Germany. Pontecorvo consciously plays on this detail of the memory of French Resistance against the Nazis when he introduces Colonel Mathieu to the viewer: an impersonal voice informs us that he is a veteran of World War II (having fought in the Italy and Normandy campaigns against the Nazis), a former member of the French Resistance, but also a seasoned military leader of colonial wars in Indochina, Algeria, Madagascar and Suez.12 That Mathieu’s anti-Nazi resistance is mentioned in the same breath as his participation in colonial wars is not accidental. This is an extremely powerful indication that torture in Algeria was not a contradiction of the ideals of the French Revolution as historian Michel Winock had lamented (see Stora 1998: 64), but it was part of a perverse history of ‘colonial humanism’ (see Wilder 2005). Gary Wilder opens his excellent account of the ideology of colonial humanism and the rise of the negritude movement with the following question: ‘What are we to make of the fact that republican France was never not an imperial nationstate?’13 (Wilder 2005: 3; my emphasis). Wilder’s question points to the contradiction between narratives and theorizations of the ‘national paradigm’, on the one hand, which sees a natural fit between territory, population and culture, and thus treats the existence of colonies as an exception. He contends that the existence of overseas colonies had in fact accompanied the birth of the French nation-state from its inception and even before (ibid.). The colonial reality was thus never an exception to or an aberration of the French nation-state; rather it was always its constitutive frame. There was therefore no contradiction in Colonel Mathieu’s valiant resistance against the Nazis and his equally valiant defence of France’s overseas territories. This understanding of the French nation-state as imperial nation-state explains how memories of the French Resistance against the Nazis actually co-existed with the memory of French colonialism’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Strangely enough, the memory of French Resistance was summoned by both right-wing supporters of French Algeria and by anticolonial activists. The latter used the memory of the French Resistance to highlight that there was no distinction between the French desire for freedom from the Nazi occupation and the Algerians’ desire for independence from French colonialism. Marie-Pierre Ulloa (2005) focuses on the trial of the Jeanson network’s militants to explore how they used the French Resistance legacy as a moral resource for their ‘illegal’ opposition to the French state. The Jeanson network was a group of pro-FLN French activists (mostly leftist in their orientation), led by

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the philosopher Francis Jeanson, who took on a variety of activities in France on behalf of the FLN, such as transporting funds for the FLN (hence their name of porteurs de valises – ‘suitcase carriers’), hiding Algerian militants, and others (see Stora 1998: 62–63; Ulloa 2005: 112; Horne 2006: 237–38).14 During their trial in September 1960 in Paris, distinguished veterans of the French Resistance, such as Vercors and André Mandouze, testified in defence of the arrested members of the Jeanson network.15 They justified the actions of the Jeanson network by claiming a direct moral continuity between the resistance against the Nazi occupation and the resistance against colonial oppression (see Ulloa 2005: 115–17). However, not all the members of the Jeanson network agreed with this parallel. Francis Jeanson, the leader of the network and a veteran of the Resistance himself, strongly resisted the analogy on several grounds: the members of Jeanson network did not face the dangers that resisters had, and more importantly, according to him, ‘the true heirs to the Resistance during the Algerian War … were the Algerians who fought against the French army for the independence of Algeria’ (Ulloa 2005: 120). On the other hand, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, members of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS, Organization of the Secret Army) drew upon the memory of the Resistance to justify their pro-colonial positions.16 The OAS and its advocates stated that the ‘sacred memory’ of the Resistance moved them to rise against the FLN’s ‘takeover’ of French Algeria, and thus regarded anti-colonial activists such as Mandouze and Jeanson as the equivalent of the French collaborators with Nazi Germany (see Ulloa 2005: 122).17 The memory of the French Resistance became therefore a rallying point for both French Algeria supporters and anticolonial activists, and when coupled with the memory of Dien Bien Phu, this apparently contradictory interplay of memories relied, as Marnia Lazreg (2008: 181) remarked, on ‘the silencing of the meaning of colonialism for the Algerians’. As discussed in Chapter 6, imperial identity depended not only on the de-humanization of the native, but also on the replication, in an incomplete form, of the imperial identity in the indigènes to validate its civilizing and enlightening mission (Lazreg 2008: 182; see also Colonna 1997). The imperial view of non-European others entailed that if there was any suffering among the natives – poverty, illiteracy, diseases, famine – it was due to their inability to adapt to and adopt the values of the civilizer. This view explains why the memory of the Resistance could co-habit with that of the defeat of Dien Bien Phu since both referred to an act of defence of French civilization. Criticisms made of Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers point to the lack of any ‘sociology of the French presence in Algiers’ (Mellen 1973: 62). The figure of Colonel Mathieu is far too positive and rational, according to critics, to offer any significant insight into the racist ideological context within which torture was seen natural and routine (see Mellen 1973; and Roberts 2002). Towards the end of the movie, after Ali La Pointe and his companions are eliminated, and thus the last FLN cell is destroyed in Algiers, a conversation takes place between several military commanders among whom is Mathieu. One of them

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states that: ‘They [Algerians] are basically decent people. We got on fine for 130 years. Why shouldn’t it continue?’18 This line erases the tension between Mathieu’s past as a resister and his involvement in suppressing anticolonial struggles. Moreover, the line obliterates in the mind of the viewer a long history of atrocious oppression, which had normalized the use of torture. For Mike Wayne, the biggest lacuna of Pontecorvo’s cinematic narrative is its omission of the 1945 massacres of Sétif – while France was celebrating its freedom from Nazi Germany – the memory of which was not only almost sacred for many Algerians, but which was also an episode that is considered by many to have started the Algerian revolt against colonial rule (Wayne 2001: 15). Bringing forth the memory of Sétif would have given the movie a structuring tension between France’s sense of entitlement to freedom from foreign occupation and its continuing domination of other peoples (ibid.). It would have also signalled the profound crisis of French imperial identity. For example, it was no mere slip of the tongue that French soldiers called Algerians ‘Viets’. Since the 1954 defeat of Dien Bien Phu was so close and coincided with the onset of the Algerian War, this merging between the ongoing Algerian War and the memory of Dien Bien Phu ‘betrayed a social unconscious saturated with fear, foreboding, and anxiety’, indicating the degree to which the preservation of the French self was equivalent to the preservation of French Empire (Lazreg 2008: 177–78). In the words of General Raoul Salan, who was involved both in Indochina and in Algeria, ‘[t]o lose an empire is to lose one’s self; it is to remove all meaning from a man’s life, the life of a builder’ (Salan, quoted in Lazreg 2008: 178). There is thus an implicit dialectic here between the imperial self ’s sense of loss and impending de(con)struction and the colonized’s ‘recovery of self ’, to paraphrase Ashis Nandy (1983). Pontecorvo suggests this dialectic in the final scenes of the movie portraying the massive anticolonial demonstrations convulsing Algiers, when an exultant and unstoppable crowd chants ‘We want freedom! We want our dignity! Independence!’ The French soldiers seem powerless to stop these claims; all they can do is attempt to shove individuals back. In her excellent reflection on trauma and the memory of politics, Jenny Edkins explores practices of memory and memorialization through which moments of trauma are incorporated into the nation-state’s narrative of commemoration while at the same time constituting sites of ‘resistance against sovereign power’ (Edkins 2003: xv). Edkins examines such practices of trauma in sites such as the Whitehall Cenotaph in London, the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the Mall in Washington, and the Vietnam Wall. In so doing, she clarifies that the focus of her analysis will fall solely on Western ‘conceptions of personhood and political community in the modern period’ (Edkins 2003: 10). She admits that that the implicit distinction between categories such as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ is a false dichotomy (ibid.). In her analysis on war memorials, she highlights the uniqueness of the Vietnam Wall in Washington, designed by Chinese-American architect Maya Ling Lin, which gestures to a ‘different temporality’ (ibid.: 81). The Wall’s black marble on

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which the list of the names of Vietnam veterans is scripted disturbs, in her view, the linear temporality of ‘national glory in the aftermath of trauma’ (ibid.: 108). The assumption informing her analysis of practices of trauma and their role in constituting Western ‘conceptions of personhood and political community’ seems to be that one can analyse them as discreet conceptions that can be de-linked from non-Western spaces. Edkins’s use of the term ‘export’ to refer to trauma and violence being exported to the Third World reinforces this dichotomy (Edkins 2003: 10); but the West did not simply export trauma elsewhere. Rather contemporary Western societies are constituted by and through (post)colonial traumas. The Vietnam Wall would have been a more subversive site of memory perhaps had it included the names of the Vietnamese who fought and died in this war. Had war memorials in the West included the names and voices of those colonial others who fought two World Wars and countless campaigns of ‘pacification’ in its name, the national paradigm might no longer seem a sufficient frame for conceptualizing memory and trauma. This multiplicity of voices constitutes overlapping borderlands where divergent (hi)stories and narratives interact and vie for attention.19 After all, the colonial Indian army fighting British wars in Africa and elsewhere, and the African soldiers fighting ‘for the French motherland’ (la mère patrie) suggest intimate interconnections and the ‘mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 329; see also Barkawi 2006).20 It is this concern with the mutual constitution of memory and trauma in world politics which is lacking in IR critical research on these topics (see also Bell 2006b). I explore the mutual constitution of traumatic memory in the following two subsections as I engage the cinematic narratives of Kassovitz’s La Haine and Haneke’s Caché. The trauma within: inhabiting the colonial trauma in the postcolonial present Kassovitz’s internationally critically acclaimed La Haine (1995) documents one day in the lives of three young men from the banlieue. The three characters were seen by many critics as representative of the ‘black/blanc/beur’ trio, the much-touted slogan of French multiculturalism: Vinz is Jewish, Saïd is North African (beur), and Hubert is black African (Rosello 1998: 2; Rosello 2001: 93; Schroeder 1999, 2001; Ezra 2000: 145–53; Rose 2007; Loshitzky 2010: 94–95). The movie, shot in black and white in documentary style, introduces the viewer abruptly to the violent reality of the banlieues, as it opens with ‘live’ news on the recent riots in the Parisian suburbs. The clash between rioters and the police resulted, among other things, in the brutal treatment by the police of a young man of Maghrebian origin, Abdel, who was beaten into a coma during police investigation. Abdel is a friend of the trio and his fate hovers constantly on their minds throughout the film. It was a similar incident in 1993 that inspired Kassovitz to shoot this film: the killing of a young Zairean, Makomé Bowole, shot dead ‘accidentally’ by a policeman

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during interrogation (Oscherwitz 2010: 110). The movie thus sarcastically re-iterates the fantasy of the new multicultural France, a postcolonial space where multi-coloured people are expected to blend seamlessly into the space of Frenchness. The movie quite self-consciously mocks this imagined seamless blend and offers a disjointed visual urban geography of the banlieue and of the core (Paris) that ruptures any sense of spatial homogeneity that might mirror the desired homogeneity of French citizenship. Although banlieue is sometimes translated into English as ‘suburb’, the French term defies translation because it is steeped in a socio-political history that is linked to the specificity of French colonial history. As Mustafa Dikeç (2007: 7) explains, the term has a long history: the first noun ban comes from medieval times when it referred to ‘places of exclusion’ (bannir – to ban, to banish) and lieue means space. The term did not always have a negative connotation. France’s banlieues have come to evoke, in recent times, a radicalized space of poverty, discrimination and isolation constantly stigmatized by French political elites and the media. They stretch outside major metropolitan areas of France, such as Paris, Lyon and Marseille. However, the banlieues are actually the improved versions of the bidonvilles (shanty towns/slums). At the end of the war, with the efforts of reconstruction of the French economy, there was a massive influx of immigrant and rural workers in French cities. As post-war France experienced serious housing issues, incoming workers were sent to live on the periphery of cities in appallingly grim conditions. Kristin Ross, in a compelling analysis on the conjunction between processes of modernization and the obsession with hygiene in postwar France, notes how the ‘new social geography’ of France is a political product of this conjunction (Ross 1996: 150). For two decades, between the 1950s and 1970s, there were massive expulsions from the centre of Paris to its peripheries (ibid.: 151). Over time these purifications ‘would turn increasingly racial in nature’ (ibid.: 150), as France experienced a significant influx of migrants (mainly from its former colonies in Africa), who were to provide much-needed cheap and disposable labour for the post-war reconstruction and who would be housed in bidonvilles (bidon – gas can; ville – town), a term that invoked their insalubrious and dehumanizing character. Starting with the 1960s, as France was basking in its trente glorieuses (the three decades after World War II when France experienced significant economic growth), bidonvilles began to be replaced by grands ensembles, which were modernized and improved housing estates (Dikeç 2007: 38). Although they were initially meant for families with stable income, the lack of adequate infrastructure (transportation, educational, shopping and cultural amenities) pushed out the middle-class families that lived there. These peripheral areas became the only available options for disenfranchised populations, such as immigrant and low-income families (ibid.). By the 1970s, the banlieues were hotbeds of socioeconomic frustration, racialization and marginality. La Haine vividly chronicles the discrepant social geographies of postcolonial France. The difference is stark between the banlieue (dilapidated estates, a sense

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of stasis, of futility and purposelessness) and the Parisian metropole (art, sophisticated shops, people moving about hurriedly). The difference emerges in the movie through movement between periphery and centre: Vinz, Saïd and Hubert travel to Paris to visit a friend of Saïd who owes him money, and Parisian reporters ‘visit’ the banlieue. This postcolonial racial difference mapped over spatial distance and difference mirrors Pontecorvo’s blunt juxtaposition between la cité éuropéenne (the European city) and the Casbah that severs colonial Algiers. The heavy police presence in the first chapters of La Haine recalls the last scenes of Battle of Algiers when French police in colonial Algiers attempted, in a state of panic, to keep the indigènes demonstrators from ‘trespassing’ into the European district. In La Haine, the scene where reporters attempt to interview the trio about the previous night’s riots brings the colonial divide into the postcolonial present: REPORTER:

Excuse me. We’re from Channel 5. Were you in the riots last night? Have you broken anything, have you burned any cars? SAÏD: Lady, what do you think we are, thugs? REPORTER [DEFENSIVELY]: No, I never said that! HUBERT: Why don’t you get out of the car? … What do you think this is, Thoiry? [AFTER REPORTERS TAKE OFF IN THEIR CAR] VINZ [TO HUBERT]: What is Thoiry? HUBERT: A drive-through zoo. The scene enacts the difference linguistically as well as spatially: the reporter’s Parisian accent suddenly highlights the ‘accented’ French of the three protagonists. Their ‘accented’ language evokes their ‘foreignness’, their dubious credentials as French citizens. Next to the reporter, the cameraman films the scene unperturbed without asking their permission. The violence of being gazed at is clearly felt and protested by the three who shout insults at the reporters and demand that they stop filming. Spatially, the scene unambiguously hints at the hierarchical positions inhabited by the two sides: the reporters in their car talk down to the trio from a street situated at a higher level than the playground where the three hang out aimlessly. Hubert’s parallel between the banlieue and a drive-through zoo is pregnant with colonial symbolical significance. The colonies as human zoos in which to gaze at and observe the ‘natives’ has been both a metaphor and an historical reality expressed in the expositions coloniales. These exhibits organized in metropolitan cities such as Paris or London aimed to re-create the space of the colony in the heart of the metropole through life-size exhibits of faraway buildings, peoples and ‘traditions’.21 During these exhibits, it was common to import ‘natives’ from various parts of the Empire to offer an ‘authentic’ feel of the colony to the metropolitan citizen. The volume entitled Zoos Humains discusses the production of the ‘native savage’ through the enactment of these exhibits where the right to colonize becomes contiguous with the right to display/exhibit and hence with

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the right to classify and categorize (see Bancel et al. 2004: 5). The myth of the ‘savage’ acquires an ontological quality because the ‘savage’ is seen and examined, therefore he/she must ‘really’ exist (ibid.). As discussed in the previous chapter, the practice of visuality was intimately implicated in the colonial context, in the production of the ‘native’ for the ‘benefit’ of her/his appropriation and control. Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) reverses the relationship between the gazer and the gazed. In his cinematic narrative, it is the French bourgeois who is looked at and who thus experiences the anxiety of being surveyed. Caché’s opening scene is striking in its ordinariness: a long shot of an unremarkable house in a Parisian street, the view of which is partially blocked by a string of cars, lingers with a puzzling insistence on a mundane scene where nothing seems to happen. Peter Brunette (2010: 113) called the opening of Caché ‘one of the most striking openings in cinematic history’. The surprising element of this static, uneventful opening scene emerges when the image starts rewinding itself unexpectedly and the viewer realizes she has been watching a surveillance video. The object of surveillance is an affluent French bourgeois family, Anne and Georges Laurent. Georges is the TV host of a high-profile literary talk show, and Anne is a successful writer. The author of the surveillance video is unknown, and this awareness of being watched and filmed provokes a lot of anxiety and suspicion in the Laurent family. The entire plot of the movie revolves around the string of anonymous videos and drawings, the author of which remains mysterious even as they unleash childhood memories Georges Laurent would prefer to keep hidden (caché). As the images on the screen confuse the viewer with their ambivalence (one is not sure when the image is a surveillance video and when it is ‘reality’), critics have remarked how Caché deliberately undermines the status of the image and turns the attention of the viewer to the precarious relationship between reality and visual representation (Brunette 2010: 114; see also Osterweil 2006; and Badt 2009: 135). Moreover, this hovering awareness that what we watch is ‘always a manufactured and thus manipulated representation’ makes the viewer complicit in the act of surveillance and hence evokes the idea of the responsibility of the viewer (Brunette 2010: 119; Osterweil 2006: 35). By focusing on bourgeois characters who claim a privileged command of visuality (Georges is a TV personality) and hence a privileged access to knowledge through vision, Haneke uses the critique of visual representation to indict a Western society desensitized to violence and alienated from its own humanity (Osterweil 2006; Brunette 2010: 1). Brunette (2010: 3, 4) has particularly remarked on Haneke’s constant biting socio-political critique of the bourgeois class, with its ‘refusal to confront the compromised past’. Such a refusal is re-enacted in Caché through Georges Laurent’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the violence of his past and to assume responsibility for it. The string of mysterious videos and drawings become more intelligible to Georges as they jog his memory into action. The viewer is shown brief shots of an Arab-looking boy wiping his bloody mouth, an image clearly not contemporary to the plot. Georges becomes aware that the author of the

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mysterious visual messages is not a random stalker but rather a childhood acquaintance – an Algerian boy named Majid. Majid had been adopted by Georges’s parents after the boy’s parents, once employed as helpers on the family farm, were killed in a demonstration in Paris. The demonstration was none other than the notorious protest of 17 October 1961, also known as the Paris massacre of 1961. During this protest over 30,000 pro-FLN demonstrators (mostly Algerian labourers living in bidonvilles outside Paris or in Paris in inhumane conditions) peacefully marched on the streets of Paris in defiance of the curfew imposed by Maurice Papon, the then police prefect of Paris. The police, under orders from Papon, brutally assaulted the peaceful protesters: some were hurled into the Seine, others were beaten unconscious and then thrown in the Seine, others were beaten to death in police custody (see Einaudi 1991). In his detailed and vividly shocking account of the day, La Bataille de Paris, Jean-Luc Einaudi notes that although the real number of deaths is difficult to tally due to the secrecy with which the police handled the events, it would be fair to say that around 200 people were killed.22 Einaudi sees this date as one of the darkest episodes in the history of the 5th Republic.23 Haneke’s cinematic narrative uses the family drama of Georges Laurent to reflect on a national drama of repression and memory that returns to haunt a nation. In an interview with Michel Cieutat and Philippe Rouyer, Haneke mentions that the story of Caché was inspired by his watching a documentary on the TV channel Arté of the events of 1961. He was shocked by what he saw and especially by the notion that ‘in a country in which discussions regarding political conflicts had always been so open, it was possible that no one was talking about these two hundred deaths in Paris’ (Cieutat and Rouyer 2010: 149). The guilt enacted by Caché in the Georges-Majid pair is the guilt that still binds Algeria and France and their shared memory of the (post)colonial violence. Mireille Rosello sees the trope of the pair as an historiographical model to which various Franco-Maghrebian writers have resorted in their narratives as a way of performing the repressed violent history of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter (Rosello 2005: 110–27).24 The constant repression and silence that surrounds the colonial past is challenged in ‘counternarratives and multigeneric histories to account for the resistance of the present to the burial of the past’ (Rosello 2005: 110). However, looking at cinematic narratives such as Caché, La Haine, and The Battle of Algiers exposes a different practice of memory that is not exactly that of a counternarrative. Of the three, Battle of Algiers is the one that perhaps most deliberately attempts to be an historical counternarrative. Pontecorvo stated that he wanted to make visible the fight of colonized people against the oppression of the colonial system – a system which he deemed to be the matrix within which the whole of Western civilization is built (Mellen 1972: 3; Mellen 1973: 12–13; Said 2000b: 284–85). Pontecorvo attempts to accomplish the feeling of documenting the birth of a nation from the perspective of the oppressed, as memory of the present, by using a granular effect to his black and white image so as to recreate ‘the

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reality as people know it through the mass media’ (Mellen 1972: 7; see also Khanna 2008: 111). For Pontecorvo, therefore, bringing memory into the present entails narrowing the gap between ‘reality’ and its visual representation. Haneke, on the other hand, is highly suspicious of this assumption that media is able to project reality. This is perhaps why he chooses not to document the night of 17 October 1961 – he could have done precisely that within the cinematic frame – but to document the repression of memory, the banality and almost mundane character of repression (how to deal with the question of guilt?), and the profound social wound it yields. His intention is, in a sense, both to indict the indifference of the Western bourgeois class to the horrors of its past, and to hint at the impossibility of any adequate representation of such horrors within the visual medium. Haneke’s mistrust of the visual is somewhat ironic considering that his inspiration for Caché is an historical documentary. Georges Laurent’s past betrayal of Majid haunts him in the present. As Majid was adopted by Georges’s parents, the latter feels jealous and engages in a successful campaign to turn his parents against their newly adopted son and thus oust Majid from their household. Georges manages to track down the adult Majid and the viewer becomes aware of Majid’s present state of poverty and abjection when Georges pays him a visit at home.25 Majid, however, is not the vengeful character the audience was left to imagine. He is a gentle soft-spoken old man who nonetheless looks broken by an untold sadness. There are a lot of details to the (hi)story that links Georges and Majid that are left untold. There is an excess to the violence of which Majid was the recipient (implicitly at the hands of Georges) that the audience cannot grasp and the cinematic screen simply cannot contain. It is precisely this excess of colonial violence that cultural critic Ranjana Khanna (2008) finds un-representable. She cites Algerian film director Slim Riad, who acknowledges that he would not be able to put into cinematic frame the torture he endured during the Algerian war because nobody would believe him! Khanna remarks that ‘the historical memory of the trauma of torture exceeds the bounds of acceptable realism’ (Khanna 2008: 272, n.27). Pontecorvo, on the other hand, is not as troubled with the issue of authenticity (understood here as the possibility to render cinematically colonial violence and its excess) as Haneke seems to be. Or to put this differently, Pontecorvo believes that the manipulation of image can solve the problem of authenticity (by making it seem ‘real’ and unadulterated), whereas Haneke insinuates the impossibility of visual representation to bear testimony authentically to trauma. The most violent scene that takes place in Caché is the scene where Georges pays Majid a second visit, this time at Majid’s invitation. Majid then unexpectedly slits his own throat in front of Georges. The scene is so shocking in its graphic violence, so simple and sudden, that it shakes the viewer to the core. The directness of the act, the blood splashing the wall, and the suddenness of the gesture are so unexpected as to suggest that the sheer horror of violence simply cannot be contained within the

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cinematic frame. As several critics have noted, Majid’s behaviour suggests that in a world in which Majid the Arab, the unwelcome immigrant guest, is denied a common humanity, the only weapon available to the oppressed is selfimmolation (Osterweil 2006: 39; Brunette 2010: 125). Yet the significance of this gesture, its triggers and context, eludes both Georges and us, the complicit viewers. What we do see is Georges’s persistent refusal to accept any responsibility for his action as Majid’s son confronts him about his father’s wretched condition and then his subsequent suicide. Georges’s reaction to the violence, both witnessed and perpetrated, is to go home, take some sleeping pills (cachets – the homonym of caché, ‘hidden’), pull the curtains of his bedroom to make it dark, and then go to bed. The memory of violence is thus numbed and put to sleep by a consciousness that refuses to dialogue with its dark recesses. While ‘the return of the barely repressed’ – to use Osterweil’s felicitous phrase – cannot be avoided, it can certainly be deferred. While the relationship between Georges and Majid is that between victim and perpetrator (though this is deeply ambiguous in Caché), the relationship between Majid and his son evokes the relationship between two generations of immigrés living in France: the migrant parents and their children (see Chapter 7). Majid is gentle, meek, polite and unable to express his degradation and oppression through anger except when directed towards himself. The son, on the other hand, is more assertive and confrontational, and willing to take Georges on. Kassovitz’s La Haine explores the anger of this second generation who are disconnected both from their immigrant parents whose passive acceptance of their oppression they reject, and from French society which rejects their difference and refuses to accept them as ‘true’ French citizens (see Chapters 3 and 7). Kassovitz chooses to portray this double disconnect by immersing the multicultural trio (Vinz, Saïd and Hubert) in a present tense that is almost devoid of memory. There is no presentation of the trio’s family backgrounds (with the exception of Vinz’s Jewish mother and grandmother) that would suggest any connection to the colonial past and its current metamorphosis into postcolonial migration. The film performs this amnesia surrounding the colonial affair as the immigrants are parked at the peripheries of French society, and illustrates that debates on immigration are devoid of references to colonialism as if no link existed between the two (see Oscherwitz 2010: 112). On the other hand, as I explore later in the second section, the urban geography of La Haine comprising the metropolitan core and its banlieues ‘[replicates] through [its] internal divisions the global power relations existing between the West and the rest’ (Loshitzky 2010: 5). La Haine’s subtle politics of memory and trauma becomes more apparent when examined against the background of the cinéma de banlieue genre of which it is considered to be one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed illustrations. Cinéma de banlieue rose as a genre in the 1990s as a protest against the rigidity and linear narratives projected by cinéma de patrimoine (heritage cinema) – a genre that emerged in the 1980s. Heritage cinema as a genre played a central role in the ‘reinvention of French patrimoine or heritage’

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(Oscherwitz 2010: 2). Its narratives are thus usually inspired by ‘great classics’ of French literature, its images are replete with historically significant buildings and lavish period costumes that recreate French history as a linear continuum uninterrupted by colonialism and immigration. Such dramas generate ‘heritage space’ as ‘a nostalgic space of memory’ (Oscherwitz 2005: 192; Oscherwitz 2010: 3). Cinematic heritage pieces, such as Bruno Nuytten’s Camille Claudel (1988), Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1994), Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Le Hussard sur le toit (The Horseman on the Roof, 1995), Philippe de Broca’s Le Bossu (On Guard, 1997) and others, project Frenchness as unambiguously white and undiluted by the métissage and ambivalence of translocal processes of colonialism, immigration and globalization. As Dayna Oscherwitz remarks, ‘[h]istorical films become synthetic memories of an imagined collective past’, which erase from this collective imagi-nation ‘anyone who lacks a long-standing, ancestral connection to the national territory or anyone whose traditions may differ from the idealized norm’ (Oscherwitz 2010: 4, 5). It is against this linear projection of an imagined past that excludes immigrants and their histories, and which effects a split between nationality and citizenship (the former seen as ‘cultural belonging’ and the latter as a stategiven right to belonging devoid of cultural and historical roots), that cinéma de banlieue arises as a genre. Its opposition to a ‘nostalgic space of memory’ translates into cinematic narratives that are steeped in the present tense and that aim toward a memory of the present. Cinéma de banlieue thus attempts to draw attention to the ‘colonial fracture’ performed by heritage cinema, whereby the colonial past and the postcolonial present of immigration are excised from discourses on Frenchness (see Blanchard et al. 2005; Oscherwitz 2010). I do agree with Dayna Oscherwitz’s comment that La Haine is grounded in the past as much as it is steeped in the present; however, unlike her, I do not see its past as the heritage past (Oscherwitz 2010: 107). As I discuss in the next section, La Haine inserts itself both in the colonial past of the new (postHolocaust) Europe (see Loshitzky 2010: 101), and in the translocal space of contemporary minority struggles (see Lionnet and Shih 2005). In her reading of La Haine, Oscherwitz inadvertently reduces it to nothing but oppositional reflection to heritage cinema. While La Haine does pose a challenge to heritage cinema, it also goes beyond this function and steps into a translocal space of protest and marginalization (see Schroeder 2001). Central to understanding La Haine’s relationship with the past and with the politics of memory is the trio’s journey to Paris and then back to the banlieue. Their journey is dotted with various encounters and incidents that hint at the distance that separates them from normative ideals of Frenchness: in Paris, the policemen are polite when asked for directions (a fact that amazes Saïd); a cab driver refuses to take them in when Saïd presents him with a (stolen) credit card (‘You don’t look like a “David”, don’t screw around with me’, says the driver); smoking a joint, Hubert and Vinz sarcastically mimic French heritage by intoning French proverbial wisdom, such as ‘à chacun son métier’

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(to each his own), ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (liberty, equality, brotherhood). Vinz chuckles and says he reserves the latter for special occasions. Saïd spots some skinheads and yells at them ‘Fuck Le Pen!’ and goes on to poke fun at Jean-Marie Le Pen in a brilliant impromptu alliteration (‘Le pénis de Le Pen à peine il se hisse’ – Le Pen has a barely visible penis). Le Pen’s mention by Saïd the beur is doubly significant here: Le Pen is not only the leader of the Front National (a far-right party with a strong anti-immigrant agenda, the leadership of which recently passed on to his daughter), but he is also a former French officer in the Algerian War. Two leftist French publications, Le Canard Enchaîné and Libération, published investigative articles that claimed Le Pen was one of the officers who resorted to torture in Algeria between 1956 and 1957 (Stora 1998: 290; see also Löytömäky 2005: 167).26 The encounter between multiculturalist France and its racist colonial past (lingering on in the racist postcolonial present) is dramatized in the encounter between the trio and a group of skinheads. Vinz takes advantage of this occasion and wants to avenge the death of Abdel, their friend beaten by the police, by pointing his gun to a skinhead and threatening to shoot him (the skinhead is none other than Mathieu Kassovitz, the director).27 Hubert sarcastically launches: ‘Oh yes, you want to save humanity! Go on, shoot him!’ Yosefa Loshitzsky perceptively remarks on Vinz’s ‘skinhead-ish look’ with his closely cropped hair and light skin (almost an alter ego of the skinhead he wants to shoot) and notes how his boiling anger on behalf of his non-white friends indicates Kassovitz’s cinematic reflection on the ambivalent position of the post-Holocaust Jew in the new Europe (Loshitzsky 2010: 104, 108). Vinz’s ambivalent racial identity between blackness and whiteness recalls Fanon’s analysis on the ambiguous alterity of the Jew who is positioned, in the racial hierarchy of France, just below ‘the Frenchman’ but above the Arab and the black man (Fanon 1967a: 103). As illustrated in the next section, the trio’s journey to Paris and back to the banlieue (almost replicating the journey of immigrants from the bled to the metropole) comes at the cost of its delinking from a larger historical context of post-war immigration, that of decolonization. While La Haine is a highly self-reflexive cinematic narrative bent on a ‘realist’ representation of the impending violence stemming from the marginalization of the banlieue, its preoccupation with a memory of the present produces a narrative disconnected from historical consciousness. Much like Roxanne Doty’s analysis of French immigration policies, discussed in Chapter 7, La Haine ultimately ‘fails to situate the racialized crisis of the banlieue as the product of decolonization in France’ (Sharma and Sharma 2000: 110–11). To a certain extent, all three cinematic narratives discussed here inadvertently perform the ‘colonial fracture’ on their screens in their different ways and thus attempt to construct a memory of the present: Pontecorvo does directly engage the topic of colonialism, but as critics remarked, what is deeply lacking in his cinematic rendition of Algeria’s decolonization is ‘an articulation of [the] historicity’ of the French colonial presence in Algeria (Wayne 2001: 15).

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While there are several Fanonian elements in Pontecorvo’s visual narrative (the stark difference between the affluence of the European city and the abjection of the Casbah, the figure of Ali La Pointe as a representative of Fanon’s lumpenproletariat), the more nuanced Fanonian elements that give depth to an understanding of Algerian decolonization struggles are sorely missing (the importance of class fractures in the liberation struggle, the precarious character of national consciousness) (see Wayne 2001: 20–21). Battle of Algiers’ ending with Algeria’s independence has a finite dimension and suggests independence as a definitive resolution to decolonization struggles. This aspect prevents the viewer from glimpsing into the rich ambiguity of the postcolonial state (see Chapter 6) and inadvertently suggests that the work of memory has successfully concluded with Algeria’s freedom from French colonial occupation. To use Dominick LaCapra’s terminology, the movie attempts to both ‘act out’ (by resorting to a historical documentary style) and ‘work through’ traumatic memory towards a definitive conclusion. Similarly, La Haine effects the ‘colonial fracture’ by mirroring the absence of colonialism and its legacies from French debates on immigration. The idea of the banlieue as a space of colonial memory (see Lapeyronnie 2005) is too subtly insinuated in the narrative of La Haine and, as discussed later, it illustrates the difficulty of articulating ‘an anti-racist politics of representation within a hegemonic culture’ (Sharma and Sharma 2000: 113). Both movies are shot in black and white to evoke an act of documenting the present, and a feeling of urgency (as expressed by La Haine’s tagline jusqu’ici tout va bien – so far so good). Caché’s self-reflexive critique of the medium of visual representation and its claims to represent ‘reality’ speak inadvertently to the ambivalence of the cinematic medium: it can distort and manipulate reality, while having the potential to re-present its rich ambiguity. Caché’s meditation on ‘the return of the barely repressed’, to use Osterweil’s phrase, allows the viewer to get a glimpse at how colonial memory lingers on in the postcolonial present.

Locating the new Europe and the Franco-Maghrebian borderland: the colonial past in the postcolonial present I now turn towards the examination of the types of socio-political worlds articulated by these three cinematic narratives. I continue here my exploration of the mutual constitution of memories, begun in the previous section, and highlight the contours of the new Europe drawn by these narratives. In an analysis on social memory and trauma in IR, Karin Fierke uses the term of ‘habitual memory’ to indicate how trauma is not necessarily hidden in the social unconscious (as Freudian theories of trauma would have it) but re-enacted in the present through relationships with others based on memories from the past (Fierke 2006: 130, 131). Thus the idea of political trauma refers to ‘the assimilation of a past context of trauma such that it comes to structure identity within a linguistic world of action and interaction vis-à-vis others’ (Fierke 2006: 132). Such a formulation certainly makes sense when one thinks of

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France’s obstinate refusal to engage its history of colonialism and the subsequent erasure of immigrant voices and (hi)stories from its vision of French nationality. It also makes sense when one thinks of Algeria’s post-independence descent into civil war, when the former victims, the FLN, now the ruling party, undertook the authoritarian and repressive role once held by French colonial authorities. According to Fierke’s theorization of trauma and memory, a reading of the Algerian postcolonial situation would point to this society’s ‘acting out’ the colonial trauma by reversing the relationship between victim and perpetrator (see Fierke 2006: 133). However, such a reading of trauma is too neat and predictable and does not give us a sense of how colonial trauma plays out in the postcolonial context.28 Nor does it offer an understanding of which traumas are transformative of socio-political identities or of the complicated fractures of gender, class and race that sustain traumas and their repercussions. Moreover, it seems that most analyses of the politics of trauma and memory in IR take a strong national focus. Is trauma only experienced nationally? Are there not processes of ‘making together’ of trauma and its subsequent memory that are translocal and transnational in character?29 In her study on modernization processes and decolonization in France, Kristin Ross insightfully notes that: France’s denial of the ways in which it was and is formed by colonialism, its insistence on separating itself off from what it views as an extraneous period irrelevant to its true national heritage, forms the basis of the neoracist consensus of today … (Ross 1996: 196) Ross’s statement unequivocally connects the colonial past of France with its postcolonial attitudes towards migration and immigrants. One of the arguments she advances in her book is that the very logic of keeping the story of ultra-modernization (which post-war France ardently embraced) separate from the decolonization processes it was simultaneously facing is itself a consequence of the ‘accelerated capitalist’ vortex that engulfed it at the time (Ross 1996: 9). Such a logic generated the racial exclusion that would become the lot of immigrants from its former colonies. The decades of the 1950s and the 1960s witnessed not only the disintegration of the French Empire but also the immersion of France into a process of frantic modernization, whereby the effort that went into disciplining and controlling its former colonies was re-focused on the everyday (Ross 1996: 77). Ross illustrates that France’s renewed obsession with technology (the craze with consumer durables and mass consumption) and progress constituted also an attempt to re-constitute its national identity in the face of the irretrievable loss of its empire. The elevation of cleanliness as a national virtue and the inward turning towards a stainless steel domesticity are intriguing when read contrapuntally with the simultaneous ‘dirty war’ (la sale guerre) France was waging in Algeria. This obsession with technology and cleanliness appears in The Battle of Algiers as well: in the European

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quarter, the streets are dotted with modern cars whirring by nonchalantly, supermarkets abound (such as Monoprix, the famous French supermarket chain on which the camera lingers a bit), and neatly groomed young people are dancing in popular clubs to tunes that speak of the bright future ahead (‘Mañana, vivia’ – ‘Tomorrow we will live’ blasts a jukebox in the bar that is about to be bombed). Ironically, the modern gadgets with which the new French middle class is obsessed can also be turned against people, as attested by the torture scene described by Henri Alleg in his harrowing autobiographical narrative La Question. The room in which Alleg was tortured by the paras is a ‘half-baked’ kitchen – an unfinished, yet modern room in a building that was in the midst of development when the war set in. The paras took it over and used it for ‘keeping house’ in Algeria (Alleg 2006: 40). Kristin Ross brings up a contemporary cartoon by Bosc that shows a para submerging a man in a bathtub with a small box of laundry detergent Pax in the foreground; the tagline reads: ‘Il faut que la torture soit propre!’ (Torture must be clean!) (Ross 1996: 108–9). By reading contrapuntally processes of modernization and the ongoing decolonization war, Ross points to a process of restructuring whereby commodification becomes central to the intimate rhythms of the everyday. Thus ‘new hierarchies of significance emerge based on commercial products and popular culture’, and on a ‘shift from the literary to the visual’ (Dine 1998). The cartoon reproduced in Ross’s study thus brings together the two counterpoints: the commodification of cleanliness in a France caught in the throes of both modernization and decolonization, and the ‘cleaning up’ of colonial Algeria. What emerges from these counterpoints is a Franco-Maghrebian borderland as a continuum of memories and disjointed (hi)stories: the French amnesia and the obsession with ‘wiping clean’ the memories of the ‘dirty war’ echoes uneasily the Algerian hyper-memory (as illustrated by Pontecorvo’s revolutionary narrative) of the war,30 which became the foundational moment for Algeria’s authoritarian liberation state. Pontecorvo’s film both illustrates and memorializes ‘The only hero: the people’ – a cinematic (and political) theme that would mark for decades the narratives of Algerian cinema and politics (see Ben Salama 1981: 106; Boudjedra 1995: 260; Stora 1998: 161–72). While political and cinematic rhetoric claimed the people as the only hero, the various heroes of the Algerian War and of anticolonial resistance were memorialized through street names and monuments in postcolonial Algiers: the famous Place du Gouvernement became Place des Martyres (Martyrs’ Square), Place Bugeaud (named after Marshall Bugeaud and considered one of the most happening places in the European quarter) became Place Émir Abdel Kader (named after the famous 19th-century anticolonial leader who took up arms against French occupation) (see Çelik 1999). It was in Place Bugeaud that the Milk Bar (a very popular meeting spot for the European youth in Algiers in the 1950s) was located, the bombing of which Pontecorvo dramatically rendered. In an ironic twist of memory, Zohra Drif, the woman bomber responsible for the bombing of the

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Milk Bar, practised as an attorney in the 1990s in an office just across from the former Milk Bar (Çelik 1999: 69). As Zeynep Çelik suggests, ‘[r]enaming public places after independence was, therefore, a systematic act of reappropriation, one that capitalised on the ideological and pedagogical potential of urban semantics’, but one which also bound together colonial memory and postcolonial present (ibid.: 69–70). ‘What is more typical of today’s new Europe – Maastricht or Sarajevo?’ asks Jonathan Webber (quoted in Loshitzky 2010: 111). Is the pan-European process that aims to forge a common European identity, a highly integrated European market, and integrated policies the process that defines postHolocaust Europe? Or is it the post-Cold War European failure to protect Muslim communities, a failure inscribed in a persistent memory of hatred and demonization of Muslims? Both La Haine and Caché employ news footage in the background of several scenes. The news footage in both films becomes ‘a permeable interface between the internal and external worlds, broadcasting the shadowy images that cast the family’s private drama of retribution in a more global light’ (Osterweil 2006: 38). The use of news footage in these cinematic narratives collapses thus the distinction between inside and outside so central to international relations (see Walker 1993). In Caché, the Laurents’ story of traumatic memory haunting them in the present is performed contrapuntally against the news footage featuring today’s tragedies in Iraq and Palestine. In an earlier scene, when Georges Laurent confesses to his wife his childhood experience with Majid, he relates the story of Majid’s parents’ death cryptically, in cut-off phrases, not in a cursive and flowing narrative: ‘17 October. Well that says everything … Papon … More than 200 Arabs were killed … ’31 Anne (and implicitly the viewer) is intimately complicit in the narrative that recreates the memory of 17 October 1961 because the assumption is that she would know what the date is about, she should be able to fill in the blanks. The memory of the past (the tragic date of 17 October 1961) becomes contiguous with the memory of the present (Iraq and Palestine) and draws the contours of an imaginary geography wherein the alterity of the Muslim/Arab other is constitutive of the European/Western self. The memories that bind Algeria, Iraq and Palestine are traumatic memories that conjure violence, destruction and dehumanization. Similarly, in La Haine, the film opens with the image of a man (a rioter in the banlieue) standing alone in a street and calling out to the riot police lined up ahead of him: ‘Murderers! It’s easy for you to gun us down. All we’ve got is stones.’ The scene could have very well been in Palestine had it not been for the French language being spoken. The opening suggests a continuum between the Intifada in Palestine and the Intifada in the banlieue (this is also the title of Yosefa Loshitzky’s chapter on La Haine). Images of rioting and of police brutality succeed one another against Bob Marley’s playing ‘Burnin’ and lootin’ tonight’. Marley’s song, released in 1973, registers the despair of those pushed to the bottom both by the international and national order so that it becomes difficult to find the one responsible for the everyday economic devastation

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(cf. Prashad 2007: 228). In a later scene, as the trio sit on the floor in front of a huge flat-screen TV in a mall waiting for morning to come and catch a train back to the banlieue, images of the war in Bosnia precede shortly an image that announces the death of their friend Abdel Ichaha (beaten to death by the police). La Haine’s outlines of the new Europe/West look a little different from the ones drawn out by International Relations: summoning memories of the Palestinian Intifada, of the massacres of Bosnian Muslims in the ‘heart’ of Europe, of the 1970s Marley’s (and Manley’s) Jamaica devastated by the International Monetary Fund-imposed structural adjustment programmes, the riots in the banlieues are inserted into a translocal political geography of protest, anger, hatred (la haine) and marginalization. The spaces of the First World’s banlieues are thus connected, within the cinematic spaces of La Haine and Caché, with the marginalized spaces of the Third World. Several critics remark that La Haine dialogues very consciously with the American urban cinematic repertoire (à la Scorsese and Spike Lee): the soundtrack of the film is replete with French hip hop, there are several scenes where characters refer directly to American racial tensions (‘I am no Rodney King’, says Vinz at one point), the constant use of improv-style urban slang (see Schroeder 2001; and Vincendeau 2005: 31–33).32 Kassovitz’s urban realism thus very self-consciously pays tribute to the struggles of the marginalized across the Atlantic. While La Haine, with its grainy white and black image (evoking vérité style) self-reflexively gestures towards a translocal space of protest and racialized marginalization, it also (perhaps despite itself ?) hints at a not so far back colonial and racial past. After chasing the reporters away, the trio visit Darty, a common acquaintance, who owes Saïd money. On the wall of Darty’s apartment hangs a comical poster of the then Interior Minister Charles Pasqua lampooned as a beur from the banlieue next to a giant poster of Bob Marley. Pasqua was the initiator of a series of legal amendments to the Code de Nationalité that aimed to restrict the rights of the ‘second generation migrants’ (the children of immigrants) to attain French nationality. These children born in France were no longer automatically granted French nationality, thus reversing the jus soli policy that had characterized French nationality laws (see Sajed 2012). The laws more specifically targeted racialized groups, such as North African and subSaharan African migrants whose visibility was undesirable.33 In a later scene, both Saïd and Hubert are arrested by the police and tortured while in police custody. The scene of torture is vividly reminiscent of Pontecorvo’s scene of torture, which opens Battle of Algiers (see also Loshitzky 2010: 113). As Saïd and Hubert are tied down on two chairs, two police officers subject them to physical abuse and racist slurs. One of them describes the techniques he is using on the two young men to a police rookie, seated in front of them visibly uncomfortable and shocked by what he witnesses. The aggressor teaches the rookie how to stay in control, know when to stop (so as not to leave traces of the physical abuse or kill), and remain calm. As Dominique Vidal remarks, French society has never regarded young people of immigrant background as truly French: they continue to be treated as indigènes especially ‘when they

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live on “reserves”’ (Vidal 2006: 182). Vidal draws attention to the colonial roots of today’s marginalization of the banlieues and of the racism confronting the young people who live there. However, he warns against a linear analysis that assumes that the rage of the young people from the banlieues is a self-conscious anticolonial rage directed against the memory of Marshall Bugeaud’s violent campaigns of pacification in 19th-century Algeria, of Dien Bien Phu, of the Sétif massacres or of the use of torture during the Algerian War (Vidal 2006: 178). In fact, most of the young rioters do not know much about colonial history, but they do know that they have a past and that the past is occluded by the ‘forgetfulness’ of French official memory. The latter is illustrated by history textbooks that ignore the colonial history of France, or by official commemorations (World War I, World War II, 17 October 1961, and others), which obviate the role of non-white others in the making together of French history and memory (Vidal 2006).34 La Haine’s presentist illustration of contemporary racism and discrimination reflects precisely both the young men’s lack of awareness regarding colonial history, and the French society’s refusal to engage the debate on immigration through its colonial memory. However, this is also one of the reasons La Haine has been critiqued for its failure to contextualize the young men’s marginalization within the frame of decolonization (see Sharma and Sharma 2000). As I discuss later when I touch on the politics of authenticity in these cinematic narratives, there is a clear danger to embracing a presentist vision of history, which memorializes the past by failing to see it linger in the present. Discussing the memorializing tendencies of white liberals in America and Europe surrounding the issues of black slavery and the colonial past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995: 150) remarks that these displays of collective white guilt can be ‘both misplaced and inauthentic’. The former happens when they assume a guilt that cannot be imputed to them since they are not the perpetrators of those past actions (ibid.) On the other hand, it can be inauthentic because this created sense of comfort serves to ‘protect them from a racist present’ (ibid.). As Trouillot had noted earlier in his book, it is easy to denounce slavery today: ‘[w]hat needs to be denounced here to restore authenticity is much less slavery than the racist present within which representations of slavery are produced’ (Trouillot 1995: 148). To rephrase Trouillot’s striking insight in the context of colonialism, it is easy to condemn colonialism today (though today’s condemnation of colonialism is still far from unambiguous) but to remain authentic to both sides of historicity one needs to recognize the connections between past horrors and their contemporary mutations. By Trouillot’s standards, Kassovitz’s subtle and overly presentist cinematic narrative fails to remain authentic.

The politics of authenticity This last section explores the politics of authenticity as it emerges from the three cinematic narratives discussed in this chapter. If the previous chapter

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examined the Franco-Maghrebian intellectual’s claim to authenticity through the purified image of the (post)colonial ‘native’, this chapter takes the investigation of authenticity further by looking at debates over the authenticity of both the directors who produced these cinematic scapes, and of the postcolonial subjectivities that emanate from their narratives. All three directors (Pontecorvo, Kassovitz and Haneke) have been considered outsiders to the cinematic topics they portrayed: Pontecorvo was a communist Italian Jew who took up the task (in 1965 no less!) to represent the historical struggles of the Algerians at a time when the memory of the war was extremely raw in France. Haneke is an Austrian director whose cinematic piece muses on the politics of remembering and forgetting trauma by focusing on an episode that strikes at the heart of both the Vichy Occupation and the Algerian War memories, the tragic date of 17 October 1961. Kassovitz is a French Jewish director of Hungarian origins (Naficy 2001: 99) from an upper middle-class family of intellectuals, who put together an anti-police film (see Schroeder 2001: 150) highlighting the marginalization and racism that French society has inflicted on the banlieues.35 On the release of La Haine, some academics and film directors have dismissed Kassovitz as not authentic enough to engage with the racialized space of the banlieues (see Schroeder 2001: 148; Rose 2007: 477; Loshitzky 2010: 96). In the words of Erin Schroeder, Kassovitz’s critics ‘emphasize his bourgeois family history in leftist cultural production … [and] as too film literate to tell an authentic story of the banlieue’ (Schroeder 2001: 153). However, as other commentators note, La Haine should be read as more than a banlieue story. It is intriguing that for the trio blanc, beur, black Kassovitz casts a Jew in the role of the white character (blanc). Yosefa Loshitzky compellingly reads La Haine as a self-reflexive allegory on the precarious position of the postHolocaust Jew in postcolonial France (Loshitzky 2010: 96). Focusing on the representation of the Jewish male in La Haine, Loshitzky attempts to respond directly to several beurs filmmakers who accused Kassovitz of not being authentic enough, of not possessing the legitimacy to represent the space of the banlieue (Loshitzky 2010: 96–97). On the other hand, film critic Hamid Naficy slams, for its inauthenticity, the new beur-geoisie – a segment of the beur population that has been climbing up the social ladder and whose duly ‘integrated’ identity ‘is no longer a threat to the dominant culture’ (Naficy 2001: 100). In other words, they are no longer authentic postcolonial subjects to speak for those other beurs who are still trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginalization. The question lying at the core of these contestations is thus: who is an authentic enough postcolonial subject who can speak on behalf of the subaltern? This is an issue that arises both in La Haine and with Battle of Algiers. Vinz’s aggressive masculinity (or rather his persistent attempts to project an aggressive masculinity) positions him both as a subject angrily reacting to his ‘marginalized masculinity’ (Sharma and Sharma 2000: 107), but also as a (postcolonial?) subject whose racial solidarity needs to be clarified. The

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question mark placed next to the postcolonial aspect of his identity raises the issue of his profound racial ambivalence – an ambivalence with which he himself is struggling. Vinz constantly seeks to entrench himself racially in the trio and to assure his friends that he is one of ‘the non-white guys’: when Saïd and Hubert react angrily to his plans to avenge Abdel’s death by killing a cop, Vinz shouts at them in a heavily accented French, ‘I know who I am and where I come from!’ (Moi je sais qui je suis, je sais d’où je viens). Vinz ceaselessly attempts to become ‘real’, to be ethnically ‘authentic’ (see Rose 2007). Vinz’s ambivalence as Jewish ‘off-whiteness’ (Rose 2007: 480) has to do also with the following question: is he Ashkenazi or is he Sephardi? Sven Erik Rose identifies Vinz as working-class Ashkenazi (Rose 2007: 476). He notes that situating an Ashkenazi Jew in the 1990s banlieue is an odd choice and it would be highly implausible (most Ashkenazi Jews in France are middle or upper class); and yet, according to Rose, Kassovitz self-consciously engages in this ‘act of chronological syncope’ to contrast the 1990s banlieue with the banlieue of the interwar years, and thus to draw on a long history of stereotypes specific to Ashkenazi masculinity (Rose 2007: 478, n.5). Loshitzky, on the other hand, although accepting that Vinz seems to be Ashkenazi, states that it would be equally if not more plausible for him to be Sephardi. Many of the Sephardi Jews were pieds noirs and arrived in France at the end of the Algerian War. This historical fact would make it much more plausible for a Jewish family to live in the banlieues in the 1990s. Indeed, as a Sephardi Jew from North Africa he becomes more compelling as a postcolonial subject, but Vinz’s ambivalent Jewish identity adds more richness to the debate on authenticity. Many noted intellectuals associated with Algeria and French colonialism in the Maghreb, such as Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous,36 Benjamin Stora, Albert Memmi, whose works have been discussed in this book, are Sephardi Jews. As Chapter 2 illustrated, in the cases of Derrida and Cixous, their positioning between Frenchness and the otherness of the indigène both in the colonial and postcolonial contexts is ambivalent at best. Beyond the ambivalence of the Jewish character, La Haine unambiguously aspires towards an authentic representation of life in the banlieue but also of the kinds of subjectivities attached to racialized others in the banlieue. As mentioned earlier, Kassovitz aims towards a vérité style by using grainy black and white visuals, but also by giving his main characters the ‘real’ names of the actors (Saïd Taghmaoui, Hubert Koundé and Vincent Cassel). Kassovitz purposefully inserts La Haine in a genre of urban realism à la Scorsese and Spike Lee, which aspires to document real stories of urban marginalization. As the movie was being shot in the summer of 1995, riots were going on in the Parisian banlieues (Sharma and Sharma 2000: 103). The feeling of documenting reality as it unfolds clearly emerges from the visual diary offered by the film whereby the exact hour and minute of every scene flashes on the screen. This feeling of ‘live’ recording of the 24 hours in the lives of the ethnic trio coupled with the movie’s tagline ‘So far, so good … ’ convey a sense of urgency, ‘[making] visible the social time-bomb ready to explode in the

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decaying multi-racial suburbs of France’ (Sharma and Sharma 2000: 104). So strong has the realist appeal of La Haine been that the film was viewed three times by both the French interior minister and by the prime minister in an effort to get a better sense of the ‘reality’ in the banlieues (ibid.). Similarly, Battle of Algiers has been used as a revolutionary textbook by both left- and right-leaning political actors.37 Several critics take issue with Pontecorvo’s claim to objectivity in Battle of Algiers (see Wayne 2001; Roberts 2002; Khanna 2008). Pontecorvo’s justification to present the ‘objective’ views of both sides while remaining sympathetic to the Algerian cause prompted film critic Mike Wayne to note that in the case of Battle of Algiers, the director’s desire for objectivity fails to identify clearly the social and political processes that generate the anti-colonial violence (Wayne 2001: 13). Such a desire to show the views of both sides immersed in a present cut off from a social and political understanding of the French colonial rule in Algeria is strikingly reminiscent of Albert Camus’s position on the Algerian War (discussed at length in the next chapter). Though, unlike Camus, Pontecorvo applauds the Algerians’ struggle for independence, his desire for neorealism (‘to reveal the world with minimal authorial comment’) has depoliticizing effects (Wayne 2001: 17): his effort to portray the people as the only hero of the revolution (epitomized by the final scene where mass demonstrations engulf Algiers) ends up producing a fetishized image of the ‘people’ as a unified entity. This massified vision of the postcolonial struggles elides too many conflicts and fractures within both the Algerian nationalisms and the divided French positions (which would continue to haunt politically both postcolonial Algeria and France).38 As the film culminates with Algeria attaining independence, mentioned as a postscript in the final scene, one cannot escape the fantasy of modernity and progress that emanates from Pontecorvo’s cinematic piece. This chapter examined the insufficiency of the cinematic medium to contain the trauma of colonial violence while laying claims to representational immediacy and veracity. The lack of historicity and of a vivid memory of the colonial past in Battle of Algiers, the focus on the here and now of the nationalist struggle, and the almost inexplicable attaining of independence (given that the Algerians lost the Battle of Algiers) inadvertently produce a linear narrative that is profoundly preoccupied with a modern idea of progress (the past is irrelevant, focus on the future) (see Wayne 2001: 109–11).39 However, as Trouillot reminds us in Silencing the Past, to remain authentic to both sides of historicity (past and present), one needs to see the connection between the colonial past’s violence and its mutations in the postcolonial present (Trouillot 1995: 148–50). Like La Haine, Pontecorvo’s cinematic narrative remains stubbornly entrenched in a present disconnected from its links and complicities with the past. As Chapter 7 illustrates, this stubborn clinging to the present without an adequate contextualization of the historical links that inform it haunts current debates on migration in France. This lapse of (colonial) memory is unfortunately replicated in many critical analyses of

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migration in IR, which do not see the need for a rigorous conceptualization of the colonial roots of Third World migration to the West. Thus the question that lay at the heart of this chapter was, in the words of Ranjana Khanna (2008: 112), ‘[c]an testimony be given to the trauma of revolution?’ Can there be an authentic testimony to the trauma, violence and incompleteness of the revolutionary anticolonial struggle? The visual narrative of Caché constitutes in a sense a negative answer to this question. What Haneke is interested in exploring is not the reality of 17 October 1961 but its after-effects – the effects of its repressed memory on the social psyche of certain protagonists that become emblematic of the smug Western bourgeois complacency. Unlike Pontecorvo and Kassovitz, who attempt to project authentic political (the Algerian people as an authentic agent of revolution) and social (the excluded banlieue subject) subjectivities, Haneke does not seem preoccupied so much with establishing an authentic subjectivity for his protagonists. As mentioned earlier, while the relationship between Georges and Majid is that between oppressor and victim, the visual projection of this relationship throws a veil of ambiguity over it so that the viewer feels there is a lot left unsaid and uncovered. Haneke’s preoccupation is not simply connecting with his audience or attempting to touch them emotionally through the messages of his visual narratives. Rather, as Peter Brunette remarked, he feels that the audience needs to recognize its complicity in the film’s meanings but also in the political reality evoked by the cinematic narrative (Brunette 2010: 7). While some critics have been tempted to characterize Haneke’s work as postmodernist, Brunette notes that Haneke’s technique is deeply modernist insofar as behind his fragmented projection of reality lies an uncompromising commitment to ‘find a little piece of the truth’ (ibid.: 8–9). Haneke’s persuasion that reality cannot be represented ‘as a whole’ translates into a fragmented narrative that prompts the viewer to assemble the pieces and the meanings but also never to stop asking questions. Indeed it is this latter aspect that is arguably the strongest ethical impulse of his work: he wants to make the viewer aware that visual representation is not only incomplete but also unreliable. This constant unreliability of the image in Haneke’s films has the function to draw the audiences out of ‘their complacency towards the political conflicts “hidden” in the screen’ (Badt 2009: 131). Hence the meticulous use of news footage in Caché in certain scenes (discussed in the previous section): the indifference of Georges towards the images of violence and devastation on his TV goes beyond creating a visual and political tension between his family drama (and his indifference towards an impoverished and devastated Algerian man) and the drama of global politics on the TV screen. It also reflects our own indifference, our emotional and moral numbness, and the oblivion of our complicity as ‘First World’ audiences in the global drama of the Third World (see Badt 2009). Rey Chow perceptively notes in her study on cinema in an age of globalization, how ‘film’s faithful yet promiscuous realism … announced the

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triumph of the camera’s eye over human vision’ (Chow 2007: 3). It is this inherent ‘inhumanism’, as Chow phrases it, of the camera’s gaze that Haneke attempts to expose in Caché by including surveillance videos seamlessly blended with the director’s gaze. Moreover, the emphasis on the Laurent family as objects of surveillance reverses the colonial fantasy of ‘[t]he right to look without being looked at’, which in Jacques Leenhardt’s opinion sums up the ‘microcosm of the colonial problem’ (Leenhardt, quoted in Ross 1996: 76). Georges Laurent’s inability to look at himself in a decentred manner resonates with Camus’s inability to decentre himself from the colonial system (discussed in the next chapter) that produced political subjects as ‘victims’ and ‘executioners’ (see Lazreg 2008: 233). Georges’s refusal rehearses the problem of the postmodern selfhood willing to be decentred from itself (and become fluid, fragmented, ever in the process of becoming), but not from a system that bears the imprint of its colonial past, nor from its own privileged position in global racial hierarchies. As Marnia Lazreg argues, ‘[t]he liberation of the colonized man from colonialism as a system is incomplete without the parallel liberation of the colonizer from the system he created’ (Lazreg 2008: 225–26). This colonial dialectic entails that while the colonial self deconstructs itself to no end, the (former) colonized self has experienced a profound need to reconstruct itself (see Lazreg 2008: 225). Pontecorvo and Kassovitz successfully express this profound need in their cinematic reflections: the former through the forging of a national identity, the latter by expressing the longing of the banlieue’s excluded to belong, and their devastating and crippling experience of hybridity (see Chapters 3 and 7). Haneke’s Caché reflects precisely on the incompleteness of this dialectic epitomized by the Western liberal bourgeois refusal to remember the colonial past, resulting in the continued erasure of the former colonized’s voice. Ultimately, what emerges from this engagement with memory, trauma and authenticity in cinematic narratives is the question of the possibility of transcendence of (post)colonial violence. This question is pursued in the following chapter through a contrapuntal reading of Fanon’s and Camus’s political engagement with the Algerian War.

Notes 1 Gillo Pontecorvo was an Italian Jew, Michael Haneke is Austrian, and Mathieu Kassovitz is a French Jew (of Eastern European origins). Kassovitz’s Jewishness has been seen by some critics as crucial to understanding the racial subtext of La Haine (see Rose 2007; and Loshitzky 2010). 2 I use ‘scape’ in the sense employed by Appadurai (1996) as a signifier of the fluidity of contemporary global cultural flows. It indicates the role of imagination as a social practice in the constitution of contemporary subjectivities through intersections among ethnoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, technoscapes and financescapes. 3 Both sides, the French army and the FLN combatants, have resorted to torture during the Algerian War. However, the French army’s use of torture was systematic and on a far larger and more ‘sophisticated’ scale than that of the FLN.

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4 The conquest of Algeria and its transformation into French territory was a drawnout process that lasted until 1848 due to vehement resistance to French occupation by local leaders, such as the famous Abd-el-Kader. The long drawn-out violent conquest was called ‘pacification’ (Horne 2006: 30). Assia Djebar’s celebrated novel L’Amour, la fantasia is an elegiac rendition of this tragic historical moment presented as the background for the Algerian struggle for independence (see previous chapter). For the massacres of Sétif and Guelma, see note 17 in Chapter 6. 5 Many scholars highlight the connections between the battle of Dien Bien Phu, French Resistance in World War II and the Algerian War. See Dine (1994), Stora (1998), Alexander et al. (2002), Ulloa (2005), Horne (2006), and Lazreg (2008). 6 Both Stora (1998: 238–48) and Dine (1994) remark that for decades after its conclusion with the Evian Accords, the Algerian War was engaged in French society primarily through ‘private’ narratives – that is, through memoirs and personal accounts of pieds-noirs, soldiers and veterans, priests and various combatants (on either side). 7 For an excellent critique of the claims made by representational theory, see Aida Hozic’s review essay ‘Visuality and Geopolitics’ (2011). 8 Stora does not lament the absence of films dealing with the Algerian War, but rather the absence of direct representation of the Algerian War (with few exceptions, the war itself is never shown on French cinematic screens), which, in his opinion, amounts to a lack of societal engagement with the war. This argument appears repeatedly in his comparative study of the Algerian and Vietnam Wars, Imaginaires de guerre (1997). 9 Several stories of rape and torture of Algerian women militants became causes célèbres in France both during and after the Algerian War. They made public the fate of FLN women militants at the hands of the French army. Arguably the most publicized case was that of Djamila Boupasha, captured and tortured in 1957 and sentenced to death by guillotine for her role in the bombing of several public places in Algiers. She was released from prison in 1962 at the end of the war. Boupasha’s story made explicit the horrific types of rape and tortures suffered by Algerian women, such as rape with bottles and various other objects, the application of electric shocks to genitals, nipples and gums (see Lazreg 2008: 162–63). Her story, Djamila Boupasha, was written by Gisèle Halimi, her lawyer, and Simone de Beauvoir, and published in 1962 by Gallimard. Pablo Picasso portrayed her in a lithographic drawing that is now on the cover of the French edition of the book. Another highly publicized story that had an explosive impact on the French public was Louisette Ighilahriz’s testimony of her rape and torture, published in Le Monde in 2000, which specifically named General Massu as one of the French officials responsible for her ordeal. Her autobiographical story entitled Algérienne was later written by war journalist Anne Nivat in 2001 and published by Fayard and Calmann-Lévy (see Durmelat 2005). 10 For further discussion on this topic see Chapter 6 in this book. 11 Chester Obuchowski remarks: ‘Especially galling to them [French intellectuals] was the fact that torture, which Montaigne and Montesquieu had so roundly condemned and which Louis XIV had officially abolished, was tacitly being authorized, as, they readily recalled, Himmler had authorized it in 1942 in an effort to demolish expanding Résistance networks. Though, unlike the Gestapo, the French army ran no school on torture, a December 18, 1959 article in Témoignage Chrétien revealed that, at the training camp for subversive warfare at Philippeville [Algeria], systematic instruction was being given on “humane” techniques for conducting torture. Irony supreme – the camp bore the name Jeanne d’Arc!’ (Obuchowski 1968: 94). 12 Several commentators suggest that the character of Colonel Mathieu was in fact a composite figure of both General Massu and Colonel Bigeard. The latter was in

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fact the one to whom Massu had entrusted the task of wiping out the FLN in Algiers (see Roberts 2002: 159; and Mellen 1973: 4–5). For a similar argument that extends the analysis to other European colonial powers, see Cooper (2005). Alistair Horne notes that Jeanson managed and operated his network without any direct orders or wages from the FLN (Horne 2006: 238). Their most important operation was the transportation of FLN funds to Switzerland in suitcases. The network’s activities went on for three years between 1957 and 1960. Jeanson stated that he opted for illegality and thus for direct opposition against the French state because ‘he did not want to be yet another of the French “theoreticians” always giving advice to the Algerians, of which they were tired’ (Jeanson, quoted in ibid.). Interestingly, Jeanson had been in the French Resistance but refused to use the memory of Resistance to justify his activist position in the Algerian War. Vercors, which is the pseudonym under which Jean Bruller published, was a French writer who was also the co-founder of Éditions du Minuit, founded during the Nazi occupation of France. André Mandouze was a Catholic writer, an anti-fascist resister and anticolonial activist. The OAS was a French ultra right-wing paramilitary organization established during the Algerian War by deserting French officers and pieds-noirs, whose purpose was to ensure the preservation of French Algeria through ‘underground techniques of terrorism’ even against the French state (Horne 2006: 441). The organization was formed in Madrid in 1961 when Spain was under Franco’s rule (see Horne 2006: 440–60). Jeanson received several death threats from the OAS during the Algerian War (Ulloa 2005: 120). Approximate quotation from the movie. For a touching and illuminating cinematic rendition of non-European soldiers’ role in World War II, see Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes, which was released in 2006. The movie narrates the story of several North African soldiers enlisted in the French army in World War II, their efforts and contribution to the liberation of France from Nazi occupation, and the constant discrimination and betrayals they faced. The cover of Barkawi’s book, Globalization and War, features the juxtaposition of two photos: one of Indian soldiers holding a Nazi flag captured in Libya in World War II, and the other of American soldiers standing guard near Imam Ali’s Shrine in Najaf, Iraq. These photos powerfully suggest precisely the complex interconnections of histories and of the making together of memories. See Bancel et al. (2004). For a discussion of the politics of visuality and its intersection with race in the British colonial context, see McClintock (1995). Leïla Sebbar’s novel La Seine était rouge, Paris octobre 1961 (The Seine was red, Paris, October 1961) chronicles these tragic events of 17 October 1961. Sebbar chronicles this tragic day through the investigative efforts of two young Algerians, one a recent migrant to France (a political refugee), the other one a beur. Maurice Papon, the former police prefect responsible for the massacres, was also a former police senior official in the Vichy government. In 1997, he was prosecuted by the French state for his role as a former official in the Vichy government between 1942 and 1944. The prosecution did not include his role in the violent repression of a peaceful demonstration of North African migrants. The ‘antiAlgerian pogrom’, as it is called by Pierre Vidal-Naquet (quoted in Einaudi 1991: 330), was simply ignored. It is to revive the memory of these two tragic events (Vichy and 17 October 1961), twinned in the figure of Papon, that Einaudi dedicates his book La bataille de Paris to Jeanette Griff, nine years old, deported to Auschwitz in 1942, and to Fatima Bédar, 15 years old, drowned in the Saint-Denis Canal on 17 October 1961.

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24 For an extended analysis of this performance see Chapters 7 and 8 in this book. 25 Majid lives in an HLM (Habitation à loyer modéré – low-rent housing), which are part of the grands ensembles mentioned earlier. 26 During the subsequent trial in 1984 by Le Pen against Le Canard Enchaîné on charges of defamation, one of the publications brought forth Algerian witnesses who gave testimony of their torture at the hands of ‘the lieutenant’ Le Pen (Stora 1998: 290). Several years later, in 1987, Le Pen addressed the ‘arrogant beurs’ in a speech during a party rally with a provocation: to choose either France with its values (thereby giving up their cultures), or to choose their ‘roots’ (which meant they should go back ‘to their countries’). In the background, a segment of the rapt audience was chanting ‘Algérie française!’ and ‘FLN terroriste!’ (Stora 1998: 289–90). 27 The gun belonged to a police officer who had lost it during the riots in the banlieue. Vinz found the gun and vowed to shoot a policeman with it if Abdel died in the hospital. 28 In the volume edited by Duncan Bell (2006b), which focuses on the links between memory, trauma and world politics, only one chapter deals with a (post)colonial context, which is Lynn Meskell’s analysis of the dynamics of remembering and forgetting in post-apartheid South Africa. 29 Duncan Bell, in his introduction to the edited volume on memory, trauma and world politics, mentions the ‘globalization of memory’ as a possible avenue of social inquiry. However, he finds it premature and notes that the ‘transnational dissemination of memory’, especially as practised by diasporas and migrant communities, would be a relevant research endeavour (Bell 2006a: 19). Nonetheless, the volume focuses mainly on the national dissemination of memory without due attention to the transnational aspect. 30 Hugh Roberts remarks that Pontecorvo shot his film on location in Algiers in the summer of 1965 during the last months of Ahmed Ben Bella’s presidency (Roberts 2002: 156). Ben Bella was ousted in a military coup by Colonel Boumedienne. The film was made as the tanks of Colonel Boumedienne were rolling in the city (Roberts 2002: 162, n.6; see also Khalil 2008: xi). 31 Approximate quotation from the movie. 32 For a sociological comparison between the French banlieues and the American ghetto, see Wacquant (2008). For a different perspective from a political geography perspective, which focuses mainly on the banlieue, see Dikeç (2007). For an analysis of the banlieue as a ‘colonial theatre’, see Lapeyronnie (2005) and Vidal (2006). 33 In 1974, a series of legislative measures was put in place, known as aide au retour (aided repatriation), whereby specifically targeted ‘visible minorities’ (especially Algerians) were encouraged to ‘repatriate’ themselves voluntarily at the expense of the French state (see Silverman 1992: 57). This initiative was a not very subtle way of ridding France of people who were considered too different to be integrated. 34 In November 2005 the French banlieues exploded again when two teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois (a banlieue east of Paris) died electrocuted in a power plant, where they sought refuge believing they were chased by the police. The rioting continued for three weeks during which more than 10,000 cars were torched and 300 buildings firebombed (Loshitzky 2010: 189, n.1). The then Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin decided to invoke an emergency law that had not been used since the Algerian War (see Henley 2005). The emergency measures involved strict curfews for the banlieue. The reaction of Djaoued, a young man from Clichy, at finding out the provenance of the emergency state is incredibly telling: ‘On the radio they said the last time they used that law was in the Algerian war. Is that stupid or what? Ninety percent of the people who live here are Arabs. What does that tell them? Fifty years later, you’re still different? We’re not allowed outside, and everyone else is?’ (Henley 2005).

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35 Mathieu Kassovitz’s father Peter Kassovitz, a film director and a writer himself, is a Hungarian migrant. That would make Mathieu Kassovitz ‘a second generation migrant’. However, as Chapters 3 and 7 illustrate, the term immigré entails, in the French context, racial and class difference, which does not include Kassovitz. 36 Hélène Cixous was born to an Ashkenazi mother and a pied noir Sephardi father. Other noted Jewish figures discussed in this book are Henri Alleg and Gillo Pontecorvo. 37 The Pentagon screened Battle of Algiers on several occasions in preparation for its Iraqi invasion (Lazreg 2008: 10; and Shapiro 2009: 3). 38 Many scholars of the Algerian War comment that it is more appropriate to talk about Algerian nationalisms since there were several competing movements with different ideological positions and political agendas, some of them going back to the beginning of the 20th century such as Étoile nord-africaine, established in 1926 in Paris by Messali Hadj and Hadj Ali Abdelkader, which aspired towards the independence of Algeria. For an in-depth analysis of the pluralist nature of Algerian nationalism, see Stora 1998, 2004. Moreover, Pontecorvo’s depoliticized vision of ‘the people’ overlooks the competing loyalties and the identity paradoxes the Algerian War engendered both among Algerians and among the French. Think, for example, of the multiple reasons that prompted the harkis to side with the French (see Introduction and Chapter 3). For a shocking autobiographical account of the betrayal of the harkis by the French republic, see Kerchouche (2003). Similarly, Pontecorvo makes no mention of those French people who wholeheartedly embraced the cause of Algerian independence, some of whom underwent torture or lost their lives, such as Henri Alleg and Maurice Audin. 39 In an interview with Edward Said in the late 1980s, looking in retrospect at his two anticolonial films – Battle of Algiers (1966) and Burn! (1969), Pontecorvo seems to be less than won over by the idea of a bright future for the post-independence societies of the Third World (Said 2000b: 291).

6

Fanon, Camus and colonial difference Possibilities and limits for decolonial thought and action

I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations … [W]hat you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference. (Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider1)

This chapter probes a tension implicit so far in the analysis of the FrancoMaghrebian colonial encounter, but not yet directly engaged, between the possibility of an escape from (post)colonial violence and a Foucauldian vision of knowledge as inherently implicated in power relations and thus compromised. The latter has long been adopted by poststructuralist/postmodern approaches. The analysis undertaken here builds then on the conclusions drawn in Chapter 2, which reflected on the implications of reading contrapuntally the emergence of post-structuralism (associated with names such as Derrida, Lyotard and Cixous) in the context of colonial Algeria, and highlighted what this amnesia of post-structuralism regarding its own colonial roots might mean for thinking critically about world politics. This exercise in historicizing the colonial ‘roots’ of post-structuralism signalled that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research in IR without attention to (post) colonial horizons is that it replicates the Derridean/Foucauldian self-referential frameworks. It also assumes that the critique of the field’s Eurocentrism is a sufficient gesture for decolonizing International Relations (IR) without meaningfully engaging otherness and difference, and hence fails to transcend the West as a system of reference. This chapter maintains the tension between ‘eurocentered critiques of eurocentrism’ (Escobar 2007: 186) and decolonizing strategies that aim to de-centre the West, but also takes a step further by turning towards the decolonial promise. One of the concerns expressed here is that the decolonial promise is perceived at best as a (fleeting) strategic position from which to interrogate the complicity of knowledge production with structures of domination, and at worst as an essentialist stratagem that fails to grasp that all knowledge is implicated in power relations and thus inevitably contaminated (a position embraced by Foucauldian/Derridean approaches). Thus a contrapuntal reading of the discrepant colonial experiences of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus

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illustrates here that the Foucauldian critique is not sustainable in a context in which colonial and metropolitan histories are co-constituted. The critical distance Foucauldian/postmodern approaches assume vis-à-vis colonial history and anti-colonial/postcolonial liberation discourses entails a neutral stance that masks a refusal to account for their own implication in (post)colonial violence. Such a stance also implies that while the poststructuralist self aims to de-centre itself and hence thrives on contingency (because wary of totalizing identity claims), it is yet unable to effect its conscious de-centring from the enduring racial hierarchies that feed its privileged stance. A contrapuntal reading thus not only renders suspect the Foucauldian (and Camusian) claim that all resistance or liberation gestures are inherently complicit with a will to dominate, but it also makes such a claim difficult to sustain in a global context of (post)colonial violence and racial hierarchies. As mentioned above, this chapter examines Fanon and Camus’s positions on the Algerian War. The former’s writings have become paradigmatic anticolonial (and decolonial) texts the anger and pathos of which have inspired students of colonialism and activist movements for several decades. Many commentators and academics have portrayed Fanon as the spokesperson of the Third World and as one of the ‘canonical figures’ of the philosophy of liberation (Kohn and McBride 2011: 120; see also Gordon 1995; Azar 1999; Said 1994b, 1999; Bhabha 1999, 2004b; Rao 2010).2 While this analysis adheres to the idea that Fanon’s thought lends itself to translocal and transcultural interpretations, it also emphasizes its political positioning within the context of the Algerian War of Independence. The Algerian cause metamorphosed Fanon from a Martinique-born French subject (moulded both by French culture and colonialism) into someone who ‘lived, fought, and died Algerian’ (Macey 2000: 30). On the other hand, interest in Camus’s writings has waxed and waned over the decades after his death in 1960, and it has recently been resurrected through the publication of several biographies and studies (Carroll 2007; Tanase 2010; Vircondelet 2010). One common trait of these recent studies of Camus’s life and politics is their painstaking effort to re-cast Camus as an Algerian, and (French colonial) Algeria as the imaginary space that made his writing possible. Such an attempt is not uncontroversial given Camus’s position on the Algerian War and on the prospect of Algerian independence, which estranged him from the French left and lost him many good friends in Algeria. I approach Camus’s thought not with the purpose of re-fashioning him as an Algerian but rather to read him contrapuntally (to use Said’s expression) against Fanon. What I mean by a contrapuntal reading of Fanon and Camus through the prism of colonial difference is not a reductionist ‘Fanon vs. Camus’ approach but rather an analysis of their ‘discrepant experiences’ (Said 1994b: 32–33) of French colonialism and anti-colonial resistance. Sankaran Krishna notes that ‘[o]ne can scarcely conceive of a discipline more hostile to contrapuntality than mainstream IR discourse’ (Krishna 2006: 91). He then suggests that to make sense of IR’s ‘amnesia on the

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question of race …, one has to contrapuntally restage the encounters between the West and the rest’ (ibid.). Thus to read the colonial experience contrapuntally does not simply entail creating space for voices from elsewhere, but something more substantive, namely understanding the production of the global racial hierarchies as a violent enmeshment between ‘metropolitan history’ (Said’s term) and other histories ‘against which (and together with which) … [it] acts’ (Said 1994b: 51). To put this matter differently, a contrapuntal reading allows me to highlight the role of colonial difference in the historical constitution of racial hierarchies. Contrapuntality indicates here the making together of (post)colonial violence in a manner that makes poignant the limits of the liberal humanist narrative of freedom and equality, and the limitations of vision and awareness in the Western critical ‘canon’ in general when confronted with the issue of colonial difference. What I understand by colonial difference (see Mignolo 2000a) is not only the historical process of de-humanization of colonized subjects but also their relegation to the bottom rungs of a global racial hierarchy that engendered asymmetrical and unequal ways through which claims to human-ness, belonging, citizenship and political agency are experienced in contemporary world politics (see Chapter 8).3 Fanon’s endorsement of violent resistance and his rejection of ‘reconciliation’ as a desirable solution speak of an ethos of decolonization and of an ethics of difference that – while specific to the Algerian context – also reverberated profoundly with other societies caught in the violence of imperial encounters. On the other hand, Camus’s conciliatory approach, his moral equalization of the violence perpetrated by both sides, and his fervent rejection of the two states solution gesture towards the inherent racial hierarchies underpinning liberal humanist narratives. Moreover, both Fanon and Camus can be considered exilés (see Chapter 3) in the sense of both their displacement and their intimate relation to French culture, but their experiences of exile are ‘discrepant’ in terms of their relation to both metropolitan French culture and the space of colonial Algeria. I am thus interested in how colonial difference shapes their political claims to exiled subjectivity. The first part of this chapter begins by exploring the differentiated claims to subjectivity-in-exile of both Camus and Fanon. The asymmetrical claims to displacement of a pied-noir in (and from) colonial Algeria and of a black Martinican in exile (who, for a while, imagined himself French) speak to a politics of exile where race as a lived experience illustrates the working of colonial difference in the constitution of citizenship and political subjectivity.4 Both Camus and Fanon assign a sense of estrangement to their experience of exile, which marks their engagement with the Algerian War. Camus speaks of strangeness as ‘modern’ (i.e. Western) man’s estrangement from and within modernity.5 Fanon gives voice to the strangeness of the colonized experienced as alienation and de-humanization, and thus highlights how the colonial experience ruptures and displaces the claim to (post)modern angst of Western narratives. By reading contrapuntally the experience of strangeness in

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Camus’s famous L’Étranger and Fanon’s portrayal of colonial and racial alienation in his The Wretched of the Earth, this part attempts to ‘make concurrent’ two ideological positions and two colonial experiences (Said 1994b: 33). Moreover, the juxtaposition of Fanon’s alienation with Camus’s strangeness indicates the violent erasure of colonial difference from Camus’s Algerian narratives, which are evacuated of their Algerianness. Such violence becomes more egregious when David Carroll’s Derridean reading of L’Étranger attempts to rescue Meursault as a racialized victim, othered by the absurd rules of French bourgeois society, on par with the Arab he had murdered. Fanon’s exposé on alienation renders such a moral equalization suspect and dangerous. By exploring the relation between French ‘host’ and the Arab ‘guest’ in Camus’s short story ‘L’Hôte’ (The Host), from his collection L’Exile et le Royaume, I question the ethical grounds on which Carroll’s Derridean reading equalizes their experiences as exiles and strangers. I argue that such a moral equalization masks the centrality of white privilege in setting the rules of hospitality, and also echoes the problematic politics of difference of deconstructionist endeavours, which emerged in the wake of the Algerian War (as discussed in Chapter 2). The second part of the chapter scrutinizes the differentiated visions of Algeria in Camus’s and Fanon’s writings. The militant tone and engagement of Fanon in the Algerian War could not be further from Camus’s conciliatory attitude that refused to envisage an Algeria independent from France. Contrary to some overly generous interpretations and studies of Camus’s engagement in Algeria, which aim to re-cast Camus as a lonely moral voice in an immoral world, I see the relation between his literary narrative spaces and his political writings as one of mutual constitution. Camus’s vision of a multiethnic and multicultural Algeria federated to the French motherland stems from his view of colonization as the ineluctably forward movement of (Western) civilization as History, and hence a fait accompli requiring no re-visiting or questioning. This paternalistic and Eurocentric vision is mirrored by the narrative landscape of his literary works that imagine an Algeria in which the ‘indigenous Arabs’ are (almost) always nameless,6 part of the scenery, ‘the natural background to the human presence of the French’ (Fanon 1963: 250).7 I argue here that it is Fanon’s searing portrayal of colonial Algeria that becomes the repressed sotto voce in Camus’s autobiographical novel Le Premier Homme (The First Man). A journey into the narrative landscape of Camus’s last (and unfinished) novel also exposes the paradox, which continues to afflict the ethics and politics of deconstruction: how to ‘end colonialism and leave [white privilege] intact’ (Ronald Aronson, quoted in Carroll 2007: 213, n.8). The third part builds on the insights from the contrapuntal readings of Camus’s and Fanon’s Algerian experience to reflect on the possibilities and limits of decolonial thought and action. The decolonial option takes colonial difference seriously and highlights the failure that continues to operate in contemporary critical discourse as the inability of Foucauldian critiques to grasp the specificity of colonial violence flattens all domination and resistance

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in a predictable cycle of violence and counter-violence. Ironically, both Camus and Fanon adopted humanist stances to edify their political commitments, and both aimed towards a universal horizon of ethics that was meant to transcend parochial attachments. However, Camus’s republican liberal humanism (Keller 2007: 201–2) and Fanon’s radical anti-colonial humanism (Azar 1999: 23; and Gibson 1999: 17) do not share the same ethical horizon: for the former, the horizon is exclusively and unapologetically Europe as the salvation of a ‘backward’ Orient (see LeSueur 2005: 104, 112; and Camus 1958: 27–28). Fanon’s ethical horizon, on the other hand, aspires towards a history of humanity that takes heed of both ‘the prodigious theses maintained by Europe’ and the atrocities, oppression and violence undertaken in the name of its exceptionalism (Fanon 2004: 238). Ultimately the ethical horizon of Fanon’s decolonial politics is sustained by a belief in the urgency of demystifying History: ‘The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible’ (Fanon 1967a: 231).8

Politics in exile: between strangeness and alienation Chapter 3 illustrated how categories of class, race and language structure various experiences of mobility and citizenship and make tenuous easy celebrations of postcolonial hybridity within critical re-configurations of citizenship. This chapter continues to reflect on the politics of exile and mobility within the colonial context. The political precariousness of hybridity is poignant not only within the postcolonial context of migration and displacement. Rather such precariousness was made possible by the colonial experience of hybridity (see Stoler and Cooper 1997: 9). While some postcolonial analyses have certainly underlined the deeply hybridized and ambivalent character of colonial domination and colonial structures (Bhabha’s work is a notable example), there has been little research undertaken on the translation of such rich ambivalence and hybridity into different political stakes. Exploring the politics of exile and the politics in exile of Camus’s and Fanon’s colonial experiences allows for an understanding of how such asymmetrical experiences translate into different political stakes, and opens the space for thinking about continuities between colonial and postcolonial claims to and practices of citizenship and political agency. Albert Camus was born in 1913 to French parents in colonial Algeria, in the city of Bône (now Annaba). He grew up in a French family of petits blancs (poor whites). He lost his father in World War I in 1914, and was thus raised by his mother and grandmother in the poor district of Belcourt in Algiers. Several commentators and biographers make the case that Camus’s experience of poverty growing up in Algiers, a city where racial hierarchies blatantly marked the everyday, had a profound influence on his writings (see LeSueur 2005; Carroll 2007; Ahluwalia 2010: 47; Tanase 2010; Vircondelet 2010). James LeSueur states that Camus was one of the few pieds noirs to

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document the horrendous conditions in which ‘indigenous’ populations lived in colonial Algeria (LeSueur 2005: 102; see also Carroll 2007). To understand Camus’s social and political position in Algeria as a pied noir, it would be more useful perhaps to look at his involvement in the École d’Alger. The latter was a literary movement that emerged in 1935 as a reaction against the crude colonialism of Algérianisme, another literary movement established in 1921 (Haddour 2000: 24). Algérianisme advocated the union between the ‘French soul’ and the ‘Algerian soil’ and attempted to solve racial tensions between the pieds noirs and the indigènes through an implementation of assimilationist policies, which would see the two groups folded into one secular culture (Haddour 2000: 11). Azzedine Haddour points out that the Algérianistes ‘represented the orthodox French colonist position’ – to re-conquer Algeria and promote assimilation without losing their colonial privileges (ibid.: 12). L’École d’Alger, on the other hand, stood for a more liberal colonial position, embracing a liberal humanist stance to argue for a ‘genuine’ assimilation of ‘natives’. The difference between L’École d’Alger and Algérianisme is that the former, to which Camus subscribed, aimed to circumvent the colonial dilemma altogether (how to enfranchise the natives without letting go of colonial privileges and hierarchies?) and thus evaded into a (supposedly) neutral ‘universal and humanist problematic’ (Haddour 2000: 17). This posture entailed (paradoxically) ‘project[ing] a vision of a reconciled Algeria [by] negating the initial antagonisms between colonizer and colonized’ (Haddour 2000: 24). Haddour’s characterization of L’École d’Alger perfectly encapsulates Camus’s pied noir vision of Algeria present throughout his writings. Camus could never accept the historical guilt of his pied noir community for the oppression and marginalization of the indigenous population. In his works, he constructs a myth of the founding of colonial Algeria that is almost devoid of violence. Camus’s repeated references to the pieds noirs’ attachment to the Algerian soil through ‘ancient and strong roots’, and to ‘our common land’ (Camus 1958: 126–27, 175)9 effectively erases the atrocious violence of French Algeria’s founding and the ensuing systematic expropriation and despoliation of its peoples.10 Jeffrey Isaac (1992: 205) states that for Camus ‘to accept this [historical guilt] would have meant accepting the negation of his own communal identity’. Without intending to, Isaac indicates the dilemma of the pied noir community, which can be grasped as a form of ‘colonial egotism’ (Haddour 2000: 19). This form of egotism of a community whose ‘political future was overdetermined by their past’ meant that their self-centredness and obsession with the preservation of their privileged position occluded any meaningful engagement with the ‘natives’ (ibid.). In spite of the strenuous effort of several commentators and biographers to rescue Camus from this form of colonial egotism, this is a malaise that his work simply never transcended, as I illustrate in the rest of this chapter. The trope of exile is a dominant one in the imaginative space of Camus’s works, and the peculiar strangeness to which he lays claim stems not only

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from his inhabiting modernity, which he sees as an alienating condition, but also from his peculiar positioning in two worlds or rather between two worlds – that of metropolitan France and that of colonial Algeria. This trope finds its expression in Camus’s novel L’Étranger, published in 1942. I would like to turn now to this novel to engage not so much its narrative flow and its characters, but the Derridean reading taken up by David Carroll in his study entitled Albert Camus the Algerian. The plot of the novel is relatively well known: Meursault, a pied noir living in Algiers, kills an ‘Arab’ man on a beach outside the city, a murder he justifies by saying that it was the blazing mid-day sun that drove him to his action. Meursault is arrested and during the trial he is found guilty, through a bizarre twist, not for the murder he had committed but for having buried his mother ‘with a criminal heart’ (Camus 1942: 146). The trial’s purpose is not to punish Meursault for the murder he had committed, but to prove that the killing of the Arab was merely another illustration of his criminal soul and of his monstrous character (Haddour 2000: 45). Azzedine Haddour reads L’Étranger in terms of a différend, as conceptualized by Jean François Lyotard (see Chapter 2), which is ‘the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim’ (Lyotard 1988: 9). In the narrative space of L’Étranger, the différend stems from the perversity of a judicial process that takes place in the idiom of the perpetrator (Meursault, French society) without the suffering of the victim (the ‘Arab’) ever being signified or allowed to emerge within that idiom (Haddour 2000: 51; see also Lyotard 1988). Haddour poignantly indicates the salience of colonial difference in understanding the actual identity of the outsider (l’étranger), which is repressed in Camus’s narrative: while Meursault is in fact allowed to present himself before the law, the ‘Arab’ is always already outside colonial law (Haddour 2000: 50). He is the real Outsider, the Foreigner whose voice and representation are effectively erased both by Meursault’s act and by the colonial judicial system. Their positions are never equal, never interchangeable. Consider now David Carroll’s Derridean reading of Meursault’s positioning within the colonial system of Algeria. Carroll’s reading of L’Étranger makes the claim that ‘Meursault’s fault (and guilt) … turn out to be the same as his victim’ (Carroll 2007: 31; my emphasis). According to Carroll, Meursault’s voice and subjectivity are silenced and even violated by a judicial system that judged him guilty and sentenced him to death not because of his action but simply because of what he is. For this reason, it then follows that the positions of Meursault and of the ‘Arab’ become not only equal and interchangeable, but also that Meursault’s subjectivity is racialized by the colonial judicial system (Carroll 2007: 37). The racialization takes place when Meursault is ‘in fact to be judged and to die in colonial Algeria not as a French citizen but as an indigenous Arab subject’ (ibid.). There is something deeply unsettling about a reading that tries to equalize the positions of the pied noir Meursault who murders an unnamed ‘Arab’ and

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gets to stand before the law, and that of the anonymous ‘Arab’ – his murder victim – whose representation is non-existent and whose role is to exist outside the law. To imagine that Meursault and the unnamed ‘Arab’ share the same socio-political positioning as outsiders is to render irrelevant the colonial difference that separates them, and to engage in a perverse act of assimilation that inadvertently accomplishes the ideal of both L’École d’Alger and Algérianisme, namely an ‘Algeria vacated of its subjects’ (Haddour 2000: 56; see also Macey 2000: 222–28). The troubling aspect of such unjustified equalization relates thus not only to Camus’s narrative and its erasures, but to recent efforts to rescue Camus from his colonial malaise and to re-cast his narrative landscape as a space redeemed from colonial violence. What might the function of such a gesture be? It is worth noting here that both Azzedine Haddour and David Carroll employ post-structuralist/postmodern insights in their readings of Camus. However, the former takes colonial difference to be crucial to grasping the workings of Camus’s colonial imaginary, whereas the latter, to paraphrase Linda Hutcheon, engages in a postmodern exposé that is almost devoid of postcolonial horizons (see Chapter 2).11 Thus the reason why I use the term ‘Derridean’ to characterize Carroll’s reading, in spite of the fact that both commentators draw extensively on Derrida’s work, is that Carroll’s exegesis replicates the logic behind Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, which erases both the specificity of the colonized subjectivity and of the colonial experience (see my critique in Chapter 2). Carroll’s analysis seems to confuse the racialization and de-humanization of the colonized, of the ‘indigenous Arabs’, with the failure of Meursault to live up to the ideal of Frenchness and of French bourgeois values. Meursault’s strangeness can be read as a form of revolt or rebellion against the social conventions of French society, which he finds foreign to his outlook on life, and as a type of estrangement from the ideal of Frenchness itself. As Haddour indicates, he is never an ‘Outsider’ (Haddour 2000: 50); he is both within and before the law (albeit in a state of mis-representation). The ‘Arab’, on the other hand, is the de facto ‘Outsider’ – he is outside the law, made to live an anonymous and undifferentiated existence on the margins of Camus’s colonial narrative. Meursault’s strangeness mirrors Camus’s own strangeness as a pied noir and mimics a ‘Mediterranean mythology’ in which Algeria is evacuated of its Algerianness and in which the real French soul is revealed (not to be found in an alienating and alienated metropole). Such strangeness can never be assumed by the colonized, whose experience of strangeness is that of a profound alienation and de-humanization within a system that relegates them to the margins of humanity. Fanon, in his letter of resignation from his position at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria, stated that ‘the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization. What is the status of Algeria? A systematized de-humanization’ (Fanon 1967b: 53). Carroll’s moral equalization thus obliterates the split between ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’, a consequence of the perverse policy of French nationality law that

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governed everyday life in colonial Algeria (see Memmi 1985; Haddour 2000; Weil 2008). Soon after the brutal conquest of Algeria in 1830, the French undertook a series of legislative reforms to the French nationality law in an attempt to negotiate the difference of recently conquered populations and thus to resolve the ambiguous status of their relationship to metropolitan France and to French citizenship. In 1870 the government enforced the Crémieux decree that saw the collective naturalization of Jewish communities in Algeria. In 1889 another series of naturalization decrees were set in, the purpose of which was to naturalize the non-French European communities that lived at that time in Algeria (such as Italians, Spaniards, Maltese and others). Such legislative reforms were paradoxically part of systematic efforts to address the peculiar status of Muslim populations in Algeria, who lived outside of the French citizenship status. While there were some voices in the French metropole who desired their assimilation and thus the ‘normalization’ of their citizenship status, there was staunch opposition against such plans coming from colons living in Algeria (Weil 2008: 213–14; see also Haddour 2000: 16–18). The status of Muslim indigènes in Algeria was thus governed by the senatus-consulte of 1865, which stipulated that Muslims were not citizens but subjects of France. Their access to citizenship was conditioned by their willingness to give up part of their Muslim identity, in civil matters of personal status (seen incompatible with the French Code Civile) (Weil 2008: 216–17). Even more perversely, the Muslim indigènes were governed until 1944 by the code de l’indigénat, a set of draconian laws that rendered as criminal infractions 33 actions that were not even illegal under French common law (see Weil 2008: 215; Macey 2000: 94). Muslims were thus ‘subjected to an exceptional status of inferiority’ (Weil 2008: 214).12 It is precisely this ‘systematized de-humanization’ and ‘depersonalization’ of the colonized that animates Fanon’s voice in his writings on Algeria. Born in 1925 in a middle-class family in colonial Martinique, Fanon was relatively sheltered by his family’s prosperity from blatant racist encounters or from the brute oppression that was the lot of those Martinicans who lived close to or worked on the sugar plantations (Macey 2000: 62–63). Growing up, Fanon’s relationship with his black identity was somewhat ambivalent: he made a distinction between his West Indian identity and that of nègres, who lived elsewhere, in Africa (cf. Macey 2000: 62). It was not until World War II, when Fanon experienced the racism of French soldiers, and until he moved to France for his studies, that he came to understand that in the eyes of French society, he was a nègre. In 1943 Fanon joined the Gaullist forces to fight against the Nazi occupation of France deeply believing that ‘the cause of France is his cause’ (Macey 2000: 88). It is interesting that both Fanon and Camus, as nonresidents of metropolitan France, joined the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation. This act can be interpreted as an attempt on their part to assert their Frenchness and their belief in the mythology of a universal French citizenship. This experience, however, prompted Camus to come closer to his Frenchness, whereas for Fanon it constituted the beginning of his alienation

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from the metropole and from Europe’s ideals. His racialization during World War II effected a split within Fanon’s identity between the supposedly neutral ideal of French citizenship – in which he had sincerely believed – and his difference as a black man, as someone who could never, in the objectifying gaze of French society, live up to that ideal. This split is painfully documented in his Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952 (see Keller 2007: 168). It was in Lyon, when he was a medical student in psychiatry, that Fanon first encountered North African migrant labourers (Macey 2000: 121–22). The encounter with these migrants, whose condition of utter marginalization and de-humanization left a deep impression on him, ‘taught him that the wretched of the earth were not far away’ (Macey 2000: 121). It was these encounters that exposed him to the psychological effects of colonial oppression on the colonized (see Keller 2007: 164).13 In a study on colonial psychiatry in North Africa, Richard Keller explores the colonial stereotypes that informed the practice of psychiatry in French North Africa. Such a practice was sustained by a vision of the Maghreb as ‘a space of savage violence and lurid sexuality, but also a space of insanity’ (ibid.: 1). Moreover, the supposed innate criminality of the North African Muslim was a myth supported by ethnopsychiatric studies associated with the Algiers school of psychiatry, such as Don Côme Arrii’s ‘The Criminal Impulsivity of the Indigenous Algerian’ (Keller 2007: 138). Fanon’s psychiatric work and research both in Lyon and at the hospital in Blida (Algeria) refuted the colonial myths of the Algiers school, and indicated that the roots of the North African patients’ psychoses should be attributed to their everyday experience of marginalization, de-humanization and objectification, and not to the natural propensity of the Maghrebian ‘native’ towards ‘imagination and malingering’ (Keller 2007: 164). The subtext of the ‘innate’ and ‘impulsive criminality’ of the North African Muslim and of the redemptive character of French colonial rule appears in one of Camus’s short stories entitled ‘L’Hôte’ (‘The Host’ or the ‘Guest’), published in L’Exile et le royaume.14 The story accounts the brief encounter between Daru, a pied noir schoolteacher who lives in an isolated and desolate village in Algeria, and an ‘Arab’ prisoner brought to his school by a gendarme, named Balducci. Balducci is on horseback and leads the ‘Arab’ by a rope through snow. Upon his arrival he reveals to Daru the purpose of his unannounced visit: Daru is under orders to take the prisoner further and surrender him to Tinguit, where the police station and the prison are located. Daru instantly refuses the request not because he condones the crime of which the ‘Arab’ is accused (he had murdered his cousin for stealing some grains from him), but because he feels very uncomfortable with the task itself. At the same time, Daru is overwhelmed by a feeling of revulsion towards the prisoner’s crime and of anger ‘towards this man, towards all men and their filthy meanness, their relentless hatred, and their blood lust’ (Camus 1957: 87; my emphasis). Daru ventriloquizes here the Algiers school’s view on the criminal behaviour of the ‘Arab’ as innate and not as conditioned by certain historical and social factors (such as oppression and famine).

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An important social and political element in the background of the story is the reference to famine and grains. Camus had documented the famine in Kabylie between 1939 and early 1940s in a series of articles written for the Alger républicain. During his travels, he witnessed the devastating effects of famine in Algeria epitomized by an anecdote according to which, in a village, he saw children fighting off dogs over the contents of a garbage bin (Camus 1958: 38). In a detailed economic analysis that vividly describes the effects of the famine and which acknowledges that the ‘labour regime in Kabylie is a regime of slavery’ (ibid.: 50), Camus transforms the famine into a natural disaster brought on by a more general global economic crisis, and thus successfully avoids the issue of colonialism as the root for the natives’ misery (see also Haddour 2000: 96–97). He never mentions the reality of an extremely oppressive colonial regime that had expropriated most of the fertile lands owned by the indigenous populations and handed them over to European colons. He certainly does not remind the reader that it was the implementation of the Warnier law in 1873, 1877 and up until 1920, which presided over the systematic despoliation of Algerian farmers and peasants of over 1.3 million hectares of land by French settlers (Laremont 2000: 44). It was this set of laws and the deprivation of most of Algerian peasantry of its means of subsistence that drove Fanon to state that in Algeria, ‘the colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coals, and light’ (Fanon 2004: 4). Both in Camus’s reportage on the famine in Algeria and in his story ‘L’Hôte’, the famine is thus reduced to a deus ex machina occurrence outside of a concrete historical and political context. As Jenny Edkins (2000) illustrates in her study on the modern episteme of famine and hunger, with (colonial) modernity the phenomenon of famine is conceived as precisely that – a ‘phenomenon’ unrelated to human agency and amenable to technological fixes. Camus’s solution lies thus in asking the metropole to send aid to North Africa (accompanied by numerical calculations on the appropriate number of boats of grains that would alleviate the famine). Camus does mention on several occasions the political disenfranchisement of the ‘natives’ and suggests that the metropole is guilty for their being ‘three centuries behind’ (Camus 1958: 49). However, the subtext is clear: the salvation of the natives can only come from the metropole. France needs to become the purveyor of grains and education that it was meant to be (see Camus 1958: 63–64). Consider, for example, the statement he made in an article written for L’Express in 1955–56: Whatever we may think of the technical civilization, it is the only one, its shortcomings aside, that can offer a decent life to underdeveloped countries. And it is not the Orient that will physically save the Orient, but the West, who, in its turn, will find its nourishment in the civilization of the Orient. (Camus 1958: 150)

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This passage encapsulates the credo of the École d’Alger, which believes that through assimilation into the civilization of the West the ‘natives’ can find salvation, while the West can re-invigorate its soul by assimilating the ‘Oriental’ civilization. Fanon remarks that when the nationalist struggle begins, the colonial regime acknowledges ‘with ostentatious humility that the territory is suffering from serious underdevelopment that require major social and economic reforms’ (Fanon 2004: 146). Such concessions to the plight of the indigènes are meant to defuse their ‘demands by manipulating economic doctrine’ (ibid.). Thus when the ‘Arab’ in Camus’s story is accused of killing his cousin because the latter had stolen grains from him, what is missing from Camus’s vision of his dark criminal heart is the colonial background of the famine that drove people to despair. What is also missing is the most crucial element in the story of famine in colonial Algeria: access to land. Fanon pinpoints this issue when he states that: [f]or a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with ‘human’ dignity. The colonized subject has never heard of such an ideal. (Fanon 2004: 9; my emphasis) In ‘On Violence’, Fanon highlights the mechanisms of the colonized’s violence against themselves. The sheer brutality and the everyday reality of direct and unmediated domination in the colonies translates into ‘the proximity and frequent, direct intervention by the police and the military [which] ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm’ (Fanon 2004: 4). The exacerbated militarization of the ‘indigenous sector’ in Algeria manifests itself psychically in the de-humanization of the colonial subjects who turn the colonial violence and repressed anger against themselves (madness, suicide) or against each other (physical fights, murder) in a desperate attempt to extricate themselves from and escape the sordid reality of colonialism. Fanon suggests that ‘such behavior represents a death wish in the face of danger, a suicidal conduct which reinforces the colonist’s existence and domination and reassures him that such men are not rational’ (Fanon 2004: 18; see also Memmi 1985). Haddour notes that the figure of Daru serves to embody precisely such a patriarchal role – to save ‘natives’ from themselves – and ‘stands as a purveyor of the values of the French mission civilisatrice’ (Haddour 2000: 99). He offers shelter and food to the ‘Arab’ for the night, and then in the morning takes him to a crossroad and tells him to choose between the road that leads East to Tinguit (where the prison is) and the one that leads to the southern territories – towards the dessert where nomads will offer him hospitality (and thus where freedom awaits him). David Carroll reads the relationship between Daru and his ‘Arab guest’ as one of equality and true hospitality, and Daru’s

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gesture of hospitality as ‘a profoundly anticolonialist act’ (Carroll 2007: 79). Even though Carroll acknowledges that it was colonialism that placed Daru in the privileged position of host to begin with (ibid.), his reading glosses over the patronizing and patriarchal character of his hospitality. Consider Jacob Golomb’s reading of the last scene in the story: When Daru brings the Arab to the crossroads where he must choose, the Arab waits for Daru’s instructions. He seeks some kind of order which will relieve him of the burden of choosing his own life. Following Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Camus indicates that if the student does not leave his master, the master must leave the student to choose alone. He indicates to the baffled Arab that he can choose either prison or liberty but he must choose of his own free will and assume responsibility for his own life. (Golomb 1995: 196–97; my emphasis) Golomb’s enthusiastic reading of Daru’s gesture inadvertently articulates the syntax of ‘the white man’s burden’ that permeates Daru’s action: Daru is the master who has the clarity of vision and of judgement to discern and influence the future of the ‘ignorant Arab’. The ‘baffled Arab’ is the student, the infantilized colonial subject who is set free and taught how to ‘assume responsibility for his own life’ and thus to rise to the level of political sophistication of the colonizer. It is from the hands of Daru that salvation must come just as it is from the boats of grains coming from France – for which Daru is waiting to arrive – that salvation for the impoverished and famished Algerian ‘natives’ must come. The relationship between the ongoing famine that was ravaging Algeria, the beginnings of anticolonial revolt (the gendarme informs Daru that there were stirrings of revolt), and homicide (the repressed anger of the colonized turned against themselves) is defused by Camus’s narrative in ‘L’Hôte’ (and by Carroll and Golomb’s interpretations), which rehashes the colonial myth of the ‘childlike natives’ who need to be guided by their colonial masters towards freedom and civilization. Camus’s liberal humanist subtext in ‘L’Hôte’ is that Daru’s hospitality towards the ‘Arab’ constitutes the key towards defusing the antagonism between colonizer and colonized. It also intimates the desire that the natural order of things in Algeria remain unchanged and that the roles assigned to Daru and the ‘Arab’ as ‘host’ and ‘guest’ stay as they are; after all, at the end of the story the ‘Arab’ chooses the path that leads to prison. The key element of the story is the act of hospitality, which in the colonial context serves to conceal the locus of privilege and entitlement. Ien Ang echoes similar concerns when she addresses the ambiguity of Western feminism, which: functions as a nation which ‘other’ women are invited to join without disrupting the ultimate integrity of the nation. But this politics of inclusion is born out of a liberal pluralism which can only be entertained by

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Following Ien Ang’s understanding of hospitality, this act implies that the host is the one who sets the rules and has the power to offer one’s home to be shared by the guest. In the colonial context, the hospitality offered by the powerful to the powerless seems perverse to say the least given that the latter is reduced to the role of guest in their own land by the former’s claim to privilege. Ang’s quote also aptly expresses Camus’s position on the Algerian War of Independence and his vision of the future of Algeria, as I discuss below.

Irreconcilable visions of (post)colonial futures: Camus, Fanon and the Algerian War To understand Camus’s and Fanon’s irreconcilable positions on the Algerian War one has to examine their different stances on colonialism. Fanon’s militant rejection of colonialism is widely known, but Camus’s attitude towards it much less so. Chroniques algériennes 1939–1958 (Actuelles III), the collection comprising essays and articles written for various periodicals on the subject of Algeria, reveals his position on colonialism. Here he refers to it as an historical fait accompli that requires no further critique other than to remind the metropole that it needs to live up to its promises of assimilation (see, for example, Camus 1958: 108–13). The political ideal of assimilation is a dominant leitmotif in Camus’s political thought, as is discussed later in the chapter. Camus’s implicit prescription for what he calls the ‘political malaise’ of Algeria (the rise of anticolonial nationalism) is the reform of the colonial rule: assimilation through political enfranchisement of the ‘natives’, and export of grains from the metropole to the famished colony. Colonialism thus becomes just another phase in the forward march of civilization as History, and thus one has to accept it, reform its excesses, and dissolve the ‘temporary’ antagonism. In ‘Misère de la Kabylie’, Camus claims that: if there is any excuse for the colonial conquest, it must be found in the degree to which it helps the conquered peoples preserve their character. And if we have any obligation to this country, it is to allow one of the proudest and most humane people in history to stay true to itself and to its destiny.15 (Camus 1958: 89) There are two questions that emerge from reading this passage: first, why is it that ‘they’ (the conquered people) need to be guided and helped to stay true to themselves? This is a question that Camus never poses. Second, if ‘the

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original sin of the colonial conquest could be atoned for by delivering the “conquered” to their “profound grandeur”’, then the logical conclusion is that failing to do so entitles the conquered to reject and rise against the occupation (LeSueur 2005: 104). Again, though, this is a conclusion that Camus never entertains. The political malaise that Camus attributes to Algeria is mainly the malaise of the pied noir community. To accept responsibility for the violence of colonial conquest and for their role as ‘usurpers’ in the everyday oppression of the colonized would be tantamount to denying their right to be in Algeria.16 One could use the Sartrean term of ‘bad faith’ to describe this attitude of denial and self-deception. Lewis Gordon (1995: 39) notes that ‘[t]he everyday dimension of racism in a racist society breeds a comfortable facticity of bad faith’. Bad faith, in this context, implies someone’s effort ‘to hide from one’s role in oppression, or even from encouragement of oppression’ (Gordon 1995: 62). While Camus deemed appropriate to enlist in the French Resistance and unambiguously rejected the Nazi occupation, he saw no contradiction from denying the colonized their claim to independence and their rejection of the French occupation. What he never considers is the idea that colonial occupation is a peculiar type of domination, different from the Nazi occupation, since it de-humanizes the conquered people. This is the colonial difference, which Fanon poignantly articulated: We must remember in any case that a colonized people is not just a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained human beings. Under the French occupation the German remained human beings. In Algeria, there is not simply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory. The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop to the French presence. (Fanon 2004: 182) As Lewis Gordon (1995: 61) remarks, ‘it wasn’t the case in occupied France that every Frenchman was “guilty” of being French’. However, in the colony, every ‘native’ is a suspect, not because of a concrete action or flaw but simply because of who they are or as Fanon put it, ‘the colonized subject is always presumed guilty’ (Fanon 2004: 16). Camus did engage in critiques of the excesses of colonialism on several occasions: first, when he documented the 1939 famine in Kabylie (in a series of articles written for Alger républicain), and then when he denounced the 1945 massacres at Sétif and Guelma in a series of articles published in Combat.17 Throughout the Algerian War he denounced the tactics of torture and disproportionate violence of the French army, but he always placed them on the same moral level of responsibility with the Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN, National Liberation Front) acts of violence (which he condemned as terrorism). Camus’s claims to solidarity with the Algerian people

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designated the subject of ‘Algerian people’ as a vacuous entity, which encompassed both pieds noirs and the ‘natives’, two people ‘united’ under the protective gaze and patronage of the motherland. Camus’s vision of Algeria was that of a multiethnic, multicultural land, part of a French ‘commonwealth’ and thus forever attached to France through ties of gratitude (see Isaac 1992: 204; LeSueur 2005: 98; Carroll 2007: 5; Tanase 2010: 186).18 Politically, Camus remained a Frenchman in his stance on the Algerian War. As Michael Azar remarked: [i]n contrast to Fanon, however, Camus never takes the crucial step from ‘Frenchman’ to ‘Algerian’: in fundamental respects, he remains a spokesman for L’Algérie Française. France always remains the exclusive subject and thus ‘the best future possibility of the Arab peoples’. (Azar 1999: 24–25) Amar Ouzegane, an Algerian communist whom Camus met when he was a member of the Algerian Communist Party, rightly diagnosed the inability of many on the French left to grasp Algerian realities. He claimed that ‘at best they display a paternalistic attitude and their goodwill serves only to detract from the real objectives of the Algerian people’s struggle’ (cited in Tanase 2010: 66). This diagnosis fits well with the case of Camus, who even at his most tender towards Algeria, ventriloquizes the paternalism and veiled racism of the ‘colonizer who refuses’ – to use Memmi’s (1985: 43–66) expression. Some of his best Algerian friends became disillusioned with his attitude towards the war and finally severed their ties with him. Noted Algerian intellectuals and fellow writers such as Mouloud Feraoun and Kateb Yacine tried to convey to Camus the justification of the Algerian struggle for independence, which stemmed from the refusal of Algerians to identify themselves with the French nation (LeSueur 2005: 101). Camus, however, continued to persist in his belief that Algeria was part of France, and that the ‘political malaise’ of Algerians would be cured if only France implemented democratic reforms in Algeria. It is Jean Amrouche, however, who advances one of the most lucid critiques of the French left’s hypocrisy and paternalism towards the Algerian struggle.19 He stated that the ‘French had a “long tradition” of excluding Algerians from their own conversation – as if the Algerians were “deaf”’ (cited in LeSueur 2005: 216; see also Keller 2007: 168–69). Indeed, a survey of Camus’s narrative landscape reveals not only the remarkable absence of Algerians, but even when they are present they are nameless (their anonymity is puzzling – they are always ‘the Arab’) and quasi-voiceless. The Algeria summoned by Camus’s narrative scene is a pied noir territory devoid of ‘Arabs’ or in which ‘Arabs’ are simply part of the ‘natural background to the human presence of the French’ (Fanon 1963: 250). His autobiographical novel Le premier homme (The First Man), on which Camus was working when he died in a car accident in 1960,20 epitomizes this specific vision of Algeria but also throws further light on his positioning as a

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pied noir in a land convulsed by anticolonial struggles. The novel follows the story of Jacques Cormier, a pied noir living in a poor district of Algiers, from his birth up to his adulthood. The novel is divided into two parts: ‘Recherche du père’ (The search for the father), and ‘Le fils, ou le premier homme’ (The son, or the first man). The last scene of the first part (which constitutes also the core of the novel) retraces the story of Algeria’s colonization as a settlement of empty lands in the second half of the 19th century – a ‘Promised Land’ (‘la Terre promise’) for the French settlers (many of them unemployed in France at the time) (Camus 1994: 172). The reminiscing of the founding of Algeria closes Jacques Cormier’s quest for information on his father, who had died in World War I, months after Jacques was born. The quest for his roots thus takes him to the founding of the colony, which the first settlers experienced as ‘an unknown land’, ‘a savage and bloody land’, ‘a miserable and hostile place’, presided over by a ‘ferocious sun’ (ibid.: 173–77). Algeria was thus founded and built through the hard work and sacrifice of the settlers who toiled the lands given to them (whose lands were those?).21 This genealogical journey to Algeria’s founding takes Cormier to the massacres of settlers by enraged ‘Arabs’. The storyteller deems these massacres to be the ‘Arab’ retaliation for their colonial conquest, who in their turn had massacred ‘the first Berbers, and who in their turn … now we arrive at the first criminal, you know, his name was Cain’ (Camus 1994: 177). This passage produces two erasures: one is the specificity of colonial violence, which is seen as simply another episode in the long history of human violence; the other erasure is the denial of any claims to authenticity by the ‘natives’ (indigènes). For Camus, simply because their arrival was prior to that of the French does not give their claim to an ‘ultimate origin’ any more weight than that of the pieds noirs (Carroll 2007: 171). Thus colonial violence is not an historical and context-specific phenomenon of Europe, but is instead conveniently inscribed in an ahistorical, quasimythical, ‘original, precolonial violence … the struggle of all inhabitants with a land that “refused to be occupied and took its revenge on whatever it found”’ (Carroll 2007: 172). This vision of an Algeria ‘without ancestors and without memory’ (Camus 1994: 261) is more than fitting for Cormier’s claim to feel as though he was the: first man, the first conqueror, alighting on a land where the law of brute force was still the primary law, and where justice was made to punish mercilessly what morals could not prevent, surrounded by this people, alluring and disturbing, near and apart, alongside whom we lived … (Camus 1994: 257; my emphasis) Camus’s claim to an ‘ultimate origin’ echoes Fanon’s searing portrayal of the mythology of the colons, who see themselves as ‘the very beginning’ and their lives as ‘an epic, an odyssey’ epitomized by the claim: ‘We made this land’ (Fanon 2004: 14; see also Macey 2000: 472). Camus’s ‘first man’ is thus

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unambiguously European, and his arrival on the land signals the beginning, the moment of founding, and the voice that authors (and authorizes) history. As Carroll (2007: 171) remarks, ‘Camus’ “first man” is the antithesis of the “new man” of Fanon and Sartre’. Fanon’s ‘new man’ constitutes the rejection of the ‘first man’s’ founding myth and of his mythology of progress through colonization. As Amilcar Cabral brilliantly explained: there is a preconception held by many people, even on the left, that imperialism made us enter history at the moment when it began its adventure in our countries … We consider that when imperialism arrived in Guine it made us leave history – our history. (Amilcar Cabral, quoted in Soyinka 1974: 11; my emphasis) Fanon’s ‘new man’ is thus a denunciation of the narrative of progress through colonization and an attempt to re-claim history not simply as a break from colonial domination but also as the re-gaining of a sense of autonomy and as ‘a complete overhauling of consciousness’ (Colin Dayan, quoted in Kohn and McBride 2011: 31). For Fanon, colonialism could not simply be reformed, as Camus suggested. For, in the words of Charles Geromini – a pied noir who joined the FLN, how does one humanize repression (Fanon 1965: 168)? Fanon has been accused of providing a Manichean and oversimplified picture of colonial rule (see, for example, Gates 1999). However, such criticisms miss the point that colonial Algeria was ‘planned and built on Manichean lines’ (Macey 2000: 472). Fanon’s exposé highlights precisely the degree to which the de-humanization of the colonized (as explained in the previous section) was a consequence of the Manichean logic that underpinned French colonial rule in Algeria. When Albert Memmi remarks about the colonizer that ‘a native mother crying over the death of her son, a native woman mourning the loss of her husband, only vaguely remind him of the pain of a mother or of a wife’ (Memmi 1985: 105–6), he implies that the colonial enterprise was possible only through the denial of the ‘natives’ humanity. Fanon’s unflinching support for the Algerian anticolonial nationalism and for an independent Algeria indicates therefore that the process of decolonization was not only necessary but also inevitable as liberation from the ‘regime of truth’ propagated by the colonial enterprise (see Said 1994b: 268). As is discussed in the last section of the chapter, Fanon’s vision of liberation ultimately entails the ‘dissolution of the inferiority complex’ and of the alienation of the colonized (Azar 1999: 26–27). Achille Mbembe understands colonial authority as an expression of commandement, a term that expresses the ability to produce the ‘native’ as the subject and the object of a reality that was the ideological manufacturing of colonial power (Mbembe 2001: 59, n.18). According to Mbembe, colonial sovereignty relied on a conception of state sovereignty that was the reverse

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of the rights-based liberal model because the deployment of the notion of rights in fact entailed the right of the conquerors to establish and promulgate laws and afford themselves the prerogatives that stemmed from them (Mbembe 2001: 25). The founding violence of the colonial conquest thus entitled the colonizer to translate this violence into ‘authorizing authority’ whereby the violence of colonial conquest is not only institutionalized through law but also sustained and constantly reiterated in the everyday as a strategy of ensuring its stability and ‘permanence’ (ibid.). Colonial rule was a rule of force, not of consent or hegemony (in the Gramscian sense)22 and thus repressive means were central to the manufacturing of colonial legitimacy. Fanon succeeds in conveying the exceptionality of colonial rule, which can only exist (in settler colonies such as Algeria) as a permanent state of exception (see Kohn and McBride 2011: 77–97). Hence the permanent everyday reality of police stations and military barracks that evoke an urban geography of colonial violence designed and meant to contain the colonized and to perpetually re-institute colonial sovereignty. In ‘On Violence’, Fanon makes a compelling distinction between the mechanics of power as hegemony in capitalist societies, ‘those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, [which] instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition’, and the mechanics of power as brute force in the colonies where violence is brought ‘into the homes and minds of the colonized subject’ (Fanon 2004: 3–4; see also Parry 1999: 226). Thus the counter-violence of the colonized against their oppressors, which Fanon theorized in Wretched of the Earth, is the means through which the colonized re-appropriate their everyday reality and directly challenge the logic of colonial sovereignty. Contrary to various interpretations that chastise Fanon for advocating violence for violence’s sake (see, for example, Arendt 1970; and LeSueur 2005), Fanon’s vision of anticolonial violence needs to be understood and situated in the context of colonial Algeria. From Fanon’s perspective, such violence is the logical consequence of a system of de-humanization that had reduced the colonized to the ‘state of an animal’ (Fanon 2004: 7). More importantly, he discusses the issue of the anticolonial violence in tandem with the psychological effects of systematic oppression and de-personalization on the individual and collective psyche of the colonized. This is very important and it certainly is not simply a digression in the narrative. The intimate link between the internalized oppression experienced by the colonized as a permanent state of guilt, tension and self-destruction, and the outburst of anticolonial violence constitutes a key element in grasping Fanon’s exposé on violence. The violence of the colonized against their own, their ‘muscular dreams’ of escape and of ‘aggressive vitality’, and their refuge in practices of mysticism and in beliefs of ‘magical, supernatural powers’ are psychological tactics, according to Fanon, which allow the colonized to escape momentarily their alienating everyday reality (Fanon 2004: 15, 19). Anticolonial violence makes sense then as an act that prompts the colonized to confront head-on the reality of colonialism and free themselves from its objectification: ‘After years of

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unreality, after wallowing in the most extraordinary phantasms, the colonized subject, machine gun at the ready, finally confronts the only force, which challenges his very being: colonialism’ (Fanon 2004: 20; my emphasis). As Richard Keller notes, ‘[v]iolence shapes identity as it becomes the subject’s principal register for framing the local social world and, in turn, individual and collective action’ (Keller 2007: 165; see also Das et al. 2000). ‘On Violence’ is not a battle cry for violence; it is an account of the violence that always attends decolonization, but also of the everyday and almost banal quality of the systematized violence of which the colonized were the recipients (see Macey 2000: 475). How could it be otherwise? As David Macey (2000: 477) insightfully remarked, ‘[i]n Algeria, violence was not just the midwife of history. Violence was Algeria’s father and mother’. Algeria was founded through atrocious violence and the legitimacy of colonial sovereignty was preserved and sustained through a ‘regime of truth’ that imagined the colonized in ‘zoological terms’ – animal-like entities whose de-personalization served to highlight the humanity of the colonizer (Fanon 2004: 7; see also Memmi 1985; Bancel et al. 2004). Fanon did not therefore need to advocate for violence; he witnessed it on a daily basis in the wards of the psychiatric hospital of Blida, where the colonial nightmare tormented his North African patients (see Keller 2007). In light of colonial Algeria’s violent realities and of the profound alienating and de-humanizing condition of being a colonized subject, Camus’s prescription of assimilation and of ‘mutual recognition between colonizer and colonized’ (Isaac 1992: 198) sounds at best misguided and naïve. For mutual recognition to emerge between two human beings locked in a violently unequal relation, they need to demolish the racial hierarchies that sustain this relation. To Fanon’s illustration of the inevitability of violence in colonial Algeria, Camus answered with desires of assimilation of the colonized into the bosom of the metropole. But Fanon’s ‘new man’ did not desire assimilation but cultural and political autonomy. Fanon’s ‘new man’ aimed for liberation from the anomie that characterized the French mission civilisatrice: the promise of equality rested upon a logic of inferiority, objectification and de-humanization. Jacques Berque nicely expresses this idea when he states that ‘[t]he Arab revolt … was not merely a revolt against the individual who oppressed but also against the “destiny” that had created oppression’ (quoted in LeSueur 2005: 247; my emphasis). This is a destiny the inherent racist logic of which Camus’s ‘first man’ both upholds and conveniently occludes when he engages in a moral equalization of the colonizer’s and colonized’s violence. In his eyes, the violence of colonial rule (with its attached fanatic belief in its mission) is no different from the violence of anticolonial resistance. They are both equally fanatic and morally culpable. Alice Cherki, in the preface to the 2002 French edition of Les damnés de la terre, questions this moral equalization of the Algerian War and indicates that it obscures the deeply unequal relationship that bounded the two sides, reinforced by steep hierarchies and brute exploitation (Cherki 2002: 14). It is a logic that continues to frame both the

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memory of the Algerian War and contemporary North–South violence (see Orford 2003; and Ayoob 2004). Camus’s sincere belief in assimilation as the political solution to the Algerian War (Carroll 2007: 133–35; Isaac 1992: 196; LeSueur 2005: 102) is a strange response to the conflict given that the French policy of assimilation was always meant to fail (see Haddour 2000: 18). In an illuminating study of the colonial education policies in Algeria, and of the pedagogy that supported them, Fanny Colonna notes that ‘the policy of assimilation demanded by the rising middle class failed … because it was incompatible with colonial interests’ (Colonna 1997: 365). What is more intriguing, however, is that the pedagogy put in place by the so-called ‘policy of assimilation’ quite self-consciously ensured its own failure. Colonna’s archival study of the examination manuals, policies and reports of teacher training schools in colonial Algeria reveals that the very design of the French colonial school system was such as to produce ‘natives’ who were estranged enough from their own culture but not too familiar with the hegemonic culture, and thus maintained a ‘proper distance’ both from their ‘native’ and French cultures (Colonna 1997: 364–65). The in-betweenness of these French-schooled ‘native’ teachers was not simply a psychological product of the colonial encounter, but also a conscious policy of ‘shap[ing] cultural mediators who came from a “barbarian” culture and were assigned to spread the legitimate culture’ (Colonna 1997: 361). It is not surprising then that ‘the school was the most effective colonial institution’,23 which propagated the opposition between ‘ideal France’ (the cradle of freedom, equality and brotherhood), and ‘real France’ – the everyday dimension of racism and violence from which ‘ideal France’ distanced itself (Colonna 1997: 353). It is precisely this form of mystification (the imagined lag between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ France) that operates in Camus’s literary and political thought, and it is precisely through the praxis of anticolonial violence that Fanon’s ‘new man’ aims to expose this mystification. This mystification might also partially explain why Camus was a fervent defender of the Algerian elite educated in French schools and saw it as his potential ally to his vision of Algeria (cf. Tanase 2010: 324), and why Fanon was so vehemently critical of the same elite. There is thus a clear disconnect between Camus’s proclaimed liberal humanism and the kind of ethical positioning that surfaces from his narratives. His humanism gestures towards a (supposedly neutral) universal ethics, according to which all human beings are equally worthy and all human life is sacred. Hence the impossibility of justifying violence in the name of any cause. According to this logic, the polarity imperialist/anti-imperialist and colonial/anti-colonial ‘was simply another invidious binary opposition destined to produce suffering, violence, and authoritarianism’ (Isaac 1992: 179). Therefore Third Worldism as an ‘ideology [is] … another version of that typically modern hubris which claims to have discerned the true direction of history’ (Isaac 1992: 178–79). An important question arises here: what is at stake in reducing ‘Third Worldism’ to nothing but ‘modern hubris’? This is a

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question I explore in the last section of this chapter when I critique David Scott’s (2004) engagement with the question of postcoloniality and modernity. However, it is noteworthy for now to draw attention to the fact that Camus’s equalizing vision, which dissolved the specificity of colonial and Third World difference (see Chapter 2) was made possible by his refusal to believe in ‘definitive revolutions’ since ‘[a]ll human effort in history is relative’ (quoted in Isaac 1992: 180).24 This endorsement of the futility of historical revolt did not prevent him, of course, from joining the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation, or from accusing the ‘Bandung group’ of betraying the anticommunist Hungarian uprisings of 1956 (Camus 1988: 166). In L’Homme Révolté, Camus argues that the paradox of all historical revolt is that it sacrifices freedom in the name of justice since the transition from revolt to revolution entails a totalitarian dimension that must demand for the ‘suspension of freedom’ to accomplish justice (Camus 1951: 139). Roger Quillot claims that for Camus this is a contradiction that cannot be resolved, which is why Camus chooses freedom because, even when justice fails, freedom creates the space to protest against injustice and thus allows for free expression (Quillot 1965: 1619). However, this is an impossible choice for Algerians. How would such a choice between freedom and justice translate in colonial Algeria? To what sort of freedom could the colonized have laid claim in a system that produced them as subjects, not as citizens? Besides even if citizenship had been granted to the Muslim Algerians, would such an act make them free? What if freedom for the Algerians meant freedom from colonial occupation? How should such freedom be attained? It is here, with the colonial difference of Algeria, that the limits of Camus’s liberal humanism emerge. It seems that his vision of freedom makes sense only insofar as it is circumscribed within a Western ontology: freedom for Algerians can easily (and only) be attained as long as France grants them citizenship and democratic reforms. This is a vision of freedom that stands in profound dissonance with Fanon’s radical anticolonial humanism. Fanon’s radical humanism is embedded in the historical anticolonial struggle of Algerians, but this situatedness does not take away from its aspiration towards a universal horizon of ethics. As Michael Azar remarks, Fanon chose to be part of ‘this historical formation’, he assumed it as his identity, and ‘designated it as a foundation for a new humanism’ (Azar 1999: 23). Fanon’s radical humanism exposes the mystification of Western universal humanism that masks the racialized hierarchization of the modern world. His work makes visible the colonial difference at work in ‘the theoretical elaborations produced by the culture of Western late capitalism’ experienced by the colonized as cultural oppression and ‘colonial enslavement’ (see Said 1994b: 268). To paraphrase Jacques Berque, Fanon’s vision of liberation is not simply about liberation from oppressors, but, more importantly, from the oppressive logic of colonialism – from its objectifying and de-humanizing frame. His radical humanism is radical because it emerges from the standpoint of the de-humanized, the ‘natives’. Therefore Fanon’s humanism, while it might bear vague traces of

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the Enlightenment, aims to accomplish what Camus’s liberal humanism cannot: to dislocate the idea of ‘human’ from its Eurocentric shackles that contain it (or what Mignolo (2000a) calls ‘post-occidental reason’). The extent to which Fanon succeeds in his attempt is a matter I take up next in a discussion on the possibilities and limits of the decolonial promise.

Colonial difference and the decolonial promise: possibilities and limits When Camus criticized Third Worldism for being just another manifestation of the ‘modern hubris’ that tended towards totality, and when he portrayed historical revolt as inherently totalitarian, he circumscribed Third Worldism and (implicitly) anticolonial revolt within the logic of modernity. However, anticolonial revolt, as articulated by Fanon, is very much against the logic of modernity, even though its position vis-à-vis modernity is ambiguous as I discuss later. Moreover, Camus does not address the idea that the very critique of modernity in which he engages is always within Western modernity, it never transcends it (nor does it attempt to). Fanon, in contrast, quite selfconsciously eschews the paradigm set out by Western modernity and aims to provide an alternative. Fanon’s conceptualization of anticolonial liberation as ‘a critique of the modern notion of Totality’ aims towards ‘de-coloniality’, which Mignolo pace Quijano understood as a practice of ‘delinking’ (Mignolo 2007: 451–52). Inspired by Anibal Quijano’s work on ‘coloniality’ and ‘de-coloniality’, Mignolo understands the practice of ‘delinking’ as, among other things, denouncing the ‘pretended universality’ of the West and of its structuring categories (nation-state, nationalism, citizenship) and processes (capitalism, colonialism) (Mignolo 2007: 453). Mignolo defines this practice as ‘epistemic geopolitics’, involving a decolonization of the category of ‘universal’ and allowing other articulations of the ‘universal’ to become visible (ibid.: 485). Second, delinking entails an ‘epistemic body politics’, which probes into the embodied difference, affective, corporeal and psychic, of colonial human realities (ibid.: 485, 487). According to Mignolo, the radical dimension of Fanon’s theory of liberation is that he engages in both practices of delinking. In Wretched of the Earth, he moves between both levels of delinking: he investigates the distortion of the colonized’s history, minds, bodies and souls, but he also moves to address the geopolitical implications of anticolonial liberation: ‘ … if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers’ (Fanon 2004: 239; my emphasis). In advocating for a kind of ‘newness’ both of thinking and of practice, Fanon was also aware of the caveats and pitfalls that might and indeed would attend both the imagination and instantiation of ‘newness’, but he was willing to take risks and believed that the promise that lay ahead was worth taking those risks. Benita Parry (1999) takes issue with those voices that dismissed Fanon’s and Aimée Césaire’s continuing relevance to theorizing the colonial as

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‘essentialist’ renditions of domination and resistance. She warns that these voices, adhering to a postmodern/Foucauldian suspicion of unified visions of resistance, by focusing exclusively on the multiple and fragmented subjectivities of both ‘colonizers’ and ‘colonized’, foreclose ‘the possibility of theorizing resistance’ and of ‘accord[ing] center stage’ to the voice and perspective of the colonized (Parry 1999: 216). Instead, postcolonial critics should take seriously the tactical significance of Fanon’s clamouring for to the necessity for a national culture and thus for more coherent and unified communal identities (ibid.: 220). To talk about such collective identities is not an exercise in precolonial nostalgia whereby a pure and undimmed glory can be restored; it is rather a conscious re-capturing of the colonized’s cultural autonomy – an autonomy denied by the colonial project (see also Shohat 1992). Countering criticisms that such claims to collective identities are blind to their constructed and unstable character, Parry asserts that both Fanon and Césaire were very much aware of the ‘imagined’ coherence of these identities. However, instead of trying to discipline nativism, ‘theoretical whip in hand’, one should also reflect on what might be gained by these disciplining moves (Parry 1999: 221). What emerges here is a tension identified at the beginning of this chapter between the promise of transcending (post)colonial violence and the Foucauldian vision of knowledge as implicated with power relations and thus inherently compromised. This tension structures the debate between recent efforts to conceptualize the notion of de-coloniality, understood by Mignolo (2007) as decolonization of knowledge and of being, and postmodern tendencies to perceive such efforts as utopian and hence uncritical of the pitfalls attending them. David Scott, in his Conscripts of Modernity, engages precisely this tension. He intends to explore the types of narratives that sustained the anticolonial impulse (the sorts of pasts and futures they imagined) and their relationship to the ‘postcolonial making of national sovereignties’ (Scott 2004: 1). His diagnosis is that ‘almost everywhere, the anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares’ (ibid.: 2). Therefore he claims that perhaps it is not so much that the postcolonial present offered bad answers to the right questions, but rather that the anticolonial questions themselves have lost their relevance (see also Hall 2005). This is a statement Scott makes again and again throughout his book. His perception of anticolonialism is that ‘it has been a classic instance of the modern longing for total revolution’ (Scott 2004: 6; my emphasis). Note that this statement reproduces almost verbatim Camus’s dismissal of historical revolt as ‘another version of the modern hubris’ that claims to have uncovered ‘the true direction of history’, which I cited earlier. Scott undertakes a reading of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, which he sees as ‘one of the great inaugural texts of the discourse of anticolonialism’, and chooses to read James’s narrative of Toussaint L’Ouverture and of the Haitian Revolution in terms of the literary forms and ‘story-potentials’ it contains (Scott 2004: 9,7). According to Scott, ‘anticolonial stories’ evoke the ‘story-potential’ of ‘romance’ in their propensity towards ‘narratives of

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overcoming, … of vindication, … of salvation and redemption’ (Scott 2004: 7–8). This propensity explains both their utopian vision of the future and their subsequent failures. However, Scott points out that while these stories of revolt adopt a romantic register, it would be more accurate to read these stories as tragedies, as instantiations of the tragedy of colonial enlightenment. C.L.R. James might have turned his hero Toussaint L’Ouverture into a romantic hero – a slave who freed himself and overcame the oppression that de-humanized him – but according to Scott, Toussaint should be better understood as a tragic figure, a ‘conscript – rather than a resisting agent – of modernity’ (Scott 2004: 107). Scott’s diagnosis is premised on a Foucauldian vision of modernity as ‘a positive structure of power’, which ‘productively [shapes] material and epistemological conditions of life and thought’ (ibid.: 106). Therefore ‘the anticolonial story’ misguidedly sees colonial power and domination as negativity, ‘as a force blocking the path of the colonized, a force … standing … in the way of the colonized’, which means that colonial power ‘is … something to be overthrown, to be overcome’ (ibid.: 118). From Scott’s perspective, the romantic anticolonial story is blind to the fact that the very ground that made resistance and transformation possible was profoundly modern and thus always situated within modernity and conditioned by its productive power relations (ibid.: 119). The point of Scott’s perspective, as he declares, is not to portray ‘this [anticolonial] narrative … [as] essentialist or epistemologically naïve’, but to indicate that such a ‘revolutionary romance’ has lost its critical force and that indeed was perhaps the wrong question to ask (Hall 2005). What is at stake, then, in declaring that the anticolonial story is a ‘classic instance of the modern longing for total revolution’ and that subsequently the questions posed by the narrative of ‘revolutionary romance’ are no longer relevant? Like Camus, Scott situates the idea and the practice of anticolonial revolt strictly within the boundaries and rules set by modernity. Indeed, in Scott’s account, modernity itself acquires a totalizing character from which nothing and no one escapes: it sets the specific conditions for the regime of slavery in the Caribbean, it conditions subjectivities, agency, actions and ideas. In spite of his Foucauldian suspicion of meta-narratives, Scott’s vision of modernity becomes the meta-narrative, the structuring principle of any understanding of coloniality. The problem with his framework (and a corollary of it) is that in the process of explicating the productive character of modern power, moral judgement is suspended and the issue of ethical responsibility is thus deferred. When addressing the modern character of the regime of slavery in the Caribbean, Scott is at pains to point out that he is not attempting to portray slavery as anything but ‘cruel or unjust’ (Scott 2004: 129). However, insofar as modernity functions in Scott’s narrative as a neutral background against which all action and structure must be seen, he inadvertently diffuses and defers the notion of political agency and hence of ethical responsibility: ‘Toussaint … could not choose not to be modern. He was not … a volunteer of its project. He was its conscript’ (ibid.). Modernity thus

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becomes an ineluctable global process endowed with an ontological presence that simply cannot be avoided nor transcended, and Toussaint, the anticolonial leader, becomes (yet again!) ‘a man penned in’ (Fanon 2004: 15). The problem with Scott’s (and Camus’s) framework of all-encompassing modernity is that it does not provide any room for the possibility of exteriorities to modernity. I use exteriority in the way conceptualized by Mignolo (inspired by Enrique Dussel’s work), who perceives it as the instantiation of those ‘border spaces’ ‘where … Western knowledge and subjectivity, control of land and labour, of authority, and ways of living gender and sexuality have been “contacting” other languages, memories, principles of knowledge and belief, forms of government and economic organization’ (Mignolo 2007: 497). While Mignolo accepts there might be no outside to modernity as such (especially late modernity), he nonetheless indicates the existence of practices of exteriority to modernity whereby the dominant logic and parameters of modernity are being contested and opposed. James C. Scott (2009) puts forth a similar argument in his study The Art of Not Being Governed, where he looks at the encounters between state-making practices and state-evading tactics in the Southeast Asian massif. Scott borrows the name of Zomia from Willem van Schendel to refer to the ‘upland border area’ of the Southeast Asian massif that stretches from West India sprawling across mountainous areas of Bangladesh, Tibet, China and Indochina (Scott 2009: xiv, 14). The various ethnic communities living in this area share in common their statelessness and their systematic evasion of statebuilding practices and structures through tactics such as tax-evasion, contraband, smuggling, but also by engaging in ‘secessionist movements’, ‘rights struggles’, rebellions and ‘armed opposition to lowland states’ (Scott 2009: 19). Such exteriorities point to the contested nature of modernity but also to various negotiations and encounters between modernity and local worlds that constitute those border spaces discussed by Mignolo. David Scott makes the claim that ‘the Caribbean’s modernity is [an] inaugural’ one in the sense of the nonexistence of ‘nonmodern formations with which colonial powers had continuously to contend’ (Scott 2004: 125). That may be so in the case of the Caribbean (although this is also doubtful), but this would be the exception and not the norm for most of the (post)colonial world.25 After all, in the Maghreb there were clear geographical, ecological and political distinctions between ‘a zone of [(post)colonial] state rule and a marginal, autonomous [upland Berber] zone’ (Scott 2009: 30). Therefore the ‘anticolonial story’ is not a story of being conscripted to or liberated from modernity, but the beginning of a theory and practice of de-coloniality: the contestation of modernity by making visible its exteriorities. At the core of this differentiated understanding of modernity is the tension identified earlier between the possibility of transcending (post)colonial violence and the postmodern suspicion of all knowledge on account of its inherent imbrication with power structures. David Scott’s sceptical reading of the anticolonial impulse becomes sadly familiar of Jean-François Lyotard’s

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prognosis (discussed in Chapter 2), according to whom Algeria was the name of ‘an intractable difference’ since all radical idioms (Marxism, in his case) had lost their potency and intelligibility in Western societies. Scott echoes Lyotard’s stance when, in an interview with Stuart Hall, he declares: ‘what if the horizon (of new nationhood, or socialism) toward which that story of overcoming urged – in which a denied past is linked to an entitled future – has faded?’ (Hall 2005). I would like to draw attention here to two aspects of Scott’s analysis: first, he seems to draw a direct causal relation between anticolonial theories of liberation (such as Fanon’s which he sees as a paradigmatic example) and the glum postcolonial realities of Haiti, Jamaica or Algeria. Second, he implies, by attributing the genre of romance to anticolonial revolt, that ‘anticolonial stories’ are both utopian and thus uncritical about any potential caveats or pitfalls that might accompany their visions. Regarding the first aspect, Scott claims, as cited earlier, that the utopian promise of anticolonial liberation has turned into a postcolonial nightmare. In doing so, he assumes a similar logic to that of James LeSueur who, in an otherwise superb analysis of the role of intellectuals in the decolonization of Algeria, blames Fanon’s and Sartre’s endorsement of violent resistance for the ills of postcolonial Algeria. This direct link between Fanon’s trigger-happy advocacy for violence (as imagined by LeSueur’s rather simplistic reading of Fanonian violence) and postcolonial Algeria’s descent into civil war is tenuous at best.26 Not only does it overlook the very complicated political and social conditions (many of them rooted in colonial politics) that intersected in postcolonial Algeria, but it also implies that Fanon was blissfully unaware of the limits of decolonization and thus of potential post-independence violence. Contrary to univocal readings of Fanon’s ‘anticolonial story’, he foresaw limits and dangers not only in the use of violence during decolonization, but also in the building of a postcolonial society. As discussed earlier, Fanon’s conceptualization of anticolonial violence needs to be situated within the extreme realities of colonial Algeria. Fanonian violence is not simply about weapons and bullets, it is ‘primarily the violence of Algeria and its history’ (Macey 2000: 475–76). The Wretched of the Earth concludes with a chapter that links colonial war and mental disorders. This is a potent indicator that Fanon was privy to the effects of the colonized’s violence on their own psyche and thus ‘seems to undercut his [earlier] endorsement of violence’ (Kohn and McBride 2011: 70). This ambiguity is explained by Joan Cocks as an awareness of the paradox that one can liberate oneself from the colonizer-colonized relation but not ‘from the reverberations of [one’s] own acts’ (quoted in Kohn and McBride 2011: 69–70). In the chapter entitled ‘The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness’, Fanon presciently moves beyond Algeria and looks towards ‘a composite Third World’ in a cautionary analysis (Macey 2000: 473).27 Stating that ‘national consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell’, and that the ‘endemic weakness of national consciousness’ in postcolonial societies can be attributed to both ‘the colonized subject’s mutilation by the colonial regime’

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and to ‘the apathy of the national bourgeoisie’, Fanon exposes his ambivalence towards the sovereign nation-state as a postcolonial project (Fanon 2004: 97–98). Contrary to David Scott’s assumption, Fanon’s anticolonial liberation cannot simply be reduced to a project of ‘radical national sovereignty’ (Hall 2005). In fact, Fanon makes explicit that his vision of ‘national consciousness’ is meant to be a step towards a more radical ‘social and political consciousness’ that is deeply translocal in its character (Fanon 2004: 142–43). What Fanon has in mind here, then, is not an introverted and autarchic form of nationalism (in fact he makes it clear that it is not nationalism), but a form of collective consciousness that is oriented and open towards the translocal space of the Third World. It would be more useful to see Fanon’s writing as inhabiting a ‘point of tension between cultural nationalism and transnationalism’ (Parry 1999: 236; see also Bhabha 2004b: xxvi; Rao 2010: 135–37; Bogues 2010: 203). This conceptualization of national consciousness summons the spirit of Bandung, where nationalism was articulated as an ‘internationalist nationalism’ whose ethos ‘looked outward towards other anticolonial nations as their fellows’ (Prashad 2007: 12, 45). Fanon was also painfully aware of the fragmented character of colonial societies, where race was not the only divider. His analysis of the role of the local bourgeoisie and thus of class as a structuring force both during and after anticolonial revolt is pregnant with an awareness of the deeply contested nature of the struggle: ‘The militant who confronts the colonialist machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building another system of exploitation’ (Fanon 2004: 94). This passage from his chapter ‘Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity’ evokes Fanon’s preoccupation with the types of illusions that are born in the midst of the revolution’s spontaneity, when ‘fantasies of complete empowerment [replace] the colonial fantasies of complete control’ (Kohn and McBride 2011: 71). Fanon’s vehement critique of single-party rule with which he was no doubt acquainted during his African travels (Ghana, Guinea, Senegal and Ivory Coast had become single-party regimes), when he served as spokesman for the Provisional Algerian Government, expresses his fears for Algeria’s future. As David Macey (2000: 486) indicates, this line of critique was considerably dissonant with the position of the FLN which had no intention of sharing power. Indeed, many of Fanon’s prescient insights materialized in Algeria after independence. An investigation of the many-faceted ‘story’ of liberation laid out in The Wretched of the Earth makes it difficult to categorize it as romantic. Rather, Fanon’s decolonial impulse can be seen as an effort to de-colonize both the universal by reclaiming it as a form of solidarity for the Third World, but also the particular by advocating for a national culture. The latter is far from being the romantic nostalgia for a lost pre-colonial past ready to be retrieved: Fanon’s theorization of national culture is dynamic and emphasizes process. From his perspective, Algerian national culture is a living phenomenon, being forged in the very moment of struggle (Fanon 2004: 168). When Fanon talks

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about ‘cultural authenticity’, what he conjures is not tradition ‘frozen in time’ but a sense of urgency for the colonized intellectual to be in touch with the ‘reality’ of his community (ibid.: 161). It is not ‘culture’, understood as a rigid set of traditions, customs and practices, that forges the nation, but the common and shared experience of resistance against colonial occupation (ibid.: 159). Fanon’s vision of nationhood is not that of an organic ethnic community, bound by parochial attachments, but rather that of a ‘dual emergence’ whereby national consciousness, ‘which is not nationalism’, makes sense only in intimate connection with international consciousness (ibid.: 179–80). The limits of the de-colonial promise are of course worth bearing in mind here. In many cases, the promise of the ‘national liberation state’, to use Vijay Prashad’s expression, was simply betrayed if not abandoned altogether. However, the question ‘what went wrong?’ can never be simply about the failed promises of the Third World state; one has to consider that as they acquired independence, the Third World states were ‘born’ not only into an international system organized along Cold War rivalries but also into a capitalist system in full expansion.28 What is important to emphasize here is not their failure to disentangle themselves from this system (how could they?), but rather the rich ambiguities of their ‘birth’. In a fascinating analysis of Third World protest, Rahul Rao (2010) points to the ongoing tension between the ‘normative orientations’ towards nationalism, on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism/internationalism on the other, which continues to frame the Third World’s ethical horizon. Whereas David Scott laments the utopian projections of ‘radical national sovereignty’, Rao points to the ambivalent richness of the coming-into-being of the ‘national liberation state’. It is important to remember here that Fanon (2004: 139) understood sovereignty as an opportunity for the colonized to live freely with dignity. As Rao (2010: 109) aptly remarks, ‘even Nasser’s most fervent opponents acknowledge the indispensability of postcolonial sovereignty towards the end of restoring their tattered dignity’. The paradox lies in the fact that the very institution that restored dignity (Prashad’s ‘national liberation state’) and ‘that continues to be partly constitutive of it’ becomes also the new instrument of repression (ibid.). Here it is important to draw attention to the limits of Fanon’s own vision of de-coloniality. Whereas he did anticipate many of the pitfalls that would attend post-independence societies and foresaw their political ambivalence both towards modernity and their postcolonial status, he perceived such ambivalence largely in negative terms as a form of betrayal. It is undeniable that the ‘national liberation state’ adopted a strategy Dipesh Chakrabarty called ‘pedagogical style of developmentalist politics’, whereby modernist strategies and discourses were fully embraced in the search for progress and economic growth (and thus ‘to catch up with Europe’) (Chakrabarty 2005: 4814–15).29 Yet Chakrabarty questions the notion that decolonization was undertaken in modernist fashion in the strictest sense. There have been various ‘anticolonial humanist’ responses to universality, which have experienced it both as subjugation and liberation (Chakrabarty 2005: 4817).30 He gives Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o as an example

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of the former in his renunciation of English as a medium of expression and in his espousal of Gı˜ku˜ yu˜ as his language of artistic communication. Leopold Senghor is offered as an example of the latter orientation due to his professed love of the French language and to his more cosmopolitan orientation.31 However, as Chakrabarty points out, ‘the ambiguities and the richness of the moment of decolonisation were never exhausted by the antinomies set up here’, between Ngu˜ gı˜’s ‘nativist isolation’ and Senghor’s cosmopolitan orientation (ibid.). It is to this rich ambiguity of decolonization that I would like to draw attention, which in David Scott’s analysis is reduced to a modernist impulse, in Camus’s narratives appears as illegitimate outside its affiliation with the colonial metropole (and hence de-linked from his vision of ‘the universal’), and which in Fanon’s thought is at times experienced as betrayal. Fanon’s vision of the decolonial is certainly not reducible to an isolationist nativism, but neither is it celebratory in its cosmopolitan orientation. In ‘On National Culture’, Fanon chastises colonized intellectuals for assuming dual identities (‘speaking as a Senegalese and a Frenchman … Speaking as an Algerian and a Frenchman’), and urges them to be sincere with themselves and ‘choose the negation of one of these two determinations’ (Fanon 2004: 155–56). This critique, however, should not be read as a denial of hybridity or the embrace of monolithic oppositional identities. Rather it should be seen as a call for political solidarity in the context of the Algerians’ anticolonial war or as an injunction for colonized intellectuals to locate (not vacate) their politics. Fanon himself never disavowed his Martinican-ness, but he did not shirk away from situating himself politically as ‘Algerian’. Criticisms such as David Scott’s deny Fanon’s conceptualization of anticolonial liberation its crucial tension between the awareness of ‘cultural heterogeneity’ and thus of the instability of ‘national culture’, and the need for ‘political solidarity’ vital in the act of decolonization (Benita Parry, quoted in Rao 2010: 130).32 Given Fanon’s move between calls for solidarity and endorsement of armed struggle (and thus a vision of transcendence of colonial violence), and his cautionary (indeed visionary) analyses of postcolonial woes (and thus his awareness of the limits of this transcendence), it is not far-fetched to make the claim that this is a tension that continues to sustain the postcolonial/decolonial project. I find Scott’s and Camus’s refuge into ‘modernity’ as dissolving this tension in unproductive (if very different) ways.33 The discussions undertaken in this book mirror this Fanonian tension and put forth the argument that such a tension is significant in understanding the rich and ambiguous negotiations of postcolonial identities both in their complicities and contestations, as the following chapter illustrates.

Notes 1 Lorde 1984: 131, 132. 2 For a critique of this portrayal, see David Macey (2000: 24–28), and Henry Louis Gates Jr (1999).

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3 Mignolo distinguishes between ‘temporal colonial difference’ (the colonization of time by designating non-European peoples as primitives), ‘spatial colonial difference’ (the colonization of space by designating non-European peoples as barbarians), and ‘epistemic colonial difference’ (the colonization of knowledge by designating Europe/the West as the locus of thought and knowledge) (Mignolo 2007: 470–71, 487). 4 I use ‘race as a lived experience’ to echo Fanon’s fifth chapter from his Peau noire, masques blancs ‘L’Expérience vécue de l’homme noire’ (the lived experience of the black man), which, as David Macey points out, has been erroneously translated as ‘The Fact of Blackness’ (Macey 2000: 26). Fanon’s French title indicates the phenomenological quality of living as a black person, whereas the English translation crystallizes this experience as a fact. 5 Strangeness was a recurrent motif within the works of many writers associated both with L’École d’Alger (such as Camus himself and Emmanuel Roblès) and with the Jeunes Algériens (such as Mouloud Mammeri and Mouloud Feraoun) (Haddour 2000: 23, n.86). 6 I use ‘Arab’ and ‘indigenous’ in inverted comas because I want to draw attention to the multiple (and contested) character of ‘indigeneity’ in Algeria, a space inhabited by various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups (see discussions in Chapters 2, 3 and 7). For insightful analyses of Algeria’s diversity, see Toumi (2000, 2002) and Silverstein (2004). 7 I am using here the 1963 translation by Constance Farrington, which I felt that, in this instance, is truer to the French version that refers to ‘la présence humaine française’ (Fanon 2002: 240). The 2004 translation by Richard Philcox, which I am using throughout the book, simply reads ‘the natural backdrop for the French presence’ (Fanon 2004: 182; original emphasis). 8 This idea of demystifying History is nicely echoed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe (2000: 42–46). 9 Quotes from French are my own translations unless otherwise specified. 10 For a different account of the founding of French Algeria, see Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia, discussed in Chapter 4. 11 For a reading of L’Étranger that overlooks colonial difference altogether while arguing that Meursault is the symbol of authentic living, of the existentialist revolt against the absurd of bourgeois social conventions, see Jacob Golomb’s (1995) study. 12 Patrick Weil points to a bizarre fact regarding the citizenship status that governed the colonized in the French colonies: whereas full citizenship status had been granted to four French communes in Senegal and to the natives of the five French cities in India (Weil 2008: 216–17), the Muslims in Algeria lived suspended in a state of non-recognition. 13 Tahar Ben Jelloun would devote his doctoral thesis in social psychiatry to the study of ‘the affective and sexual problems of North African migrant labourers in France’. His thesis subsequently informed his sociological essay, La Plus Haute des Solitudes, published in 1977, which documented the effects of marginalization on the psyche of North African migrants in France (www.taharbenjelloun.org/index. php?id=53&l=0). 14 In French, ‘hôte’ is an ambivalent term that can mean both guest and host. 15 Note that Camus makes this statement in relation to the Kabyles, and not necessarily to Arabs in general. In ‘Misère de la Kabylie’, Camus refers to the Kabyles as a people ‘whose eagerness and spirit of assimilation have become proverbial’ (Camus 1958: 78) – a statement that echoes perfectly the ‘Kabyle myth’ propagated by French colonialism, according to which the Kabyles were superior to the Arabs by being more assimilable and more motivated workers (see Silverstein 2004: 52–55). 16 On the role of the colonizer as ‘usurper’, see Memmi (1985: 72–76).

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17 On 8 May 1945, just as Nazi Germany surrendered and the armistice was signed, tens of thousands of Muslim Algerians marched in the main cities of Algeria celebrating the victory against the Nazis and carrying slogans such as ‘Down with fascism and colonialism’ (Stora 2004: 21). In Sétif the police fired at the protesters, who then retaliated by attacking members of the pied noir community, which resulted in the deaths of about 100 Europeans. The police and military reprisals against the Muslim community were atrocious. The toll estimating the number of the Muslim dead ranges between 1,000 and 45,000 (according to reports by Radio Cairo) (see Horne 2006: 27). Alistair Horne (2006) begins his magisterial history of the Algerian War, A Savage War of Peace, with a chapter on the massacres of Sétif. 18 In 1958 Camus publicly supported the Lauriol Plan, put forth by a law professor at the University of Algiers, Marc Lauriol (see his last article, entitled ‘Algérie 1958’, in his Chroniques Algériennes). The plan envisaged Algeria as part of a federated political arrangement under the auspices of the French Commonwealth, resembling the Swiss cantonal federate model (Horne 2006: 235). This arrangement entailed the division of Algeria into canton-like departments along ethnic lines and would subsequently be reflected in the composition of the French parliament, where – following proportional representation – the number of ‘native’ representatives would outnumber those of the pieds noirs (ibid.; see also Carroll 2007: 213–14). This plan was unacceptable both to pieds noirs, who would see their colonial privileges severely curtailed, and to pro-independence Algerians, such as the FLN. Lending support to this plan, as Ronald Aronson rightly observed, was Camus’s way of avoiding the issue of the colonial occupation of Algeria while serving the interests of his own community (cited in Carroll 2007: 113, 213–14). 19 Jean Amrouche (1906–62), born in Kabylie in a Catholic family, is considered to be one of the most important North African poets. His sister Taos Amrouche, seen as the first Algerian woman novelist of French expression, was a noted singer, famed for her interpretation of traditional Kabyle/Berber songs. 20 The unfinished novel was published posthumously in 1994 by Gallimard. 21 I find this question to be the most important silence in Camus’s works, since it is a silence that directly concerns his identification as ‘the first man’. His autobiographical novel Le Premier Homme opens with the arrival of Jacques Cormier’s parents at the small isolated farm in rural Algeria. Upon their arrival, Jacques’s heavily pregnant mother went into labour and gave birth to him. Camus’s parents were both pieds noirs born in Algeria. His father Lucien Auguste Camus had an Alsatian background (at least as claimed by his family), and was ‘the descendant of the first generation of Frenchmen to settle in Algeria’ (Todd 1997: 3; see also Tanase 2010: 12–13). His mother, Catherine Hélène Sintès, was born into a very poor family of Spanish settlers in Algeria. Camus’s father’s Alsatian background is extremely important to situating Camus’s pied noir identity in colonial Algeria. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), in which France was defeated, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were handed over to Prussia as part of the settlement. Many people who remained loyal to France fled the provinces and migrated to Kabylie in Algeria as political refugees. The refugees’ settling of Kabylie had been made possible by France’s confiscation of ‘the rich lands around Algiers, Bône (Annaba) [where Camus was born], and Oran’ (Weil 2008: 214). The French government allocated ‘[o]ne hundred thousand hectares of Kabyle land’ to the newly migrated colons by expropriating the Kabyle peasants of their most fertile lands and thus driving them into abject poverty (Gibson 1999: 24–25). Ironically, many of these impoverished Kabyle peasants subsequently migrated to France as unskilled labourers. This colonial history that made possible Camus’s family history in Algeria is silenced in his autobiographical novel and in his political writings.

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22 See, in this sense, Ranajit Guha (1997), who speaks of India under the British Raj as a case of ‘dominance without hegemony’. 23 Given the central function of the school in colonial North Africa to produce (a small number of) hybrid subjects, who are French but not quite – to paraphrase Bhabha (2004a) – it is interesting to note that both Assia Djebar’s and Leïla Sebbar’s fathers were ‘native’ teachers in colonial schools. It is not surprising therefore that the colonial school as a crucial formative experience figures prominently in the autobiographical writings of Ben Jelloun (1983), Memmi (1966, 2003) and Camus (1994). 24 To get a better understanding of Camus’s vision on modern revolt, see his Homme révolté (1951). 25 For a view that disputes the non-existence of non-modern formations in the Caribbean, see Shilliam (2011, 2012). 26 LeSueur (2005: 369, n.57), following Laremont (2000), claims that Fanon’s thought had a direct impact on Houari Boumedienne, one of the most significant FLN leaders, who would become Algeria’s fourth president after independence. However, David Macey, in his biography of Fanon, places Fanon’s influence on the FLN on far more ambivalent terrain than LeSueur would like to acknowledge. For a more complex analysis of postcolonial Algeria’s descent into civil war, see Prashad’s chapter ‘Algiers’ in his The Darker Nations (2007). For a critical analysis of the claim that Fanon’s theory is disproved by Algeria’s experience of Islamic radicalization, see Gibson (1999). I find this direct causal link between Fanon’s theory of anticolonial violence and the violence of postcolonial societies to be uncritical of the many intersections of contexts (both local and translocal), which might allow us to begin to think about postcoloniality. The type of argumentation adduced by LeSueur (and implicitly by Scott’s book), according to which Fanon’s advocacy for violence led to the violence of postcolonial Algeria, might be (easily) contradicted (in an equally simplistic way) by pointing to how Gandhi’s satyagraha did nothing to prevent the atrocities of the Partition when India cannibalized itself. The point here is not ‘who got it right: Fanon or Gandhi?’ but to understand that both anticolonial responses emerged within specific colonial contexts and addressed particular historical legacies, and social and political realities. 27 I use here Richard Philcox’s 2004 translation. The French title ‘Mésaventures de la conscience nationale’ is translated by Constance Farrington as ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’. 28 See here the insightful analyses of Stavrianos (1981), Mittelman and Pasha (1997) and Prashad (2007). See also Wolf (2010). 29 For a similar argument focusing on postcolonial Indonesia’s modernist strategies, see Anderson (1991). 30 Chakrabarty, in this article, is in fact talking about cultural globalization experienced as cosmopolitanism. I use ‘universality’ because it allows me to orient the analysis towards this opening towards the outside (cosmopolitanism) without evoking the contested conceptual baggage of ‘globalization’. I deal with globalization and the translocal in Chapter 8. 31 See Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s polemical chapter ‘The Language of African Literature’ in his Decolonising the Mind, where he pours scorn on Leopold Senghor’s love of French (1986). It is worth noting here that Senghor’s version of négritude was in fact much closer to French republicanism than to African ‘nativism’ (see Macey 2000: 183–85). Ironically, when president of Senegal, Senghor instructed the Senegalese delegates to vote at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly against Algeria’s independence (see Macey 2000: 376). This is a betrayal Fanon could not forgive. He engaged in a diatribe in ‘On National Culture’ against both Senghor and Madagascar’s Jacques Rabemananjara, both of whom attempted to block Algeria’s independence by voting with the French at the UN (Fanon 2004: 169–70).

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Senghor’s ‘cosmopolitan orientation’ needs therefore to be seen with a sense of caution. 32 Benita Parry is referring here to Said’s thought, but this Saidian tension is one that can be attributed to Fanon’s thought as well. 33 When I critique David Scott and Albert Camus in the same sentence I do not mean to place their projects on a level of equivalence. The former expresses a (romantic?) disillusionment with the ‘anticolonial story’ of revolutionary struggle, whereas the latter wants to preserve the colonial privileges of his community of pieds noirs. However, it is intriguing that they define anticolonial revolt in the same way as merely another instance of a modern longing for total revolution.

7

Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world Postcolonial hybridity and beyond

On 13 July 1998, I went to bed as myself and woke up as Zinedine Zidane. It was the day after the victory of the French national soccer team. However, I am not a soccer player. On 21 March 2012, I went to bed as myself and woke up as Mohamed Merah. However, I have never carried a weapon nor have I ever shot anyone … Why are we tied to Mohamed Merah like the noose is tied around the neck of the executed? I cannot deny it. I cannot escape it. I cannot dig a hole for myself in which to hide while all this blows over. I am Mohamed Merah. The worst is that it’s true. Like me, he was of Algerian origin, like me, he grew up in the banlieue, and like me, he was a Muslim … I am Mohamed Merah, and he is I. We are of the same origin, and especially of the same condition. We are postcolonial subjects. We are natives (indigènes) of the French Republic. (Houria Bouteldja 20121)

In Chapter 2, I signalled that one of the most significant consequences of conducting post-structuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealization of the marginalized, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Such an idealization of the oppressed and of the marginalized is many times remarkable by the paradoxical absence of their voices or perspectives from analyses that problematize contemporary practices of security, of statecraft, of sovereignty, among others. It is not uncommon to find that the legacy of colonialism and the manner in which (post)colonial subjects attempt to negotiate their political identities and agency in an age of postmodernity is simply left unexplored. Therefore International Relations (IR), even in its critical variants, does remain predominantly a Western discipline, practised mainly in the metropolis by Western scholars and often forgetful of the importance and endurance of colonialism in current practices of statecraft. By using Roxanne Doty’s work as an illustration of a larger problematic within both mainstream and critical IR theory, I wish to re-centre the importance of colonialism and imperialism in the creation of the Western nation-state. It is telling that even a respected critical scholar like Doty can engage at times in amnesiac practices

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regarding the enduring legacy of colonialism in an issue as important as contemporary migration flows. Doty’s other works, such as Imperial Encounters (1996), do address the issue of colonialism and of global racial hierarchies, but it is largely from the vantage point of Western perspectives – an approach that inadvertently privileges the voice and history of the West with non-Western voices present as absences or as always acted upon subjectivities. This chapter moves from the (post)colonial production and positioning of subjectivities within the diaspora, undertaken in Chapter 3, to the experience of migration itself. The analysis builds on the last chapter’s concern with the tension between the promise of transcendence of colonial violence and the Foucauldian suspicion of emancipatory narratives, and probes into the experience of postcolonial migration and the ensuing politics of claims to citizenship and authenticity. I begin therefore by critiquing Roxanne Doty’s emphasis on statecraft as lenses for understanding the experience of migration. My critique posits that the exclusive emphasis on practices of statecraft serves to reify the state as the locus for politics while failing to locate French immigration policies in their (post)colonial context. As a number of authors argue (see, for example, Balibar 2004, 2009; Gafaiti 2003; Silverman 1992; Ben Jelloun 1997; Maghraoui 2003; Kipfer 2007, 2011), the legacy of colonialism lies at the heart of contemporary processes of migration in France. While very promising in her intention to conceive of practices of statecraft as a particular kind of desire in policing migrants and migration, Doty’s focus remains at the level of governmental policies and regulations. I argue here that a more fruitful approach is to explore the embeddedness of such policies in transhistorical contexts and in translocal relations, and to investigate the relation between migrants’ subjectivities and their claims to political belonging via citizenship. The chapter explores literary narratives as an alternative locus for the politics of migration while tracing parallels to discourses and experiences of activism among North African migrants in France. These migrant communities find themselves at the intersection of various translocal links, such as those of migrant labour, postcolonial (in)difference, the global politics of knowledge and shifts in citizenship. This analysis, however, does not advance the argument that literary narratives provide a ‘truer’ account of the experience of postcolonial migration. Rather it seeks to investigate the politics of postcolonial hybridity present in literary narratives and in discourses of activism. The intersections between literary accounts of postcolonial hybridity and authenticity in the narratives of Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, and the practices and claims to authenticity by Franco-Maghrebian activists illustrate the complexities of navigating the terrain of postcolonial belonging: the intellectuals speak for the indigène, while the activists appropriate the category of indigène as a political platform. I examine Leïla Sebbar’s celebratory discourse of hybridity performed by the strong and independent feminine character, named Shérazade, in the trilogy that shares her name. Sebbar’s overly assertive and unattached heroine, who

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transgresses every boundary and resists every stereotyping, becomes a stereotype in her own right – that of the postmodern hybridized nomad. She a perfect representative of the Marches pour l’Égalité of the 1980s (also known as the Marche des Beurs), the anti-racist manifestations in France that advocated for better integration of the ‘natives’. Neil ten Kortenaar (1995: 1) claims that hybridity is unintelligible without a reference to authenticity and purity, and that both hybridity and authenticity are rhetorical tools that manipulate cultural symbols to endorse political action. If that is the case, then Shérazade embodies the stereotype of the hybrid par excellence. Her hybridity is thus solely rhetorical in intent, since she refuses any attempt at stereotyping in the name of an authenticity, which she hopes to lay bare before the reader. To use Rey Chow’s conceptualization, Shérazade conceives of herself and of the ‘native’ in general as a ‘defiled image’ whose restoration of authenticity requires her prompt intervention. Roxanne Doty’s focus on statecraft as analytical lenses for the politics of migration implicitly assumes that the migrant (as an absent figure and voice) is always acted upon through various policies and regulations. Examining literary narratives and practices of activism allows us to perceive both how migrants experience statecraft and how they act back upon or with statecraft. The last part of the chapter looks at claims advanced by one of the newest migrant activist organizations in France, Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR, Movement of the Natives of the French Republic) and examines how these activists, who appropriate the term indigène as a political platform, challenge the Republic’s ideals of homogeneity, secularism and unambiguous Frenchness. The stated goal of this activist movement is to create an autonomous space for native voices from which to challenge racial inequalities both within France and translocally.2 The activists point to the continuation and recomposition of colonial legacies in the heart of the metropole, whereby the marginalization of immigrants from the former colonies is accomplished through the ‘(re)invent[ion] [of] racist and quasi-colonial social forms’ (Kipfer 2011: 1162). They thus opt for a ‘politics of liberation rather than integration’ (Kipfer 2011: 1162–63), in homage to their ‘immigrant parents and to [their] colonized or deported precursors who have greatly struggled for their liberation’.3 However, insofar as MIR remains de-linked from a social base (such as the banlieue), as critics have pointed out, and thus fails to ‘actively [appropriate] memories of colonization’ (Kipfer 2011: 1172), the question that emerges here is the following: who has the right to speak on behalf of the native (as the authentic intermediary between power and the powerless) and with what political effects? While MIR champions Fanon’s idea of liberation as emancipation from the oppressive logic of colonialism, there are concerns as to whether it also replaces the fantasy of complete control with a fantasy of complete empowerment against which Fanon cautioned (cf. Kohn and McBride 2011: 71). Their constant interactions with mainstream French media also raise the issue of the politics of visibility, whereby those militants with a strong voice and

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media presence are also seen as the legitimate/authentic intermediaries between power and the marginalized.

Migration in International Relations: moving beyond or around the state? Doty’s Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies focuses on discourses of racism and anti-immigration in a number of Western democracies, one of which is France. In a chapter entitled ‘Seuil de tolérance’, she analyses the case of anti-immigration discourses in France. More specifically, she focuses on the contradictory relation between ‘the schizophrenic pole of desire’ of the French state toward ‘infinite freedom, defying boundaries, promoting perpetual flow of goods, capital, and human bodies’, and the centripetal desire towards order, unquestioned identity and security (Doty 2003: 58). This tension between inward- and outward-looking and non-totalizing tendencies translated into policies that initially allowed migrants to come into France almost without restrictions ‘as cheap and mobile foreign labour’ (ibid.: 60). Doty adds that the increased migration of mobile cheap labour also meant the relegation of such labour to the fringes of French society. What became apparent then was the tension between a certain ideal to which French society held itself, as the cradle of human rights, and the reality of large groups of people living in a state of sordid marginalization.4 Through a thoughtful analysis of post-World War II French policies regarding migration, Doty establishes a connection between the need of French society for cheap and dispensable labour, and the racism that permeates French political discourses and practices. Moreover, she explores the paranoid desire of the state to re-configure its identity to the standard of homogeneity, while excluding from participation those on whose labour and presence it depends for the satisfaction of its schizophrenic desire for deregulation and unimpeded commercial flows. Doty uses Homi Bhabha’s (2004a: 62) conceptualization of the nation as the disjunction between the pedagogical and the performative. Bhabha understands the nation as narration split between ‘the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical [understood as of a “pre-given historical origin in the past”], and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative [understood as the incoherent fragments of daily life that “must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a coherent national culture”]’ (Bhabha 2004a: 209). When Bhabha refers to the splitting between the ‘pre-given historical origin in the past’ and the gathering of incoherent fragments into one coherent national whole, in the case of France, the most important element in the understanding of the alchemy between national identity, immigration and racism is colonialism. Thus discussing the affective and legal underpinnings of anti-immigrantism in France requires exploring the inevitable links between colonial and post-colonial exploitation of cheap labour. Regrettably, Doty’s analysis of France fails to discuss the complex colonial legacies recomposed in French immigration policies and practices. To

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understand the absurdity of anti-immigration policies in France, the roots of racism towards migrants, and the inexplicable fear and anxiety of this society towards Muslim and African migrants in particular, one has to understand the mechanisms, stereotypes and desires put in place and performed with the onset of the colonial rule in Africa. Max Silverman claims that one cannot speak of a clear break between the colonial and post-colonial eras in France. In fact, ‘contemporary France has been formed through and by colonization’ (Silverman, quoted in Gafaiti 2003: 209). Aside from the mass migration of the formerly colonized to France and the repatriation of the pieds noirs after the independence of Algeria, it is the very structure of society that still operates according to legal structures: … which were largely formed in the context of management of the colonies abroad and immigrants at home, and which are still the source of forms of exclusion today. Balibar sees colonialism as a fundamental determinant of contemporary racism: ‘Racism in France is essentially colonial, not in terms of a “leftover” from the past but in terms of the continuing production of contemporary relations’. (Silverman, quoted in Gafaiti 2003: 209) This argument appears both in Kristin Ross’s (1996) excellent contrapuntal reading of French decolonization and of processes of modernization, and in the more recent research undertaken by Stefan Kipfer (2011). Consequently, to analyse the legal structures and the policies that are promulgated without a postcolonial exposé, to use Linda Hutcheon’s expression, obscures the ways in which France’s racial discourse and multicultural pretensions stem from its colonial legacy. Doty’s omission of the postcolonial from the analysis of contemporary French society implies that redefinition of ‘what it means to be French’, as she put it, has nothing to do with the colonial legacy and its continuing reconstitution into discriminatory policies and racialized discourses. She begins her examination of anti-immigrantist discourses in France with the mass migrations that took place in the period after World War II. However, as Driss Maghraoui suggests, ‘[c]ontrary to the generally held belief ’ that France’s violent encounters with issues of race and migration stem from the process of ‘post-war immigration’, it was the ‘colonial period [that] was at the heart of deep-rooted stereotypes and racism within French society’ (Maghraoui 2003: 214). Therefore to understand why France refused in 1993, through the amendment of Article 23 of the Code de la Nationalité Française, to grant automatic citizenship to the children born in France coming from migrant families, and thus to abandon jus soli, one needs to see who in particular was targeted by these laws. Most of the European migrants, such as those from Italy and Portugal, had been assimilated into French society. It is the North Africans (Maghrébins) and the sub-Saharan Africans who were intended as targets, because their ‘visibility’ and their difficulties in ‘integration’ made them

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undesirable to France. What does this ‘visibility’ mean? Is it simply a reference to race? It is not only a racial reference. As already discussed at length in Chapter 3, the immigrés are constant reminders of the colonial disillusion, they are ‘the illegitimate children [bâtards] of the colonial affair’ (Memmi 2004: 97). Consequently, their visibility is not merely a racial visibility, but a reminder of the painful state of anomie in which the French Republic has been living since 1789. Assessing the problematic and yet successful marriage between the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity) and the expansion of the French colonial empire in its aftermath, Blanchard and Bancel claim that: the native [indigène] type allows us to simultaneously think of the emancipating ideal of the French republic shared by a wide spectrum of French society, of its assimilating heritage of national unity, which has always refused that an entity exist outside the body of the nation, and also of a racialized vision of the world, since it systematically places the colonised Other to a level inferior to that of the reference model. (Blanchard and Bancel 1998: 33; my emphasis) This statement indicates not only the paradoxical relationship between human rights and colonialism in the French context, but it also serves to illustrate the manner in which the migrant becomes a point of convergence between the colonial legacy and the postcolonial racialized formulation of French nationality. Another issue with Doty’s examination of French anti-immigrantist practices is that it remains a state-centric analysis. Since the purpose of her investigation was to examine how ‘statecraft is desire’ (Doty 2003: 9) and how the ‘non-place of immigration’ is where ‘desire lurks’ (ibid.: 6), she seems to suggest that migration can be understood most productively within and through practices of statecraft. While this may be an intriguing approach, when limited to the analysis and deconstruction of state-enforced policies, what we have (again) is a recomposition of the state as the locus of politics. If indeed Doty wished to remain true to her aptly put statement according to which ‘the unconscious censuring of desire … takes the importance of a scream that echoes throughout many sites where statecraft does its work’, ranging from academic journals to remote villages, and from the street of major urban centres to ‘the many borders crossing areas in our globalized world’ (Doty 2003: 2), then her investigation of anti-immigrantism should have moved beyond the listing of state-enforced discriminatory policies. If indeed ‘the sites where statecraft does its work’ are multiple, then it would have been productive to explore them in their multiplicity, through an analysis of how the politics of everyday life in its sublimation of desire constitutes the realm of international politics. Doty deconstructs the dearly held notion of the unitary and rational state as the main actor of world politics (dearly held by disciplinary IR) in order to reconstitute a national space where statecraft is

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desire. The deconstruction is important and notable, but it does not really go beyond supplanting a certain set of characteristics with another. The ultimate implication of her analysis is that the international realm is really mainly about the state, or as she phrases it, about ‘practices of statecraft’. Furthermore, Doty seems to think that by replacing one set of signifiers (rational and unitary) with another (schizophrenic and paranoid), the stereotype of the state in IR is displaced. What we have instead is a reconstruction of the state, but according to different parameters, namely as a heterogeneous and desiring set of mechanisms. Mireille Rosello explains that stereotypes can be regarded as ‘medieval walls behind which we feel protected and safe’ (Walter Lippmann, quoted in Rosello 1998: 11). This observation implies that stereotypes construct ‘a pleasurable form of togetherness’, and they are usually performed as invitations to position yourself on the side of the dominant group (ibid.). Rosello’s predicament is how to ‘decline’ such an invitation since simply opposing them to ‘positive’ images does not diffuse their harmful potential. Consequently, ‘[t]o declare them wrong, false, to attack them as untruths that, presumably, we could hope to replace by a better or a more accurate description of the stereotyped community, will never work’ (Rosello 1998: 13). What Rosello’s conceptualization of the stereotype teaches us is that the stereotype contaminates all discourse with which it comes into contact. Doty’s analysis is an enactment, after all, of her desire ‘to oppose stereotypes as meaningful statements’, which can be a self-defeating attempt (see Rosello 1998: 13). Instead, stereotypes ‘have to be treated not as the opposite of truth but as one of the narratives that a given power wants to impose as the truth at a given moment’ (Rosello 1998: 17). Doty’s analysis had the potential to destabilize stereotypes and treat them as power-narratives, but her exploration limited itself to a demonstration of the irrationality of the state and its less than unitary nature. Her analysis of anti-immigration discourses in the contemporary French context revolved around concepts such as schizophrenic desire, racism and migration without grounding such concepts in a muchneeded discussion on their (in)congruities with the legacy of French colonialism. As already mentioned, there can be no meaningful examination of antiimmigrantism in France without an attentive contextualization of such an issue within a (post)colonial framework. Doty rightfully notes the crucial role of immigration in the constitution of statecraft through contradictory desires of rejection and openness. She remarks how: [t]his non-place that immigration insistently points us toward is precisely where desire lurks; within anxieties about order, divisions between the inside and the outside, insecurities over who belongs and who does not. This is where desire does its productive work. This is where we must look for ‘the state’. (Doty 2003: 6)

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The practices of citizenship and hybridity discussed in this chapter (and in this book more generally) deal precisely with desire: the desire of migrants for a better a life, enforced by the fantasy of Europe as a land of all possibilities; the desire of border officials and of European societies to keep them on the margins so that they may reflect themselves in the fantastic mirror of nationalism as unitary and homogeneous nations; the anxieties and insecurities of migrants about their identity and the identity of their children born on European soil; the desire of the immigré(e) to become an exilé(e); and finally the desire of the exilé(e) for the authenticity and lost purity of ‘the native’ (as discussed in Chapter 4), whose metamorphosis into the immigrés renders them defiled and less desirable. Such desires constantly infiltrate the imaginative and narrative strata of these encounters, but contra Doty, their purpose, however, is not only to incarnate ‘the state’ through practices of statecraft (albeit in its unstable desiring postures), but to indicate the perverse alchemy between racism, immigration and (post)colonial memory.

Postcolonial strangers: Maghrébins, immigrés and beurs – who is the real indigène? Postcolonial hybridity and authenticity in literary narratives I now turn to examining practices of hybridity and claims to authenticity in literary narratives and in narratives of activism. As explained in earlier chapters, France’s position vis-à-vis its colonial memory is an uncomfortable one to say the least. The overwhelming position within French society is that colonialism is something located in the past, consummated and terminated, bearing little relevance for the present. It is not surprising then that in France colonialism is the study object of history primarily, although inroads are being made recently by other disciplines, such as literary studies, for example. It should be mentioned, however, that such inroads are very timid and even marginal, and that colonialism is thus considered to be the terrain of historians.5 On 23 February 2005 a law was adopted in France that acknowledged the meritorious service of the French settlers in North Africa (les Français rapatriés or pieds noirs) and the indebtedness of the motherland for such a service. The implications of the law were tremendous, because it encouraged the French nation to imagine and reflect on its experience of colonialism in Africa through the prism of its ‘positive contributions’. Needless to say this law provoked a tremendous outcry, especially among certain intellectual circles (notably historians) who drafted a petition that demanded the abrogation of what was (very rightfully) considered to be a shameful law.6 Mireille Rosello, in her France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters, talks about ‘[m]ultiple memories trapped behind the barbed wires of history’ (Rosello 2005: 29). The author remarks that ‘since the beginning of the 1990s, the war between two countries [France and Algeria] is slowly becoming a historical possibility rather than a taboo’ (ibid.). What this statement implies

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is that narratives of the (anti)colonial war in Algeria (depending on who is telling the story) have crystallized into ‘official’ versions of history that cater to the needs of national memory. Moreover when the process of coming to terms with colonial memory becomes the preoccupation of the discipline of history alone, there is a lack of dialogue and intersection between (hi)stories, which allows for a law like the one adopted in February 2003 to become ‘official’ memory. If colonial memory is ‘trapped behind the barbed wires of history’, it finds alternative loci for its expression in Franco-Maghrebian literary and cinematic productions (see Chapter 5). I do not want to imply pace Lyotard (as discussed in Chapter 2) that these are the only spaces where manifestations of the political might be glanced at nowadays. Rather I choose to explore literary narratives (in Chapters 4 and 5 I also use cinematic and photographic narratives) as alternative and additional evidentiary resources for IR scholarship, which attempt to initiate conversations between (hi)stories. Assia Djebar muses on her function as a writer from the ‘South’ (as she puts it) who needs to bear witness to an encounter of memories and thus: simultaneously [w]riting [the memory] of yesterday’s colonization and that of post-colonization, or rather that of decolonization in the language of yesterday’s colonizer, … ; this is where I emerge today … in this space between shores that confronts me suddenly to the seashore of non-return: non-return that I would wish transitory, momentary, but behind the threat of non-return, the more than symbolical presence of rupture concretises itself. (Djebar 1999: 206) As Djebar herself acknowledges, she is haunted by the question of how to bear testimony through writing (comment témoigner en écrivant?) (Djebar 1999: 215). This haunting question appears more or less implicitly in the writings of many Franco-Maghrebian writers whose narratives bear testimony to a colonial past that is unfolding itself as present.7 Simultaneously, these haunted writings also muse on what it means to be a migrant in the land of the former colonizer, and on the complex processes of negotiation that circumscribe postcolonial practices of identification. Thus, for Franco-Maghrebian writers, bearing witness inevitably means bearing witness to a particular historical and political situation, that of colonialism, but also to the conundrums, hybridities and issues of mobility with which postcoloniality is fraught. Leïla Sebbar’s trilogy, which I explore here, engages stereotypical images of Maghrebian migrants and of beurs in French society. These stereotypes have a violent genealogy linked to colonialism. The imagery associated with the ‘Arab’ or the ‘Muslim’ carries sometimes contradictory, or at least apparently contradictory, overtones: the stereotype of the brave and noble Arab knight co-existed, and to a certain extent it still does, with that of the Arab as a cruel, lazy and cunning person (Blanchard et al. 2003: 39). The coexistence of these

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seemingly opposed stereotypes was related to their provenance. The former came mainly from orientalist literary and artistic currents that imagined an exoticized and seductive Orient, whereas the latter came into existence in popular imagination, fed by the myth of colonialism as embodying the binary of civilization vs. barbarism (ibid.). These myths are seemingly opposed, but in fact they constitute two facets of the same practice, which is stereotyping. There are no positive stereotypes, since idealized images refer to practices of exoticization that relegate a group to the realm of fantasy. This discussion on stereotypes mirrors Rey Chow’s concern with the politics of representing the ‘native’, as discussed in Chapter 4. In Writing Diaspora, she remarks that the politics of ‘native as image’ is rarely explored, in the sense that there is always a tendency to pit the politics of depth against the politics of image (surface) (Chow 1993: 29). This practice implies an attempt to restore the inner truth of the ‘native’ by substituting the ‘bad’ image with a ‘correct’ image that both annihilates the former and validates the ‘native’s’ authenticity (ibid.). Rosello’s solution to this conundrum relies not on resisting a bad image by replacing it with a positive one, but on a subversion of the power of stereotype by employing sarcasm and humour, and by disturbing the implied homogeneity of the stereotype. She believes the question of ‘What can I do against stereotypes?’ is important, but perhaps more important is ‘What can I do with a stereotype?’ (Rosello 1998: 13). Sebbar’s trilogy entitled Shérazade weaves the story of a young seventeen year-old woman coming from a family of Algerian migrants in France who ran away from ‘traditional’ home. The first volume of the trilogy focuses on her life in Paris among other young people who, just like her, tried to escape in one way or another their families, their pasts or simply their presents. The second volume follows Shérazade in her travels throughout France, whereas the third volume finds the heroine in the Middle East. The trilogy is a refashioning of orientalist painting and of the myth of the oriental woman. Sebbar inflects her reconstruction of the oriental myth with postcolonial sensitivities. Sebbar’s Shérazade is not the opposite of Sherazade, the heroine of Arabian Nights. Rather she constitutes the contrapuntal reading of the Sherazade portrayed in orientalist painting, the subdued, passive and highly eroticized woman who constitutes the object of gaze in the paintings of Delacroix, Matisse, Picasso and Ingres. In fact, she resembles the heroine of Arabian Nights, exuding wit, self-assertiveness and confidence. As Fatima Mernissi (2001: 68) indicates, the Arab reading of the myth of Sherazade focuses on her ‘brainy sensuality and political message’. Likewise, Sebbar’s Shérazade stubbornly resists orientalist stereotyping, even though fascinated with the orientalist paintings of Delacroix and Matisse. Fed up with her unpredictable Parisian lifestyle, Shérazade decides to go to Algeria and find traces of her childhood in that land. Symbolically her desire to take this journey can be understood in terms of a return to a land to which everyone else (the French people she encounters daily) ascribe her: she comes from Algeria, she belongs to Algeria. Born and raised in France, Shérazade

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embodies the beur in the feminine as she struggles to reconcile both of her cultural backgrounds: Franch and Algerian. Mirroring this struggle of reconciliation, the couple Shérazade-Julien performs a dialogue and an encounter that has never happened between France and Algeria. Rosello identifies the theme of the mixed couple in the texts of Franco-Maghrebian writers as an allegory of linguistic encounters (Rosello 2005: 100), and as an historiographical model (ibid.: 113–27). In the case of the Shérazade-Julien couple, the linguistic roles are somewhat reversed since it is Julien who is fluent in Arabic (in classical Arabic), and Shérazade who is more comfortable in French, even though speaking the Algerian dialect. Julien’s parents had lived in Algeria during colonialism, and his father was a French teacher. He is enamoured with Delacroix’s odalisques, yet refuses to talk about the Algerian War. There seems to be a split in Julien’s persona, between a certain socio-political reality (that of postcoloniality), and a world of fantasy populated only by the exotic and the erotic. Julien’s knowledge of the Maghreb lies mainly in the latter sphere. Having grown up in Algeria, Julien has more of an Algerian past than Shérazade whose personal history is mainly French. His house is filled with orientalist images, and he transfers this passion onto Shérazade, whom he calls his odalisque. Shérazade’s intrigue with the odalisque stems from her desire to understand herself, and the way in which women like her (Maghrebian, African, the exoticized ‘other’) are perceived by the society in which she lives. She initially indulges Julien’s passion for the image, allowing him to take photos of her, but her indulgence transforms into rage at a nodal point in the narrative, when she tears to pieces all of Julien’s photos of her. It is at that moment that she equates photography with pornography, and takes the decision to leave for Algeria. Sebbar’s Shérazade is an incredibly energetic, creative and resourceful woman who exudes confidence and self-assertiveness, and who demands to be listened and spoken to. She is everything that the odalisques in Sebbar’s Femmes d’Afrique du Nord (discussed in Chapter 4) are not. The colonial postcards’ femmes mauresques, of whose consciousness Sebbar spoke with authority, are silent pathetic creatures and constitute cameo appearances, whose tragic tales of unfulfilled love Sebbar’s commentary aimed to unveil. It is as though Sebbar constructed Shérazade to portray everything the femmes mauresques lack: a strong sense of self, piercing voice and critical gaze. To the stereotype of the odalisque, of the oriental woman, Sebbar juxtaposes Shérazade, the stereotype of the precociously liberated and independent woman. Richard Dyer suggests that ‘[i]t is not stereotypes, as an aspect of human thought and representation, that are wrong, but who controls and defines them, what interests they serve’ (Dyer, quoted in Rosello 1998: 177, n.7). Consequently, it appears that Sebbar, in her preoccupation to replace the orientalist stereotype with a better or more accurate description, lost focus of ‘who controls and defines such stereotypes’. Sebbar’s Shérazade brings to life portraits of migrant women (or from migrant backgrounds, like Shérazade) who

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are strong and independent, and who personify Rey Chow’s non-duped ‘native’. France is a young woman from Martinique who shrewdly performs the role of the exotic black woman (négresse) and takes on the name of Zingha, an Angolan queen of the 17th century famous for terrorizing the Portuguese colonizers (Sebbar 1982: 124–25). Martinique, France and Angola constitute thus a triangle in the colonial geography embodied by one feminine character. Shérazade herself assumes two nicknames: Rosa (Rosa Luxembourg) and Camille (Camille Claudel). Again, the main character takes on the identities of two remarkable women who revolutionized the arenas of politics and art, respectively. Basile is yet another strong immigrant character. He is a black man from Guadeloupe, and he uses his ‘exotic’ looks to attract and seduce wealthy women, without ever pursuing a relationship with them. He is keenly sensitive to social and political issues and is sincerely interested in social revolutionary change. It is these characters’ relationship to each other and to Pierrot, the rebellious French young man who also leads a radical leftist organization, that illuminates the tensions of the social migrant world depicted by Sebbar’s narrative. It is Pierrot who is most gullible of the fantasy of authenticity: he accuses his immigrant friends of wanting nothing more from life than a bourgeois existence, which in his view is tantamount to betrayal, especially when considering their ‘native’ backgrounds. Pierrot’s indignation can be translated as an accusation of inauthenticity. They are not truly victims, because they do not act like victims; they are interested in the more mundane elements of life, such as nice cars, trendy clothes, comfort, luxury, art, literature, music, etc. Pierrot’s character plays the role of the Maoist intellectual conceptualized by Rey Chow, as ‘a supreme example of the way desire works: what [h]e wants is always located in the other, resulting in an identification with and valorisation of that which [h]e is not/does not have’ (Chow 1993: 10). If Pierrot’s desire is to be and to have what he is not and does not have, namely a ‘native’ and a ‘native’ identity, then Sebbar’s strong female characters as socio-cultural hybrids are meant to challenge the notion of a stable ‘native’ identity. The problem I find with Sebbar’s portrayal of migrant hybridity, which reappears in Génération Métisse already discussed in Chapter 4, is the way in which it is celebrated as an endless métissage of cultures, styles and intellectual trends. Her vision of hybridity is closer to the postmodern nomadism of which Stuart Hall was critical than to an historically situated hybridity. As personified by Shérazade and her peregrinations throughout France and the Middle East, her characters are unattached nomads (nomades sans attaches) (Sebbar 1988: 86). My contention does not revolve around the notion that some people are indeed nomads. Rather I find myself troubled by the manner in which her narrative uncritically enacts the desire of her characters (immigrés, beurs) to become someone they are not, the exilé(e). Perhaps I make myself guilty of failing to acknowledge ‘the necessary mimetic energy of all counterstereotyping narratives’, to use Rosello’s (1998: 5) words. Perhaps that is the case. However, I cannot help but be concerned by the clearly oppositional

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triangle constructed by Sebbar’s works, between passivity, victimization and lack of agency (Les Femmes d’Afrique du Nord and Mes Algéries en France), self-assertiveness and independence (Shérazade), and postmodern nomadism and postcolonial cool (Génération Métisse). Is there no instance in which these seemingly progressive constructions of identity can blend within the same category (the immigrés) or within the same context? Is there no other way of confronting colonial stereotypes except through oppositional representations the desire of which is to spell out the truth? Is there no way in which we (academics, artists and intellectuals) can conceive of the ‘native’ as ‘indifferent defiled image’ (Chow 1993: 52)? Why do we feel that our mission is to flee to the rescue of the ‘native’ and redeem her true self and sense of agency? Who speaks for the ‘native’? Activism, postcolonialism and the decolonial desire In investigating practices of hybridity and claims to authenticity in the narratives of Franco-Maghrebian postcolonial diasporic writers, a central concern is the legitimacy of their voice. Can they, as exilés, give credible voice to the concerns, aspirations and inner life of the immigré, of the postcolonial native parked on the margins of French citizenship and political belonging? A similar stake emerges when exploring the politics of appropriating the category of indigènes as a political platform and as socio-political positioning by a movement of migrant activists, Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR). MIR was established in 2005 in a tumultuous geopolitical context: the onslaught of the ‘war on terror’ (which involved the securitization of Muslim communities in Western societies); the headscarf debate (which had ended up with the adoption in 2004 of legislation that prohibited the wearing of obvious religious symbols in French schools); not to mention the very controversial law adopted in February 2005 (discussed earlier) that aimed to present in a positive light, in history textbooks, the accomplishments of French colonialism in its former colonies. MIR announced its existence through a public statement launched in January 2005, entitled ‘We are the Natives of the Republic’ (Nous sommes les indigènes de la République). The statement outlines the continuing state of discrimination of North African migrants and their descendants within the French Republic, and unambiguously declares that France was and continues to be a colonial state. It then launches a call to the decolonization of the Republic and commits the Movement to translocal links of solidarity with other marginalized groups both within and outside of France.8 The group is constituted of intellectuals who quite consciously draw on postcolonial literature and employ a political language that would resonate perfectly with postcolonial intellectuals in the Anglophone academy. They adopt an oppositional political identity that aims to draw attention to the racialized structure of French society (and to its connection with existing

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global racial hierarchies), and to the necessity of bringing forward the repressed colonial memory of domination and oppression. Thus they describe their political position as one of postcolonial anticolonialism (see Robine 2006; Kipfer 2011). To the injunction of integration, they respond with a call to liberation. More specifically, MIR point to the dismal social and political marginalization of the banlieues whereby migrants are consigned to a similar ‘native’ status deployed in the colonies that produced the colonized as mere subjects of imperial France and hence non-citizens. They understand the postcolonial situation of North African migrants in France not simply as one of linear continuity with colonialism but rather one of recomposition, whereby ‘new forms of ethnic discrimination’ (Sadri Khiari, quoted in Kipfer 2011: 1159) are invented to keep liberal sensibilities intact while re-enforcing the colour line between the ‘real’ French and the rest. The postcolonial situation as colonial recomposition stems from the territorial and spatial organization of racialized bodies confirming postcolonial subjects to the edges of the French social and political space (Kipfer 2011: 1156–57). According to MIR activists, the space of the banlieue and of the camp (in the case of harkis) should be better conceived as neocolonial spaces where the French Republic segregates its undesirables.9 The discourse of MIR reflects the ongoing debates in French intellectual and media circles (to which MIR activists have contributed substantially) on the issue of the ‘colonial continuum’, which refers to the continuity between colonialism and contemporary immigration policies. There are many intellectual voices in France who perceive the idea of ‘colonial continuum’ as no more than a media-circulated buzzword with little reflection in the reality of immigration within French society. Even highly respected intellectuals such as Gérard Noiriel, an eminent critic of French policies towards migrants, consider that the link between colonialism and immigration is not ‘scientifically [sic!] credible’ (Noiriel 2006: 218). Quite apart from the puzzling assumption that one needs to prove the link ‘scientifically’, the reality of the continuity between colonization and postcolonial immigration is primarily a ‘corporeal’ one, as Alec Hargreaves (2007: 28) rightly notes. This corporeal dimension refers to the highly visible presence of migrants from France’s former colonies in the heart of the metropole and to their systematic segregation and marginalization over the last decades. As Jérémy Robine remarks, the term of ‘colonial continuum’ implies a geopolitical representation – an analytical device that makes apparent the conjunction between colonial policies, France’s foreign policy (and Western states’ foreign policies in general) towards its former colonies, the underdevelopment of Third World societies, the demonization of Islam in Western societies, and the marginalization of non-Western migrants in Western societies (Robine 2006: 127). Robine points out that the merit of an activist movement like MIR is to provide a cogent analysis of the roots of migrants’ discrimination in colonial policies, something antiracist organizations in France had completely overlooked in their concern to erase ‘artificial differences’ and thus promote acceptance (ibid.: 135).10

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However, MIR’s voices need also to be contextualized within a power struggle among various activist organizations in France, which claim to speak on behalf of the postcolonial ‘natives’ and thus to be the legitimate (i.e. authentic) intermediary between power and the powerless (see Robine 2006; and Hajjat 2008). On the one hand, there are antiracist organizations such as SOS Racisme, established in 1984 in the aftermath of the Marche pour l’Égalité – an antiracist march that took place in 1983 and 1984 under the leadership of beurs activists. Such organizations have a profound secular orientation advocating for the elimination of racial discrimination through better integration of (North) African migrants. They embraced the official multicultural discourse whereby difference can be accommodated within the space of the French nation and thus celebrated the arrival of postcolonial hybridized identities (see, for example, Sebbar 1988). Leïla Sebbar’s character Shérazade is a perfect illustration of the type of postcolonial subjectivity popularized and valorized by the Marche pour l’Égalité (Sebbar herself was involved in the march): young people of migrant backgrounds, with a voluntary and independent spirit who cheerfully championed their difference and their Frenchness. This stereotype of the happily adjusted migrant was subsequently adopted by the French government in its media campaigns.11 On the other hand, there are the migrant activist groups who keep a low public profile and prefer to engage in an everyday activism through grounded and grassroots mobilizations in the banlieues, such as Mouvement de l’Immigration et des Banlieues (MIB) established in 1995. The movement has worked closely with families of imprisoned immigrés to provide them with legal representation and resources to which they had no access. More specifically, they engaged in an assiduous mobilization against the ‘double peine’ legislation, which stipulated that an immigrant imprisoned for a criminal activity would be immediately deported on his release.12 Such an activism is deeply embedded in contingency, rooted in the space of the neighbourhood and steering clear of political affiliations (antiracist organizations have generally been affiliated in France with leftist parties), and from attempts to theorize their struggles within a (post)colonial framework. Tarik Kawtari, one of the founders of MIB, criticizes MIR both for their disconnect from the space of the banlieues and thus from an experience of grounded activism, and for their discourse of self-victimization publicized through French media (Kawtari 2008: 214). Kawtari opts for a discourse of responsibility, refusing both the victim and the hero status. His concern (and approach) is for the ‘here and now’: improving the situation of the immigrés by mobilizing around and solving specific practical issues. From this perspective, MIR are seen as nothing but an exclusively intra muros Parisian phenomenon attempting to compensate for their deficit of political legitimacy (and authenticity) by engaging in provocative discursive manoeuvres aimed at attracting maximum media attention (Hajjat 2008: 258). While engaging in depth the fractures among anti-racist and pro-migrant organizations in France is beyond the scope of this chapter, the purpose of

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this discussion is to illustrate the politics of visibility among migrant organizations, and their claims to speak either for or as the postcolonial native. Organizations such as SOS Racisme, Ni Putes Ni Soumises and MIR have been at the centre of media campaigns or debates about the link between racism, gender and immigration in France. What is striking about MIR’s form of mobilization is the conjunction between various elements, all novel in their own right: the very defiant tone adopted in their public communiqués, their media interviews, and their public declarations which unambiguously indicate French society as a neocolonial space; their public adoption of indigène as their political identity, a term which had long been seen as derogatory, politically incorrect and highly controversial; their public marking of events associated with colonial memory, such as the anniversary of the Dien Bien Phu battle, the ill-fated protest of 17 October 1961 (discussed in Chapter 5), the Haitian Revolution, the anniversary of the Nakba (many MIR activists have close ties with pro-Palestinian groups in France), various moments of the Algerian anticolonial struggle, and others; the self-avowed translocal and transnational scope of their mobilization and activism that seeks to forge solidarity links with other decolonial struggles whether within France or abroad;13 their self-conscious deployment of postcolonial terminology and themes, and their assiduous efforts to theorize their struggles and the situation of the immigrés from a postcolonial standpoint.14 It is the combination of all these elements that makes MIR a unique phenomenon for the media and French public opinion. Their political vocabulary draws on anti-colonial authors such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Amilcar Cabral, Edward Said, and iconic militant figures such as Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, James Baldwin and others, and not so much on ‘classic’ postcolonial intellectuals such as Homi Bhabha or Spivak. Their political position is thus, as already mentioned, that of a postcolonial anticolonialism, which is staunchly oppositional in orientation. Theirs is a revived Third Worldist political engagement combined with a cosmopolitanism of the Global South. The former is visible in their oppositional politics and in their public(ized) marking of colonial events, which produces a ‘past as present’ postcolonial discourse. The latter is evident in their articulation of solidarity with contemporary translocal and transnational movements whether in Western or non-Western societies with whom they share a similar political vision and a commitment to the decolonial. The relentless presence of MIR in the media spotlight has not only a tactical role, namely to shock and sensitize public opinion to the continuing colonial framework of French society, but should also be read in light of other unintended effects: while they publicly pour scorn on official multiculturalism and on the rhetoric of integration, their subversion operates within the larger global context of ‘becoming visible’, expressed by Rey Chow (2007: 12–13) in terms of the attempt ‘to anchor one’s identity … in to-be-looked-at-ness’, and thus to fetishize a particular identity. Thus their public postures as indigènes of the French Republic, of victims of continuing colonial domination and

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hence as champions of postcolonial anti-colonialism, have both productive and counter-productive effects. On the one hand, it does raise questions and prompt debates about the links between colonialism and immigration in France. On the other hand, their desire for high-profile visibility, their intellectualized critiques coupled with their absence from the grassroots of the banlieue (while proclaiming their plans to establish the Party of the Natives of the Republic – PIR, Parti des Indigènes de la République – as the mouthpiece of quartiers populaires, i.e. the banlieues) has the effect of fetishizing the indigène identity as little more than postcolonial chic (not unlike Sebbar’s conceptualization of Shérazade and her uncritical embrace of postcolonial hybridity). A few important questions emerge here: does MIR’s visibility also spell the continuing invisibility of the indigènes trapped in the banlieues? Is MIR’s media strategy a confirmation of the Foucauldian warning against ‘subjugated knowledges’ being incorporated into the mainstream of knowledge as soon as they are ‘brought into light’, and thereby running the risk of ‘re-codification’ and ‘re-colonization’ (Foucault 1980: 86)? Or perhaps is it the case that such a line of thinking is self-defeating in its utopian expectation that authentic resistance remain untouched and unsullied by power? In this case the problem of authenticity lies at the core of the split between theory and praxis: MIR is seen as engaging in a theorization of the ‘rupture from the French nation’ (la rupture avec la nation) unaccompanied by praxis, whereas the indigènes rioting in the banlieues engage in the pure praxis of rupture without any theorization attending it. Jérémy Robine suggests that only the rioting indigènes can enact the rupture with the French nation – periodically, locally and only momentarily (Robine 2006: 148). What MIR is doing, according to Robine, is only a discursive rupture that is ultimately ineffective in bringing about political change. While Robine’s critique is on target, there are other aspects to consider as well. In his analysis of contemporary forms of Third World protest, Rahul Rao (2010: 2–4) points to the dilemmas of resistance where violence is perpetrated by various actors, some of whom can be simultaneously both victim and resister. The question at the heart of his excellent book is the following: ‘what sort of protest sensibility would be appropriate to a world in which there is no singular locus of threat?’ (ibid.: 4; original emphasis). This question is incredibly apt in the case of a movement like MIR, who engage in public statements declaring their unquestioned allegiance to groups such as Hamas (and other armed militant groups) simply because they are seen as resisters against the colonialism of Western and Israeli states (see MIR 2009). Overlooking Hamas’ own abuses of civilians and their conservative approach to women’s rights in the name of a ‘total anti-colonialism’, raises questions both about the political maturity of MIR and about the limits of an anti-colonial solidarity, which does not discriminate among various types of ‘resistance’.15 Rahul Rao is critical of both the cosmopolitan orientation (with an unqualified embrace of the international) and of the communitarianist orientation (with its whole-hearted

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adherence to nationalism), advocating for a ‘protest sensibility’ that is critical of both. In a sense MIR is trying to accomplish just this, to throw their weight behind both transnational and local movements and struggles. What they lack is a sense of critical distance and ironic tension between the two orientations, which allowed someone like Edward Said to be both a fervent advocate for the Palestinian bid for statehood and a fierce critic of nationalism. It is this critical tension that, in my estimation, links the gap between theory and praxis. Adopting a ‘protest sensibility’ that recognizes tensions, inconsistencies and the need for critical judgement of the very actors one seeks to emancipate and with whom one is solidary would constitute MIR as a more authentic form of postcolonial anti-colonialism. Their adherence to a total(izing) anticolonialism glosses over the multiple fractures along lines of class, gender and race inhabited by the subalterns whose representatives they deem themselves to be. The question then changes from ‘who speaks on behalf of the “native”?’ to ‘who speaks on behalf of which “native”?’ This chapter engaged the issue of migration in critical IR analyses, and the figure of the postcolonial migrant as a bearer of hybridity and resistance in literary narratives and activist discourses. I criticized Roxanne Doty’s analytical framework for its enduring state-centrism, and for her elision of the question of the postcolonial in conceptualizing the link between racism and immigration in Western democracies. Central to this conceptualization is a problematic understanding of the role of governmental policies and regulations in producing racist discourses regarding immigration. I suggested here that a more fruitful line of inquiry would be to regard such policies in their embeddedness within transhistorical (colonialism) and translocal (activism and resistance) relations. In his theorization of the notion of global resistance in what he calls ‘Islamic Cultural Zones’, Mustapha Pasha (2005: 546) asks a highly significant question: ‘How do peripheral societies actively transform hegemonic effects?’ If the question is re-phrased to refer to ‘peripheral groups’, then my analysis of postcolonial resistance in both literary narratives and activist discourses brings to the fore the contradictory politics through which peripheral groups (such postcolonial migrants) ‘actively transform [the] hegemonic effects’ of racist and neo-colonial discourses and policies. While aspects of their active transformation incorporate the very hegemonic effects they wish to undo, their resistant postures (whether in the case of Sebbar’s Shérazade – a perfect representative of the Marche pour L’Égalité generation, or in the case of MIR’s ‘total anti-colonialism’) refer to translocal webs of relations forged in the violence of the (post)colonial encounters between France and the Maghreb. It is to the role of translocal webs of relations in IR that I now turn in the last chapter.

Notes 1 My translation. 2 See www.indigenes-republique.fr/statique?id_article=189.

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3 See www.indigenes-republique.fr/statique?id_article=189. 4 This tension receives an attentive treatment in Balibar (1994). 5 It should be noted here that in the last few years there has been increasing debate on the French colonial legacy (see Hemery et al. 2005; Lacoste 2006; Noiriel 2006; Hargreaves 2007; Boubeker and Hajjat 2008), especially when addressing the issue of the ‘failure’ of integrating immigrant communities from France’s former colonies. The debate seems to be dominated overwhelmingly by historians with interventions from sociologists who work on the link between migration and colonial memory. 6 See Claude Liauzu’s article (a well-known historian of French colonialism) in Le Monde Diplomatique entitled ‘Une loi contre l’histoire’ (a law against history), published in April 2005. Following the public denunciations made by notable intellectuals such as Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, Claude Liauzu and Benjamin Stora, the law was repealed by Jacques Chirac at the beginning of 2006. 7 In an insightful analysis, sociologist Abdellali Hajjat remarks that unlike the Anglophone world, where academics from formerly colonized countries have been at the forefront of critiques, in France it is largely French (that is ‘white’) academics who have taken on postcolonial analytical frameworks (Hajjat 2008: 259–60). He thus notes the absence of non-white academics in France from any engagement with postcolonialism. However, he overlooks the rich array of engagement with colonialism and with postcolonial legacies in the literary works of diasporic Maghrebian writers. I think this is an important omission. 8 See the text of their appeal at www.indigenes.org/appel/php/index.php. 9 This argument is not novel, having been championed by other intellectual groups, such as ACHAC (Association pour la Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine – Association for the Historical Investigation of Contemporary Africa). This is a group of French researchers coming from various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences who examine the discursive mechanisms behind representations of the colonized and of the colonies, and their connection to contemporary representations of postcolonial migrations in France (see their website www.achac.com). Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel, whose works have been cited in this book, are perhaps the best-known intellectuals associated with this group. One of the differences between ACHAC and MIR is that the former is largely constituted of white French academics whose work is primarily academic whereas the latter is largely is composed of young people of migrant background (some of whom are academics) and whose primary operational arena is an activistmediatic one. The latter aspect distinguishes MIR’s self-avowed political engagement and aspiration from the ACHAC’s academic orientation. 10 For more on the politics of activism among North African migrants in France, see Bouamama (2008), Hajjat (2008), Kawtari (2008), Sajed (2012). 11 In 2003, two days before Bastille Day (the French national day), Jean-Louis Debré, president of the National Assembly, inaugurated an exhibition entitled ‘Mariannes d’aujourd’hui’ (Today’s Marianne), where photographic portraits of 14 racially diverse women were displayed on the columns of the Bourbon Palace. The women posed as provocative Mariannes, the feminized symbolic image of France, wearing Phrygian bonnets in the French tricolore and invoking an ethnicized image of contemporary France, racially diverse yet unmistakably French. The exhibition was organized by Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive), a highprofile feminist organization founded in 2002 by a group of women, many of who are of North African background. The mission of this organization is to draw attention to the violence against women in the banlieues (especially within Muslim communities). Jean-Louis Debré, in his inaugural address, spoke of the symbol of Marianne as being the perfect of incarnation of the French Republic and of its emancipatory values to which women from the banlieues pay homage

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(www.assemblee-nationale.fr/evenements/mariannes.asp). The exhibit is thus not simply about a new multicultural France, but also about a paternalistic discourse (steeped in colonial imagery) that reiterates the civilizing mission of protecting brown women from brown men, to borrow Spivak’s apt formulation. See Kemp (2009) for an analysis of this particular appropriation by the hegemonic discourse of antiracist imagery. It is interesting to note here that although ‘la double peine’, namely punishing a person twice for the same infraction, is not legal according to French criminal law, the justification for its continued use in the case of migrants is that it should be considered a complementary penalty (peine complémentaire) and hence not a ‘double peine’. See www.vie-publique.fr/politiques-publiques/politique-immigration/ legislation-reglementation-statut-etrangers/#La%20double%20peine. Although Stefan Kipfer uses the term ‘counter-colonial’ to describe the political positioning of MIR, I think the term ‘decolonial’ has been used far more widely by Houria Bouteldja and Sadri Khiari, both considered to be key figures and theoreticians of MIR (see Robine 2006; and Kipfer 2011). I make a distinction in this chapter between MIR’s deployment of a decolonial politics and their reading of anti-colonial theorists, on the one hand, and the type of postcolonial theorizing influenced by post-structuralism and associated with well-known postcolonial figures such Spivak or Bhabha. However, I also refer to MIR’s use of postcolonial themes and terminology to entail the larger field of postcolonial studies, which encompasses theorists of various ideological persuasions. For an analysis of Palestinian women’s political dilemmas in their struggle against both local patriarchies and Israeli occupation, see Cockburn (1998).

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Diasporic identifications, translocal webs and International Relations

Part of the problem here is obviously the amnesia induced by the original myth, in conventional international relations scholarship, of the nation-state as an autonomous and not always already global political space. Rather than asking what forms of globality historically connect and separate us, international relations assumes autonomous national selves and then gravely puzzles over the cooperative or conflictual properties of these socially impoverished beings. Occasionally, when our mutual relations become impossible to hide, they are transformed into questions about the novelty or the instability of these ties that bind. Hence it is an erasure, a willful form of ‘transnational [il]literacy’ … about the multiple connections that already exist, about the globalities that link Self and Other, the documented and the undocumented, the orphan and the citizen, that makes this routine lapse into illusory, autonomous selves possible. (Muppidi 2004: 76)

This concluding chapter explores the connections and tensions between the politics of diasporic identifications, translocal webs and the geohistorical location of the discipline of International Relations (IR), as it posits its origins and its objects of study. What links these three apparently unrelated issues is a preoccupation with the study of diasporic and migrant identifications from the perspective of colonial difference, as conceptualized by Walter D. Mignolo (2000a). Such a perspective allows us to grasp the unequal and asymmetrical ways in which claims to citizenship and political subjectivity are experienced. More specifically, in the Franco-Maghrebian context, it is through an examination of literary narratives that a more nuanced ‘picture’ of various diasporic identifications emerges, which is illustrated by the categories of exilé(e) and immigré(e). In this specific context, it is the use of literary narratives and strategies that has constructed a Franco-Maghrebian diasporic experience. The narratives of authors such as Leïla Sebbar, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Memmi and so many others, mirror paradoxical diasporic experiences of ‘separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place’ (Clifford 1997: 255). I employ critically Aihwa Ong’s conceptualization of ‘flexible citizenship’ and of the ‘transnational’ in order to assess the unequal experiences of the exilé(e) and the immigré(e) as socio-political categories of the Maghrebian

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diaspora. Ong (1999: 112–13) understands ‘flexible citizenship’ as a strategy of the diasporan subject who is prompted to choose her citizenship according to economic calculations driven by current shifts in global markets. Her perception of ‘flexible citizenship’ shapes her vision of the transnational through which she ‘alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour and imagination’, insofar as the practice of ‘flexible citizenship’ is circumscribed by a mutually supporting relation between escape and discipline (ibid.: 4, 19). I perceive the web of translocal relationships that circumscribe and shape the Franco-Maghrebian encounter as possessing transversal, transactional, translational and transgressive dimensions, which speak as much about moments of agency, resistance, escape and self-determination, as they reflect instances of determinism, discipline, powerlessness and silence. Thus my understanding of the encounter between France and the Maghreb does not limit itself to the ‘official’ portrayal of histories and characters, or to the state-centred interactions within this region. Rather my project is concerned with the interactions, movements, transgressions, translations and negotiations that happen between and among individual and collective voices and memories, situating themselves (rather uncomfortably) within the Franco-Maghrebian web of translocal relationships. It is this crossing and interaction among various voices and memories that shapes the Franco-Maghrebian context. I critically evaluate Ong’s concept of ‘flexible citizenship’ and its implications for the context of migration flows and diasporic processes between the Maghreb and France. I thus borrow her understanding of the ‘transnational’ and apply it partially to the idea of ‘translocal’, although I do not examine it through the perspective of global capitalism and its interactions with the nation-state.1 Thus my subsequent uses of the transgressive and translational refer to the possibility of building an alternative international relations as a situated web of translocal relations. In this alternative view, acts of indiscipline (or practices of disciplinary transgression) are performed through a reading of literary narratives and strategies that translate and mediate alternative understandings of migrant and diasporic subjectivities. They translate also alternative visions of international relations articulated with the colonial difference in mind. The first part of this chapter, therefore, examines these intersections between IR and colonial difference by attempting to trace IR’s geohistorical location within the imaginary of what Mignolo (2000a) and Dirlik (2003, 2005, 2007) call ‘colonial modernity’. I thus explore, in parallel, the implications of Aiwha Ong’s dismissal of the relevance of (post)colonial frameworks in understanding current processes of transnational mobility, and of disciplinary IR’s refusal to engage the problem of coloniality. I argue that colonial difference is crucial in grasping the dynamics of migration and diasporization in the Maghreb, insofar as it permits us to discern the trans-historical nodes of power relations that structure interactions between societies (French and Algerian, for example). It also permits us to distinguish various claims to diasporic

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subjectivity. It is through a reading of literary narratives produced by FrancoMaghrebian writers that the complexities of such claims, and of the politics they involve in their aspiration to mediate a particular socio-political reality (that of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter), are revealed. Moreover, as the second part of this chapter argues, such literary texts inadvertently indicate the subject of ‘flexible citizenship’, namely the exilé(e). Her displacement allows her to reposition herself not only vis-à-vis ‘this other self ’, as Hafid Gafaïti describes the West, but also vis-à-vis the immigré(e), whose impossibility to claim ‘flexible citizenship’ marks the irony of postcolonial displacement. Consequently, literary narratives illustrate the ways in which the exilé(e) can indulge in the luxury of a re-positioning vis-à-vis the West and of a ‘recovery of self ’ (see Nandy 1983). They also indicate the manner in which the immigré(e)’s encounter with ‘hospitality’ in the West is still largely framed by a colonial imaginary that relegates this category of migrant to a peripheral position and subjectivity (see Chapters 3 and 7). Thus, literary strategies and narratives become more than cultural productions reflecting on current socio-political events. In the Franco-Maghrebian context, they become histories of and about silences. They attempt to perform, within their narrative substance, the ‘critical labour of memory’ (Balibar 2004)2 by exploring those legacies and processes the examination of which has been repressed and avoided by ‘official’ discourses. Nonetheless, such a mediation of memory and forgetting is not without its violence. As the final section of this chapter indicates, these literary strategies are themselves caught within the politics and practices they attempt to denounce, even as they suggest certain possibilities of transcendence and transgression. I argue that the fantasy of authenticity and the ‘unified moralism’ (Ong’s expression) they attach to the figure of the ‘native’/indigène reflects a desire to transcend colonial stereotypes by counterposing a ‘purified’ (and equally stereotypical) version of the subaltern. The practice of imagining the ‘native’, whether understood as the ‘sanctified native’ captured in literature and photography (Chapters 2 to 4) or perceived as the postcolonial immigré (Chapters 3 and 7), exposes the fragile and yet productive articulations between ‘local’ and ‘global’, between past and present, and between memory and history.

IR and the problem of colonial difference IR and its long-forsaken others This section critically employs Walter D. Mignolo’s conceptualization of ‘the colonial difference’ to examine the ways in which processes of subalternization of knowledge are crucial to understanding the disciplinary roots of IR. They indicate the need to go beyond the strictures of the ‘international’ and explore the richness offered by the ‘translocal’. I believe that a dialogue between social sciences and humanities is essential in understanding the articulations between what Mignolo characterizes as ‘local histories’ and ‘global designs’.3

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Mainstream IR stubbornly refuses such a dialogue. Exploring the connections between coloniality, social sciences (in this case IR), and literary narratives allows, however, for a re-thinking of an alternative IR – one that emerges as translocal webs of relations. In his study of the connections between coloniality and knowledge production, Walter D. Mignolo understands colonial difference as: … the space where coloniality of power is enacted. It is also the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place and where border thinking is emerging. The colonial difference is the space where local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet local histories, the space in which global designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored. The colonial difference is, finally, the physical as well as imaginary location where the coloniality of power is at work in the confrontation of two kinds of local histories displayed in different spaces and times across the planet. (Mignolo 2000a: ix) Mignolo thus conceives of coloniality as the meeting of various local histories, a violent encounter that is circumscribed by unequal power relations (see also Chapter 1 in this book). He does not conceive of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ as two reified categories. Rather he makes a subtle but significant distinction between local histories with aspirations towards global designs, and other local histories, seen as those spaces in which the coloniality of power of global designs is both negotiated and resisted. His intention is thus to localize knowledges with universalistic pretensions, or, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) expression, to provincialize Europe. Mignolo does not imagine the encounter between these two kinds of local histories as a univocal imposition of power, material structures and knowledge. He acknowledges that this violent encounter has been mediated by complicity, resistance, adaptation and indifference. Such a complex understanding of the coloniality of power allows for the possibility of imagining the ‘native’ or the nativized immigré(e) as ‘indifferent defiled image’, a practice advocated for by Rey Chow in her Writing Diaspora (1993: 52). As I discuss later, the exilé(e) and the immigré(e), as socio-political categories of migrants within the FrancoMaghrebian context, allow for a conceptualization of international politics as a translocal web of transgressive and translational relations through which colonial difference is performed in unequal and asymmetrical ways. I thus argue that the problem of colonial difference is crucial to imagining an alternative international relations constituted by translocal webs of relations. Here I employ Arif Dirlik’s (2007: 166) definition of the translocal, according to whom the term gestures towards long-standing interactions and intersections between localities preceding the arrival of the nation-state. In this sense, I understand ‘translocal’ to entail webs of relations and intersections that are ‘much broader in [their] historical compass than the transnational

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and offers a flexible concept in the analysis of social and political formations while also underlying the importance of place in human activity’ (Dirlik 2007: 166–67). Dirlik builds his understanding of the translocal on Appadurai’s conceptualization of ‘locality’. Appadurai, writing in the context of anthropological disciplinary debates, claims that an anthropology built around the production of locality is valuable for a variety of reasons, one of which is the possibility to re-think ‘the complex co-production of indigenous categories by organic intellectuals, linguists, missionaries and ethnologists’ (Appadurai 1995: 207; emphasis added). While this book is not concerned with anthropology’s disciplinary debates, Appadurai’s emphasis on ‘locality’ as the product of complex intersections resonates profoundly with this book’s focus on the role of class, race and gender in the co-production of native categories. Dirlik adds ‘trans’ purposefully to signal the integration of locality within larger global processes. Indeed, he sees the fusion between ‘trans’ and ‘locality’ to suggest the necessity of a dual focus: on local(ized) processes and social formations, but also on the larger structures and flows that intersect with and circumscribe localities (see Dirlik 1998 and 2007). Put differently, I argue here for a re-thinking (methodological and disciplinary) of IR constituted by translocal webs of relations, which bring to light the colonial difference undergirding both the discipline and the practice of international relations (see also Gruffydd Jones 2006 and Saurin 2006). Mignolo argues that what he calls ‘the modern/colonial world order’ or ‘colonial modernities’ started in the late 15th century with the conquest of America. The beginnings of ‘colonial modernities’ initiated the devastation brought upon the Aztec and the Inca peoples by the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century. Colonial modernities ‘has built a frame and a conception of knowledge based on the distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics and by doing so, has subalternized other kinds of knowledge’ (Mignolo 2000a: 13).4 These ‘other kinds of knowledges’ are local knowledges that have undergone, as he suggests, a process of subjection and marginalization in the encounter between ‘colonial modernities’ and ‘local histories’. What Mignolo identifies as the imaginary of the modern/colonial system has had its centres of knowledge production first in Europe and, after World War II, in North America (ibid.: 92–93).5 Thus non-Western knowledges have been considered, for the longest time, objects to be studied, self-enclosed entities that awaited the investigation and decoding of Western-trained minds. In an unsurprisingly inward-looking move, disciplinary IR traces its ‘origins’ back to the 17th century with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), an event that crystallized the concepts of state sovereignty and self-determination, and established the internal political boundaries of Europe.6 Mignolo claims, however, that the first attempts to institute an international law took place in 16th-century Spain, and were occasioned by the debates between Bartolomé de las Casas and Gines de Sepúlveda, in Valladolid, on the humanity of the Amerindians (ibid.: 29).7 These early debates were followed by the deliberations coming from the School of Salamanca on cosmopolitanism

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and international relations (ibid.).8 Francisco de Vitoria, in his treatise De Indis, acknowledges the humanity of the Amerindians but postulates that they are as children to the Spanish conquistadors, therefore in need of guidance and protection (Anghie 2006: 118). To take thus the notion of colonial difference seriously in understanding the genealogy of international governance, we need to re-think the space of the ‘international’ as constituted by the 17th-century racial difference between the Amerindians and the Spanish colonizers. As Robert Vitalis masterfully demonstrates, the discipline IR has effectively erased the working of racial difference and of ‘racism as a force … [and] an institution in world politics’ (Vitalis 2005: 160; see also Persaud 2004). Moreover, when the world is divided up by the discipline into sovereign nation-states that operate according to immutable principles (and thus blind to questions of culture, race, gender, or religion), what we currently have in the discipline of IR is a ‘commitment to an apartheid of benign neglect’ whereby the above-mentioned questions are successfully ignored and silenced (Vitalis 2005: 164). Thus I take seriously here the question of colonial difference in its racial instantiation as central to the conceptualization of translocal webs of relations that bind together France and the Maghreb. Consequently, I find it rather strange that the study of the politics of diaspora and migration between France and the Maghreb, centred around the issue of coloniality, needs meticulous justification as to why it belongs to the ‘field’ of IR. If the focus in IR shifts from an exclusive preoccupation with the nationstate to an attention given to various spatialities and political forms of organization (such as the translocal, among others), then such a justification would be unnecessary. Underlining the rich research potentialities offered by a focus on trans-, Aihwa Ong suggests in her Flexible Citizenship, that: [t]rans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something. Besides suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital, transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour and imagination. (Ong 1999: 4) Unlike Ong, however, I do not look at nation-states, and therefore I am not interested in the notion of ‘transnational’ for reasons explained above; nor do I look at movements of capital, even though movements of migrants are linked to movements of capital in important ways. However, Maghrebian migrants’ decision to relocate is not circumscribed by mere economic calculations. The movements of migrants from the Maghreb to Europe are also structured by complex socio-political and historical webs of translocal (post)colonial relations. Such a context is crucial to understanding the transgressive and translational relations that have shaped the Franco-Maghrebian encounter. As seen from my critique of Roxanne Doty’s study of anti-immigrantism in Western

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democracies, undertaken in the previous chapter, this context is crucial to grasping the complexity of the links binding diaspora, exile and migration in this specific translocal space. While mainstream IR stubbornly refuses an interdisciplinary dialogue, exploring the connections between coloniality, social sciences (in this case IR), and literary narratives allows for a re-thinking of an alternative frame of world politics. I argue that this connection between colonial difference, literary narratives and social sciences can contribute in important ways to challenging the subalternization of knowledge in IR. What is arguably unique about the Franco-Maghrebian web of translocal relations, is the vital role of literary strategies through which narratives of exile and migration produce a diasporic translocality fraught with questions of language and class, and producing its own racial and gendered categories. Employing postcolonial literary strategies in this book aimed to illuminate not only the processes of locating the knowing subject, but also the complex links and practices that constitute the locations of the known. Arjun Appadurai’s (1996: 55) concern with the links between imagination and social life sheds light on the role of literary narratives as constitutive of and constituted by the fabric of socio-political life: Fiction, like myth, is part of the conceptual repertoire of contemporary societies … Like the myths of small-scale society as rendered in the anthropological classics of the past, contemporary literary fantasies tell us something about displacement, disorientation, and agency in the contemporary world. (Appadurai 1996: 58) Indeed, one of the purposes of this book’s incursion into literary narratives was to illustrate the ways in which the links between coloniality, literary strategies and social science can be considered part of what Appadurai characterizes as an ‘anthropology of representation’ (Appadurai 1996: 58). Such an anthropology of representation re-configures the space of the ‘international’ as a complex web of translocal relations that transcend and transgress the limited analytical value of ‘national’ and ‘international’. The moral politics of comparison?9 With these thoughts in mind, I now turn to the relevance of coloniality for social sciences in general, and for IR in particular. In a chapter entitled ‘Geopolitics of Cultural Knowledge’, Aiwha Ong advances the argument that ‘we must move beyond an analysis based on colonial nostalgia or colonial legacies’, in order to grasp fully the new directions taken by the ex-colonized countries in their eagerness to position themselves as advantageously as possible vis-à-vis the global political economy (Ong 1999: 35). Ong’s prescription is based on the assumption that countries such as those in South-East and

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East Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong) are not interested in either colonialism or postcolonialism, since they have, ‘in their leaders’ views[,] successfully negotiated formal decolonization’ (Ong 1999: 35; my emphasis). In light of these comments, several questions come to mind. First, who exactly is not interested in (post)colonialism in these countries, the leaders or other categories?10 Second, since the leaders of these countries estimate that they had successfully negotiated decolonization, does it follow that decolonization has indeed taken place? Third, can one claim that indeed ‘in many areas of the world’ ex-colonies have successfully negotiated decolonization? What would such an argument look like in the context of the Maghreb? Étienne Balibar (1999) claims, in an article entitled ‘Algeria, France: One Nation or Two?’ that the decolonization of Algeria was an incomplete process with devastating consequences for both nations. In more recent research, he asserts that within the context of migration processes between the Maghreb and Europe, we are witnessing a ‘recolonization of migration’ (Balibar 2004: 41), as already discussed in Chapters 3 and 7. Undoubtedly the current Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika would consider that decolonization in the Maghreb is a fait accompli, and that colonialism is a part of the past entrusted to the labour of historians. However, does it follow that upon taking such views into consideration, we should move beyond an understanding of how (post)colonial processes are circumscribing current practices of migration control? There is a significant amount of literature in the Franco-Maghrebian space that addresses the issue of repressed colonial memory and the urgent need to open up debate about the violence of French colonialism. As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, the Algerian War is without a doubt one of the most defining moments for the understanding of contemporary French identity (see, for example, Stora 1998; Ireland 2005; and Gross 2005). When Benjamin Stora speaks of a ‘non-meeting of memories’ and of the ‘memory of Algeria [that] continues to eat away at the very foundations of French society like cancer, like gangrene’ (quoted in Ireland 2005: 203; see also Stora 1998), he is particularly concerned about how such repressed memories spill over into various realms of socio-political life both in Algeria and in France. Furthermore, Alek Toumi advances the argument that the colonial relation has been replaced post-independence by an economic colonialism between France and the Maghreb (Toumi 2002: 138). This colonialism links in complicity neoliberal interests of French and Algerian elites. Another important issue here are the directions taken by postcolonies on the path to a ‘successful decolonization’. What were the tactics employed by post-independence governments to effect a ‘successful decolonization’? In the Maghrebian post-independence states, the projects of Arabization have been state-sponsored instruments of cultural decolonization. They attempted to eliminate all things French. In Algeria, during the civil war of the 1990s, such an effort to cleanse Algerian society of all things French took a tragic turn, when intellectuals, journalists and artists, who were perceived to be close to French values or to advocate for a democratic Algeria, were killed.

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As some intellectuals remark, it seems that the French colonial project has been replaced by Arabo-Islamic colonization (see Toumi 2002; Memmi 2004). In fact, Albert Memmi (2004: 78) asserts that, in the case of the Maghreb, ‘the revolution did not take place’. Chapter 3 attempted to outline the linguistic situation in the Maghreb to illuminate one of the paradoxes of decolonization in this region. The French language has come to play the role of an instrument of liberation and a tool for petitioning for a democratic and tolerant Maghreb. Moreover, I wonder to what extent societies in South-East Asia, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and even Singapore and Hong Kong have ‘successfully negotiated decolonization’. Perhaps the key to understanding the relation between colonial, decolonization and postcoloniality lies not in the question of whether such societies (or at least their leaders) are interested in colonial/postcolonial issues. Rather, the postcolonial here relates to the endurance of certain processes, practices and attitudes that are being carried over from colonialism. However, it also simultaneously indicates the transmutation of these legacies into new contemporary forms with paradoxical results, as has been the case in the Maghreb. In Neoliberalism as Exception, Ong performs an unambiguous separation between Western colonialism (which in her estimation ended with the independence of these states), and internal practices of colonialism undertaken by the newly colonized states. By performing such a separation, Ong overlooks the insidious modalities through which such practices are indeed connected. I find Anne McClintock’s critique of the term ‘postcolonialism’ more compelling, and paradoxically more edifying about the usefulness of deploying the postcolonial as an analytical tool. In indicating the complex and enduring relevance of coloniality to the contemporary world, she states that: [w]hile some countries may be postcolonial with respect to their erstwhile European masters, they may not be postcolonial with respect to their new colonizing neighbours. Yet neocolonialism is not simply the repeat performance of colonialism, nor is it a slightly more complicated, Hegelian merging of tradition and colonialism into some new, historic hybrid. More complex terms and analyses of alternative times, histories, and causalities are required to deal with complexities that cannot be served under the single rubric of postcolonialism. (McClintock 1995: 13) A theorist such as Rey Chow would disagree with the claim that Hong Kong, for example, has accomplished decolonization and has moved beyond it. I would argue that the depth of Rey Chow’s work arises precisely from the manner in which she positions herself as a Hong Konger educated in the Western canon, and as ‘one of the few “postcolonial” intellectuals working in the North American humanities academy today who can lay claim to having been subjected to a genuinely classic colonial education’, and who has to negotiate between her Chineseness, understood generally, and her Hong Kong Chineseness, understood particularly (Chow 1998: 161). In works such as

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Woman and Chinese Modernity and Writing Diaspora, she makes the claim that to understand ‘coloniality’ in terms of ‘foreignness of race, land, and language’ is both enabling and disabling, or as she puts it, both blinding and illuminating as it limits our understanding of the practice of coloniality. Two important points emerge from her analysis: one concerns the understanding of coloniality as internal colonialism, and the second one refers to coloniality not only as ‘the literal understanding of geographical captivity’ (Chow 1993: 7), but also to its ideological dimension, which forgoes geographical boundaries. The former is an important one, with which postcolonial theory has been grappling in its attempt to understand how the ‘coloniality’ of power operates. Ania Loomba uses as an example of this internal coloniality Mahasweta Devi’s story on the tragic condition of the tribal culture of the Agarias in postindependence India. She employs this literary narrative strategically, to reveal how postcolonial ‘[n]ational “development” has no space for tribal cultures or beliefs’, and how post-independence nationalist projects replicate ‘colonial views of non-Western people’ in regards to those ‘minorities’ who do not fit neatly with the national fantasy of unity and homogeneity (Loomba 2005: 14–15). As seen in the Maghreb with the struggles of the Berber tribes, postindependence Arab nationalisms have very little patience with dissent and diversity (see Silverstein 2004). The policy has been, just as in the Indian case, to replicate colonial policies of violently suppressing ‘rebellious’ elements, and ‘bring them into line with the rest of the country’ (Loomba 2005: 15). As such, Aihwa Ong’s suggestion that postcolonial studies overlooks the fact that ‘[m]any formerly colonized countries in South-East Asia are themselves emergent capitalist powerhouses that are “colonizing” territories and peoples in their own backyards or further afield’ (Ong 1999: 35) is perhaps misguided. Postcolonial theorists such as Rey Chow, Ania Loomba, James Clifford, Stuart Hall and many others do in fact concern themselves with precisely this sort of internal colonialism, whether in its nationalist manifestation (Ania Loomba, Rey Chow), or in its capitalist dimension (Gayatri Spivak, Rey Chow). In addition, Ong’s quick dismissal reveals her failure to grasp ‘coloniality’ as more than just ‘foreignness’ or ‘Western-ness’. I also wonder whether Ong’s facile dismissal of the continuing relevance of coloniality does not neglect its ideological dimension, as it exerts itself in unequal and various degrees in practices of knowledge production in academia. When Rey Chow emphasizes the fact that, during British colonialism, ‘[t]o study Chinese [in Hong Kong] was never against the law but was simply constructed as a socially inferior phenomenon’ (Chow 1998: 163), she is referring to the versatility with which the coloniality of power operates. Her decision to undertake a university degree in English was a ‘material value-conscious’ choice in the context of a ‘Westernized Asian’ society (ibid.). Thus I argue it is through material value-conscious choices and practices that the ideological dimension of coloniality manifests itself. I do not deny Ong’s thesis that such material value-conscious choices are used in ways that subvert the idea that neoliberalism, in all its complex processes, is eminently

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and all-encompassingly Western. I think Ong’s thesis has enormous merit in pointing to the flexible and resourceful manner in which global designs are transformed by local histories, to use Mignolo’s conceptualization. Nonetheless, at the same time, to claim that neoliberalism’s flexibility and versatility in South-East Asia spells the end of the relevance of colonial frameworks for these societies, is short-sighted. Here the implications of the decolonial project, as laid out by Mignolo, are extremely significant, as they serve to make visible the ‘colonial difference’ going beyond attempts and their relative successes to deconstruct and subvert Western imaginaries from within. Or to phrase it differently, colonial difference suggests the way to more productive strategies of subverting hegemonic structures than the mere oppositional re-readings of the Western canon. In a discussion on the attempts of African and Latin American philosophers who embarked on the task of re-reading European philosophy having colonial difference on their socio-political horizon, Mignolo makes an important distinction between ‘intellectual decolonization’ and ‘border thinking’. The former implies the ‘rereading [of] the key figures of Western philosophy in their blindness to the colonial difference and to the coloniality of power’ (Mignolo 2000a: 64). The latter, however, implies a more daunting task – that of: mediat[ing] between philosophical practices within colonial modern histories (e.g., the practice of philosophy in Africa, Latin America, North America … ) and ‘traditional’ forms of thoughts – that is forms of thought coexisting with the institutional definition of philosophy but not considered as such from the institutional perspective that defines philosophy. ‘Tradition’ here doesn’t mean something ‘before’ modernity but rather the persistence of memory. (Mignolo 2000a: 64) In this book, Chapter 2 traced a sort of genealogy of intellectual decolonization in the Franco-Maghrebian context, an exercise prompted by the violence and the horror of the Algerian War. There I argued that the works of intellectual figures such as Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Jean-François Lyotard are associated with the project of post-structuralism, without accounting for the stamp of colonial difference that indelibly marks them. Derrida and Cixous (and Albert Memmi, as it is seen in later chapters) are products of the colonial experience in Algeria, and claim for themselves a particular ‘native’ status that marks their difference: being Jewish in the Maghreb during and after French colonialism. It is their Jewishness in the Maghrebian setting, at a difficult time (colonialism and after), that allows them to claim a difference from both the West and from Algeria. Nonetheless, it is Lyotard in his political writings on the Algerian War, who delves into a complex analysis of colonialism in the Maghreb, of the complicities and betrayals by both sides during the Algerian War, and of the prospects of postindependence Algeria.

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Derrida’s project, in particular, is one that perhaps best illustrates the attempt of intellectual decolonization in the Franco-Maghrebian setting. According to Robert Young, the post-structuralism associated with the names of Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard, is a project of deconstruction that arises from an anticolonial impulse (Young 2001: 411–28). More importantly, Young perceives deconstruction as a ‘form of cultural and intellectual decolonization’, which ‘expos[es] the double intention separating rational method from its truth’, namely the conflation of a myth with a universal truth (ibid.: 421). Derrida confesses, in the Epilogue to his Monolingualism of the Other, that the ultimate object of his project, namely: the deconstruction of phallogocentrism and of ‘the’ Western metaphysics … – all of that could not not proceed from the strange reference to an ‘elsewhere’ [Algeria] of which the place and the language were unknown and prohibited even to myself, as if I were trying to translate into the only language and the only French Western culture that I have at my disposal, the culture into which I was thrown at birth, a possibility that is inaccessible to myself … (Derrida 1998: 70) As already discussed at length in Chapter 2, the desire to deconstruct Western logocentrism seems to translate itself into an almost exclusive preoccupation with logocentrism and with Western philosophy. Language and the West become both the object and the subject of desire. In other words, one can argue that perhaps Derrida’s project of deconstruction is a failed exercise in ‘border thinking’ – to use Mignolo’s concept – while remaining an influential attempt at intellectual decolonization. This book constitutes, therefore, an exercise in intellectual decolonization, which I see as an important act to undertake in IR. It is also an incipient attempt, underdeveloped perhaps, to initiate some sort of border thinking, which goes beyond a re-reading of the Western canon in social sciences and humanities (see Shilliam 2010). Such an incipient project makes an effort to consider those narratives in which ‘the persistence of memory’, as Mignolo termed it, is a vivid concern and has the echo of an ethical imperative especially when considered in the context of the Franco-Maghrebian (post)colonial encounter. I now move towards a discussion on the role of literary narratives and strategies in understanding the politics of exile and diaspora that circumscribes the encounter.

The Maghreb: ‘the difference that cannot be told’?11 On the ironies of ‘flexible citizenship’ This second part explores the claim that the Maghreb is the irreducible difference ‘that cannot be told’, a claim that has appeared in the writings of Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Hélène Cixous

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and Walter D. Mignolo. Here I argue that when examined through the prism of postcolonial migration flows, the Maghreb’s irreducible difference is as enabling as it is disabling, as mirrored by the exilé(e)/immigré(e) ensemble. I thus employ Aihwa Ong’s understanding of ‘flexible citizenship’ as illustrated by the image of the ‘multiple-passport holder’, and Mireille Rosello’s conceptualization of postcolonial hospitality as reflected by the metaphor of the immigrant as guest. In an analysis of Abdelkebir Khatibi’s concept of ‘an other thinking’, Mignolo attempts to construct the Maghreb not only ‘as an epistemic irreducible difference’ (something very similar to Lyotard’s characterization of Algeria as ‘intractable difference’, as examined in Chapter 2), but also as ‘a geohistorical location that is constructed as a crossing instead of a grounding (e.g. the nation)’, insofar as the Maghreb ‘is a crossing of the global in itself ’ due to its ‘[l]ocat[ion] between Orient, Occident, and Africa’ (Mignolo 2000a: 69).12 Maghreb’s construction as a crossing was explored in Chapter 3 through an analysis of the politics of language in the Maghreb, which also illuminated the multiple character of this region (as argued by Alek Toumi and Assia Djebar) due to its complex and rich historical legacies. As mentioned already, post-independence Maghrebian states (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) have engaged in aggressive projects of Arabization in an attempt to effect both cultural decolonization and to accomplish their grounding as nation-states. Paradoxically, post-independence also saw a significant increase of migration flows from the Maghreb to Europe (France, in particular). Such migration processes led to a diasporization understood not only in terms of the displacement of people and their ‘entanglement’ in transnational networks (see Clifford 1997), but also to a diasporization of postcolonial literary narratives (Gafaïti 2005), as explained later on in this chapter. Current literature on migration has constantly framed such processes by an ethico-moral imperative of hospitality, whereby the receiving society is cast as ‘host’, and the ‘immigrant’ as guest.13 This conceptualization of the immigrant-destination society relationship in terms of hospitality throws into focus the responsibilities and duties of the immigrant as guest, while inadvertently obscuring the ironies of such expected responsibilities and duties. Discussing the perverse relation that binds the (in)hospitable nation to the immigrant as guest, Mireille Rosello highlights the absurdity of how: [b]eing grateful to the so-called host nation is a baffling proposition if the only contact between the immigrant and that abstract entity is a bureaucratic labyrinth of impersonal and alienating administrative procedure. And the most problematic aspect of the metaphor of state hospitality may be that in times when the official policy advocates ‘inhospitality’, the individual, whose hospitality was originally the model for state hospitality, is now expected to abide by the state’s inhospitable norm. (Rosello 2001: 10)

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Conceptualizations, such as Rosello’s, of contemporary processes of migration between the Maghreb and Europe make an important statement with regards to perceiving the Maghreb as ‘the difference that cannot be told’, pace Mignolo, or as the name of an ‘intractable difference’, pace Lyotard. These current processes of ‘postcolonial hospitality’ make it possible to tell this difference, but not in a socially scientific way that distinguishes between the knowing subject and the known object. Rather, the difference is told in a manner that articulates the translocal negotiations, understood as transgressive and translational, between migrants and their ‘host’ societies, among migrants themselves, and between migrants and the societies they left behind. As the categories of exilé(e) and immigré(e) illustrated in Chapters 3 and 7, in the Franco-Maghrebian context, different regimes of ‘hospitality’ operate and discriminate along class, race and gender lines. Naming ‘difference’, as Rey Chow (1993: 107) perceptively notes, is usually meant as an intent ‘for the marginalized to have some access to the center’. Categories of class, gender and race are usually conjured as ‘a preestablished method of examining “cultural diversity”, whereby “difference” becomes a sheer matter of adding new names in an ever-expanding pluralistic horizon’ (Chow 1993: 108). My contention then with considering the Maghreb as a ‘difference that cannot be told’ is that such an assertion, while meritorious in its intent to eschew sameness and empty generalizations, serves to crystallize the Maghreb as the unknowable entity, as the ultimate difference to an all too known and knowable West. It is precisely this vision of the Maghreb that haunted Camus’s narratives (discussed in Chapter 6), where figures of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims’ remain faceless and nameless – the ever unknowable and mysterious limit to a ‘rational’ colonial imaginary. Moreover, as Chow’s quote illustrates, naming ‘difference’ inadvertently tends to assume an almost automatic nod to diversity. It does not pay due attention to the ways in which working with important categories such as class, gender and race, should go beyond naming differences we cannot tell, but to whom we owe our (equalizing liberal) allegiance. Rather such categories should be used strategically in order to illuminate one another. They should expose the discrepancies in power, mobility and privilege not only between unproblematized categories such as the ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds, but within various societies themselves, and in my case, within various diasporas. In the context of the formation of various diaporic identities, ‘difference’ is an important, even crucial, element in understanding the unequal articulations of power, mobility and flexibility. It should not become yet another variable, however, to which we must pay an unreflexive homage. Aiwha Ong (1999: 19) notes that ‘under conditions of transnationality’, certain values such as flexibility, migration and relocation seem to be positively inflected as opposed to stability and fixity. What she identifies as ‘flexible citizenship’— the strategy to manipulate the mobile and trans-territorial operations of neoliberal capitalism—can be understood as being ‘shaped within mutually reinforcing dynamics of discipline and escape’ (ibid.). I find this conceptualization

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compelling. As the discussion on migration in Chapters 3 and 7 showed, however, ‘flexibility’ and ‘citizenship’ both in their separateness and in their association, could not be further from the lived experience of the immigré(e). More to the point, in the context of migration and diasporic processes that structure the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, who can boast access to flexible citizenship? It is important to note here the distinction between Ong’s (1999) understanding of flexible citizenship as the strategy available to certain privileged categories from South-East Asia, and her highly sophisticated conceptualization of neoliberal exceptions (or graduated citizenship) (Ong 2006). The former refers to the category of Asian professionals who shuffle between Asia and North America, and are ‘those most able to benefit from their participation in global capitalism celebrat[ing] flexibility and mobility’ (Ong 1999: 19). The latter makes compelling and insightful distinctions between the neoliberal exception, which ‘gives value to calculative practices and to self-governing subjects as preferred citizens’, and the neoliberal exception, which marginalizes ‘other segments of population’ and renders them ‘excludable as citizens and subjects’ (Ong 2006: 16). In the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, my distinction between exilé(e) and immigré(e) would follow Ong’s most recent differentiation of citizenship practices. However, the distinction with which I operate here is not framed by a conceptualization of the global dynamics of neoliberalism. Rather I am interested in those mutations in citizenship effected by the intersection between colonial legacies and memory on the one hand, and postcolonial flows of migration on the other (see Chapter 5). As discussed earlier, Ong’s dismissal of the continuing relevance of colonial frameworks for postcolonial societies fails to account for mutations in citizenship brought about by such complex intersections. I thus elaborate on the need to investigate differentiated citizenship (Ong’s expression), bearing in mind the colonial difference at the heart of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter. As discussed at length in Chapters 3 and 7, for the exilé(e), whose attachment and sense of belonging can unproblematically be allocated to different shores of the Mediterranean, ‘flexible citizenship’ is a lived reality, a practice to which she has access at any time. In the case of the immigré(e), however, the inhospitable conditions of the ‘homeland’ drive her to the other shore. Here the migrant as immigré(e) is met with a different kind of inhospitality, characterized by an economic and political disenfranchisement not so dissimilar from the one experienced ‘back home’ but marked by colonial difference in the ‘host’ society. As such, ‘flexible citizenship’ for the immigré(e) translates into the bitter irony of not being able to enjoy the privileges of citizenship in either country. The different translations in terms of lived realities of ‘flexible citizenship’ in the Franco-Maghrebian context of migration flows lie at the core of the previous chapter. Such an important distinction between translations allows for a more complex understanding of translocal practices of diasporic subjectivity. Ong makes a valuable critique of diaspora studies and of its preoccupation with the ‘subjective experiences of displacement, victimhood, cultural hybridity,

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and cultural struggles’, which are implied to be instances of resistance to and transgression against an adverse global economic system (Ong 1999: 12–13). The author notes that there is a certain ‘unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects [that] now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power’ (ibid.: 13). Such remarks echo Rey Chow and Asha Varadharajan’s concerns with the sanctification of the ‘native’ and with the portrayal of the ‘subaltern’ as ‘an idealized image of themselves [the academics prone to sanctifying the “subaltern”]’, while ‘refus[ing] to hear the dissonance between the content and manner of their speech and their own complicity with violence’ (Chow 1993: 14). The analysis undertaken in Chapter 2 on the ethics of studying the subaltern illustrates these very preoccupations. However, Ong’s critique of contemporary research within citizenship and diaspora studies also misses the element of relationality that binds various categories of diasporan subjects. As Appadurai (1995: 207) remarked in discussing the production of locality, indigenous categories (or in Ong’s case ‘subaltern’ categories) are co-produced. In the context of the Franco-Maghrebian (post)colonial encounter, the indigène is as much a product of colonial administrators as it is of the évolué’s ambivalence towards French culture, whereas the immigré(e) is co-constituted both by the French state’s racialized vision of citizenship and by the exilé’s privileged inclusion within Frenchness. Therefore, this book sought to make visible the process of co-production of the ‘indigène’/immigré(e) categories both by the colonial imaginary and by the évolués’ politics of subjectivity. I do not deny Ong’s thesis that current neoliberal processes have produced flexible approaches to citizenship. But this exclusive focus on the present combined with Ong’s quick dismissal of the continuing relevance of colonial legacies to contemporary reconfigurations of citizenship misses an important point, which was made clear by Michel Rolph-Trouillot in his Silencing the Past (mentioned earlier, in Chapter 5). Trouillot (1995: 148–50) notes in his discussion of the politics surrounding the memory of the Haitian revolution that to remain authentic to both sides of historicity (past and present), one needs to see the connection between the colonial past’s violence and its mutations in the postcolonial present. In the Franco-Maghrebian context of translocal relations, to remain authentic to both sides of historicity is to take colonial difference as the central element in the constitution of diasporic subjectivities, of claims to (post)colonial citizenship (see Chapter 6), and in contemporary mutations in political belonging. Coloniality as a state of exception? Literature, colonial legacies and memory in the Franco-Maghrebian context In her same critique of citizenship and diaspora studies, Ong expresses a concern with how an ‘exclusive focus on texts, narratives, and subjectivities’ masks the larger structural (whether material or symbolical) dynamics that

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shape such ‘victimhood and ferment’ (Ong 1999: 13). This might be the case with anthropological articulations of global capitalism and imperialism. Such exclusively focused articulations are conspicuously absent (or perhaps even nonexistent), however, from IR’s engagements with diasporic and migration processes. As a discipline, IR’s understanding of complex translocal processes is obstinately limited to the interactions among nation-states understood as rational and unitary actors caught up in a game of survival and domination. Thus in the limited ‘world’ of IR, the role of ‘texts, narratives, and subjectivities’ as important tools for producing an alternative understanding of such processes seems irrelevant and inconsequential. Consequently, the purpose of this book was also to introduce the reader to the possibility that literary narratives not only can put forth a different perspective on migrant and diasporic experiences, but also can acquire important valences when read and interpreted through the prism of the critical labour of (colonial) memory, to use Balibar’s expression. This argument becomes acutely pertinent in the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter. Hafid Gafaïti argues that in a country such as Algeria, ‘the novelists are the real sociologists and historians’ (Gafaïti 2005: 15), insofar as the novel written by North African writers of French expression has become a cultural manifestation of the necessary task of memory.14 Gafaïti is careful to point here to the sociological and historical role of the Algerian novel, which has come to mirror ‘the weight of current events’ (ibid.: 23). As Mireille Rosello’s study on the performative encounters between France and the Maghreb illustrates, the absence and repression of the work of colonial memory from public debates translated into a proliferation of literary texts that explore the practice of ‘hauntology’. Through such a practice, ‘[n]ot only do the living come to talk to the dead (to their dead), but they also meet other people, individuals that history forbids them to befriend’ (Rosello 2005: 129). These forbidden (post)colonial encounters address the politics of nagging memory, which I examined in Chapter 4, in the context of the feminine spectral presences of some of Assia Djebar’s literary productions (L’Amour, la fantasia and Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement), and Leïla Sebbar’s collaboration to the Femmes d’Afrique du Nord. Cartes Postales (1885–1930). Thus in the name of an ‘historicized memory’ (Pierre Nora’s phrase), Djebar (and other FrancoMaghrebian writers) attempt to reflect on their own history, both as individuals and as collectives. One could then make the case that Franco-Maghrebian authors are writing a history of silences and about silences (‘stories about the absence of stories’, cf. Rosello 2005: 111). The politics of memory and forgetting between France and the Maghreb tend to come into focus regularly, whether in political, economic, or cultural encounters. Articles featured by Le Monde and BBC News, in December 2007, gave accounts of Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Algeria in a climate of political tension. Public opinion in Algeria requested that he apologize, on behalf of the French state, for the practice of torture and for the atrocities committed by the French Army in Algeria during the Algerian war of independence.15

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Sarkozy’s message stated that if France and Algeria are to move together towards a better future, then one must look at the past straight in the face (regarder le passé en face), and acknowledge that ‘the terrible crimes’ that were committed during the war have made victims on both sides of the confrontation. Interestingly enough, such a speech was given during a meeting between the French president and a number of Algerian business leaders. According to the BBC News article, Sarkozy’s visit to Algeria was intended to increase ‘economic ties between the two countries, expressing the hope of signing contracts worth 5bn euros. The contracts include billion dollar investments in the Algerian oil and gas business by the French energy companies Total and Gaz de France’. The same article indicated that France was already the biggest investor in Algeria outside the energy sector. As the articles featured by Le Monde and BBC News were keen to emphasize, both France and Algeria have strong economic interests in maintaining their relationship on positive terms. Sarkozy’s message performs therefore a double duty: that of moral equalization between the French and Algerian parties during the Algerian war of independence, and thus conveniently neutralizing the colonial difference that had separated the two; and that of token denunciation of colonialism to appease political tensions so that business could go on as usual. This more than symbolic form of condemnation was uttered so as to legitimize further the unambiguous status of the French Republic as the land of liberté, égalité, fraternité, in which the period of colonialism figures as the state of exception, a moment of temporary madness in the otherwise magnificent and generous history of France.16 The state of exception is left to the study of historians. Given that the past is now straightforwardly examined, both France and Algeria need to move beyond the colonial legacy of the past. As already discussed in this book, such a message sits very comfortably with the overwhelming opinion within French society according to which colonialism is something located in the past, which has been consummated and terminated, and which bears little relevance for the present. It is not surprising, then, that in France colonialism is almost exclusively the study object of history. Aiwha Ong unambiguously stated that since leaders of many formerly colonized states estimate they have successfully negotiated decolonization, and since economic interests are prompting such states on the path to aggressive capitalism, academics need to move beyond (post)colonial frameworks (Ong 1999: 35). In the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, I find such a proposition to fit all too well within the already ongoing ‘official’ discourses in both France and Algeria. To move beyond the (post)colonial framework in the Franco-Algerian context suggests a disturbing moral equalization between both colonizers and colonized, and thus effectively neutralizes any politicization of memory and colonial legacies. Such a convenient and expedient dealing with the ‘past’ obscures the ways in which coloniality might be continuing in other forms, such as in economic interests and cultural-ideational structures, which bind in complicity elite French and Algerian interests.

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The continuation of coloniality needs to be understood beyond facile notions of territorial occupation. For instance, Rey Chow opposes the idea that orientalism does not apply to East Asia since China was never fully territorially colonized (an argument advanced by Ong in Flexible Citizenship), by stating that: [t]his kind of positivistic thinking, derived from a literal understanding of the significance of geographical captivity, is not only an instance of the ongoing anthropological tendency to deemphasize the ‘colonial situation’ …; it also leaves intact the most important aspect of Orientalism – its legacy as everyday culture and value. (Chow 1993: 7) Thus an easy dismissal of the relevance of colonial difference ignores the fact that discussing the continuing legacies of colonialism does not imply a static understanding of coloniality as a process of material and ideational domination that lasted for a finite period of time. Coloniality is a process the manifestations of which alter and metamorphose with time and with the emergence of various socio-political and economic conditions. As Chow suggests, the understanding of coloniality as ‘geographical captivity’ is limiting insofar as it reconstitutes the positivistic vision of the world made up of discreet territories and political entities. One of the merits of taking literary and visual narratives as evidentiary sources for political encounters in global politics is their ability to offer a glimpse into webs of translocal relations and thus a mapping of more immediate and complicated spatial relations. This ability prompted Hafid Gafaïti (2005) to conceive of literary narratives as central to the constitution of a Franco-Maghrebian diasporic space. Furthermore, Franco-Maghrebian literary and visual narratives evoke coloniality as a legacy of ‘everyday culture and value’. They illustrate how racial stereotypes during colonialism transmute into more subtle ones in the present, bearing similar connotations, but inflected differently. The works of Mireille Rosello (1998), Pascal Blanchard (in Blanchard et al. 2003) and Nicolas Bancel (in Blanchard and Bancel 1998) attest precisely to this process of transmutation of racial stereotypes in French media, cinema, aesthetic productions, popular culture and literary texts, which have endured from before the colonial period, have suffered alterations during colonialism, and are continuing in the contemporary everyday culture under various guises. Obviously these stereotypes do not endure unchallenged. As seen from the analyses undertaken in Chapters 4 and 5, which focused on visuality, the visual and literary narratives examined here aimed towards a subversion of racial stereotypes. The role of this book was not to pass judgements on whether such subversions were effective or not. Rather, I was more interested in exploring the idea that ‘[f]iction can introduce the possibility of dissident narratives and invite us to conceptualize oppositional practices of [postcolonial] hospitality’ (Rosello 2001: 174). The important point to remember about literary strategies is that

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while aiming to subvert stereotypes and to offer emancipatory alternatives, they are themselves caught up, inevitably, within those politics they seek to expose and challenge. Hafid Gafaïti discusses the emergence of a diasporization of the Maghrebian intelligentsia, which has involved the exile of many Maghrebian intellectuals to France (and Europe more generally). Such an exile inevitably ‘starts by a series of betrayals: betrayal of brotherhood, betrayal of collective memory, and of the given word’ (Gafaïti 2005: 240). The very possibility of betrayal arises in the postcolonial context, in which the diasporic intellectual, or the exilé(e), becomes the subject of a paradox. She leaves the country for whose independence she has advocated, due to a climate of political hostility and repression, and seeks ‘hospitality’ in the country that had been for so long identified as the source of oppression. James Clifford encapsulates well the relation between (post)coloniality, legacies of the past, and contemporary diasporic processes, when he states that: [t]he term ‘postcolonial’ (like Arjun Appadurai’s ‘postnational’) makes sense only in an emergent, or utopian, context. There are no postcolonial cultures or places: only moments, tactics, discourses. ‘Post-’ is always shadowed by ‘neo-’. Yet ‘postcolonial’ does describe real, if incomplete, ruptures with past structures of domination, sites of current struggle and imagined futures. (Clifford 1997: 277; added emphases) Thus the postcolonial, seen in its complexity, encompasses both continuities and ruptures, ongoing struggles and open possibilities, but Gafaïti’s terminology, that of ‘diasporisation’, even as he refers to experiences of exile, brings into focus an interesting and important position.17 In the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, the experience of exile of the Maghrebian intelligentsia has acquired diasporic valences via literary strategies. In other words, it is the use of literary narratives and strategies that has constructed a Franco-Maghrebian diasporic experience (as mentioned earlier). The narratives of authors such as Leïla Sebbar, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Memmi and so many others, mirror paradoxical diasporic experiences of ‘separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place’ (Clifford 1997: 255). Moreover, such texts acquire the function of enacting memory, performing the present and mediating the future. As the analyses in this book have illustrated, the romanticized figure of the ‘subaltern’ or of the ‘native’, evoking lost moments of authenticity, and that of the immigré(e), as defiled ‘native’, mediate the encounter between literary strategies, colonial legacies, and contemporary processes of migration and diasporization. The figure of the immigré(e) negotiates, therefore, the ambiguities of the position of the exilé(e). Her defilement reflects the disconnect between a desire for authenticity, whether as an imagined future or as clearly reconciled past (as reflected in the idealized figure of the ‘native’/subaltern),

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and a confrontation with the lived realities of the everyday (as mirrored by the less than romantic figure of the immigré(e)). However, it is precisely the (treacherous?) relationship between the exilé(e) and the defiled figure of the immigré(e) that translates the predicaments of various diasporic experiences and of the asymmetrical and unequal claims to citizenship and political subjectivity. Hafid Gafaïti discusses the transnational dimension of the literary narratives written in French by Maghrebian diasporic intellectuals, which are integrated into what he calls ‘hybrid cultures’ (Gafaïti 2005: 51–52). Such a statement implies the sort of transnationality that enjoys the privileges of ‘flexible citizenship’ and of hybridity, understood as ‘an exhilarating and liberating condition’ (Ha 1995). As James Clifford (1997: 256) remarks, ‘[d]iasporist discourses reflect the sense of being part of an ongoing transnational network that includes the homeland not as something simply left behind but as a place of attachment in contrapuntal modernity’. Clifford borrows the idea of contrapuntally lived experience from Said’s meditation on exile and displacement, through which ‘being from’ and ‘being at’ are experienced simultaneously and in tension.18 This notion of contrapuntally lived diasporic experience is very helpful in allowing us to understand and explore the ambiguities within which the diasporan subject’s sense of belonging and political entitlement is immersed. As Gafaïti indicates, exile and diasporization for the Maghrebian intellectual has implied both betrayal and a loss of self. However, it also involves a recovering of (another) self and of speech (recouvrement de la parole, d’une parole autre sur soi) (Gafaïti 2005: 240–41). This recapture of self within the exilic experience implies also a repositioning of the self vis-à-vis ‘this other self ’ (cet autre soi), the West (ibid.: 240).19 From the perspective of the immigré(e), on the other hand, is there a repositioning or recovering of self ? How is such an experience of displacement and relocation to be lived? The figure of the exilé(e) reflects the characteristics associated with Aihwa Ong’s ‘multiple-passport holder’ who ‘embodies the split between state-imposed identity and personal identity caused by political upheavals, migration, and changing global markets’ (Ong 1999: 2). However, the experience of the immigré(e) teaches us that being a ‘multiplepassport holder’ is not a unified experience that encompasses all migrants or diasporan subjects. The immigré is confronted, on a daily basis, with the dreary and humiliating experience of postcolonial (in)hospitality, whereby the immigrant is the uninvited and unwelcome guest who must show his gratitude towards the society that both fears and needs him.20 Memmi (2004: 97–101) advances the argument, already discussed in Chapter 3, that the Maghrebian migrant is a constant reminder of the embarrassing colonial legacy. In this case, the latter’s repositioning vis-à-vis the West continues to be framed by a colonial imaginary with its deeply racialized vision. Moreover, the immigré(e) is thrown into a contrapuntally lived experience, which she or he finds both confusing and threatening. This ‘cultural limbo’ (Ha 1995) acquires a more painful and sharper edge as it is negotiated

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between the older and the younger generations, who identify themselves as beurs (see Chapters 5 and 7). Reading and interpreting Franco-Maghrebian literary narratives allowed me to explore and expose these particular tensions between generations, among migrants themselves. It also permitted me to look at the migrant family and at the manner in which postcolonial ‘hospitality’ continues to carry a hefty currency even for the so-called ‘second-generation migrants’, who are actually born and raised on French soil. Consequently, Ong’s understanding of flexible citizenship, and Mireille Rosello’s conceptualization of postcolonial hospitality speak about the quandaries of understanding the complex articulations between ‘local histories’ and ‘global designs’ within the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter. More to the point, processes of migration re-frame this postcolonial encounter through resurrections of historical memories (legacies of colonialism of which the immigré(e) acts as a constant reminder), and the creation of postcolonial moments always overshadowed by ‘neo-colonial’ ones (as argued by James Clifford, and as experienced by the impossible claim of the immigré(e) to ‘flexible citizenship’). Such a re-framing takes place through claims of new imperialisms (Arabization projects in post-independence states, and neoliberal interests that bind together French and Maghrebian elite interests). This idea of the uneasy and fragile negotiation between ‘local histories’ and ‘global designs’ as experienced within the contested space of diaspora, takes me to the final section of this concluding chapter, in which I explore the tensions emerging from writing and understanding diasporic identities from the perspective of colonial difference.

On the lures of diaspora and transnationalism In Chapter 4 of this book I made the case that practices of sanctifying and/or exoticizing the ‘native’ speak about a desire to take possession of an authentic experience long lost in a globalized and (post)modernized world, and tend to claim authenticity through the purified image of the ‘native’. The categories of exilé(e) and immigré(e) allow us, therefore, to understand who the knowing subject of such a desire is, and who constitutes its failed known object. As the examination of photographic and literary encounters with the ‘native’ hoped to illustrate, the figure of the ‘native’, captured in its dissoluteness (Alloula, Sebbar) or in its sanctity (Djebar) is both related to and removed from that of the immigré(e). However, images of dissoluteness co-exist with those of sanctity in a troubled interaction, whereby one stereotypical image is opposed to another one, equally stereotypical. There are ambivalent articulations of the ‘native’ and of the immigré(e), and of their relation, which inadvertently emerge from such literary and photographic productions. The figure of the immigré(e) is thus supposed to be different from that of the ‘native’ insofar as the former belongs to a different time and to a different space (postcolonial France). However, the two figures are also inextricably related to each other because the imaginary within which the identity of the immigré(e) is projected in postcolonial France is still largely inflected by a colonial frame. This situation

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has prompted authors such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mireille Rosello and Albert Memmi to suggest that the imagination of a great part of French society has still not been decolonized. Albert Memmi’s relatively recent Portrait du décolonisé embodies this tension between a desire to move beyond colonial legacies, as suggested by Ong, and the impossibility to do so. Memmi’s essay is divided in two parts, one focusing on the postcolonial citizen and on the situation of post-independence states, and the other on the figure of the Maghrebian migrant. The first part of the essay witnesses a casting away of the thesis advanced in his Portrait du colonisé, which had made Memmi famous in the intellectual world in 1957. Consequently, the first part advances the argument that post-independence states’ plight of poverty and underdevelopment is not due to the legacies of colonialism, the continuity of which into current political and economic processes he denies. Rather, such a sordid state of affairs needs to be linked to ‘local’ conditions of corruption and to a self-defeating attitude that he identifies as dolorisme (perhaps best translated by ‘self-pity’) (Memmi 2004: 35). This attitude of the formerly colonized suggests an attribution of responsibility to an external agent, the (ex)colonizer, who is now seen as culpable of all the evils plaguing the post-independence state. Thus Memmi not only builds an argument against the notion of ‘neo-colonialism’, but he also makes the claim that colonization was not entirely negative, because it had some benefits for the colonized societies (Memmi 2004: 37)! When such a fierce and uncompromising argument against the very existence of neo-colonialism is built within the first part of the essay, the reader harbours little hope that the treatment of the Maghrebian migrant will fare any differently. However, with the second part, the tone changes considerably and even surprisingly. If for the postcolonial citizen of post-independence Maghrebian states he sees no reason to muse on legacies of colonialism, there seems to be a strong suggestion in Memmi’s text that such a continuity of legacy is not outlandish in the case of the Maghrebian migrant. The author discusses how the young Maghrebian migrants resemble ‘zombies’, and how they come from a different planet, that of the banlieue (suburban ghetto) (Memmi 2004: 137–40). Thus, he is aware of not only the marginalization of Maghrebian migrants within French society, but also of the possibility that the colonial imaginary continues to operate in this specific context. Memmi thus remarks that ‘[t]he son of the Maghrebian migrant has still to digest the memory of the colonial domination and that of the exploitation of labour that ensued within the former metropolis’ (ibid.: 136). Such a statement traces, perhaps unintentionally, a sense of continuity (one also marked by ruptures and alterations) between the past, the relevance of which he dismisses in the first part of his essay, and the present economic exploitation of migrant labour. James Clifford (1997: 261) remarked that there are no guarantees of ‘postcolonial’ solidarity within diaspora. The categories of exilé(e) and immigré(e) serve to evoke a fragile and troubled relationship between the two, but also

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between such categories and practices of (post)colonial memory and forgetting. Rather the claimed or perceived solidarity (between the writer and the objects of his fantasy for authenticity, between the exilés and the immigrés) masks the politics of the privileged diasporic subject whose nostalgic memory is meant to stand in for the subjectivity of the ‘native’. Chapter 4 illustrated the manner in which such a troubled relationship is mediated by an array of literary and photographic strategies, which are complicit in crystallizing a set of nativist representations with aspirations to authenticity: miserabilist portrayals, whereby the ‘native’ and/or the immigré are confined to a condition of abjection and dissoluteness; exoticized and glamorized exposés whereby the feminine ‘native’ and/or immigrée exude nothing but orientalized sensuality, ranging from silent compliance to uninhibited liberation – both stereotyped understandings of presence or lack of agency (Sebbar’s photographic and literary productions); and quasi-sanctified feminine presences whose victimhood seems almost unsurpassable (Djebar in L’Amour, la fantasia and Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement). One of the lures of imagining and writing diaspora is thus the projection of a particular kind of authenticity of mediation. As Sontag remarked, this act of supplementing the image by enlisting a socially concerned writer to spell out the truth of the photos stems from a moralistic fantasy, which assumes that what Spivak has called the Native Informant – the postcolonial intellectual living in and/or speaking to the West – authentically voices over and deciphers the mysterious lifeworlds of the ‘native’ for the benefit of the benevolent Western reader/viewer (Sontag 2001: 105–6). Caught between sanctification and exoticization, commodification and defilement, the ‘native as image’ enriches with its surplus value the subjectivity of those voices yearning for authentic experiences and lost origins. Moreover, a sense of moralism seems to surround the diasporan subject herself, whether understood here as exilé(e) or immigré(e): attached to her persona is her function of subversion and the potential of liberation, insofar as she is supposed to disturb the homogeneous national imaginary and to pose a challenge to uncontested practices of identity and belonging (see Ong 1999: 14–15). The analyses provided throughout the chapters provide, I hope, a more ambivalent picture of the diasporan subject, and of both the violence and the subversive potential that accompany practices of diasporic subjectivity. Furthermore, I thought it was important to underline how a certain privileged diasporic subjectivity – that of the exilé(e) – tends to assume the authority of voice and perspective to speak for and correct the wrongs done against oppressed subjectivities (whether diasporic or ‘indigenous’). I do not deny that there is emancipatory potential in the strategies employed by the texts and images analysed throughout this book. I hope to have provided a more nuanced engagement with such texts and images that acknowledged their merits even as it signalled their dangers. Ong is right in her observation where she problematizes the unexamined assumptions of much of current literature on transnationalism:

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[t]ransnational mobility and its associated processes have great liberatory potential (perhaps replacing international class struggle in orthodox Marxist thinking) for undermining all kinds of oppressive structures in the world. In a sense, the diasporan subject is now vested with the agency formerly sought in the working class and more recently in the subaltern subject. (Ong 1999: 15) This assumption stems in no small measure from the fantasy of opposing the rigidity of IR’s geopolitical imagination, caught up in the territoriality of the nation-state and its ‘fixed’ borders, by celebrating the transnational movements of people as migrants and refugees. Such movements are seen as necessarily disrupting statist discourses and subverting the centrality of the state as the locus of political agency (see Shapiro and Alker 1996). This is one of the reasons why I opted for the use of ‘translocal’ in this book. I do not imagine that the term ‘translocal’ is unproblematic, but I do prefer it because, as mentioned earlier, it gestures towards an understanding of spatial relationality that precedes the nation-state (although not necessarily excluding it). It also indicates the continuing relevance of place in a world of flows. Current critical analyses in IR privilege the fluidity and weightlessness of subjectivity. Hamid Naficy, in his discussion of exilic and diasporic filmmaking, suggests that ‘[p]erformance of identity is not a free state because there is still a set of primary categories of belonging (sediments) to which one attaches in order not to become totally weightless, atomized, or alienated’ (Naficy 2001: 286). Therefore, mobility, movement and border-crossing also entail a certain degree of ‘fixity, not fluidity, the weightiness, not weightlessness, of identity’ (ibid.: 287). The term ‘translocal’ allows thus both for a sense of relationality and movement, and for the continuing relevance of place and fixity. Furthermore, this celebrated vision of the ‘transnational’ does not account for the ways in which diasporic agency is asymmetrically practised, and how some diasporan subjects find themselves in much more advantageous positions than others from which to exercise influence. From the perspective of colonial difference, and in the context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter, such an assumption obscures the ways in which colonial legacies hover over diasporan subjects in highly unequal ways: the position of the immigré(e) is a metamorphosis of that of the indigène [native], a status attached to most North Africans during colonialism, and discriminates according to particular social, economic and political signifiers. This metamorphosed identification indicates someone who is uneducated, mostly illiterate, on the margins of both Maghrebian and French societies, such as poor immigrants from the ghettoized suburbs of French cities, and immigrant workers from the rural and urban areas of North Africa. Writing and understanding diasporic practices is thus riddled with an inescapable ambivalence stemming from the imperative of going beyond colonial nostalgia (which tends to sanctify the ‘native’), and from the necessity of ‘acting out [colonial] memory’ (as discussed in Chapter 5)

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as a means to heal the wounds of the past, exorcize repressed memories of colonial violence and testify to ongoing oppressive structures. Thus the practice of imagining the ‘native’, whether understood as the ‘sanctified native’ captured in literature and photography or perceived as the postcolonial immigré(e), exposes the fragile and yet productive articulations between ‘local’ and ‘global’, between past and present, between memory and history. In an essay entitled ‘Diasporas’, James Clifford remarks that ‘contemporary diasporic practices cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism. While defined and constrained by these structures, they also exceed and criticize them: old and new diasporas offer resources for emergent “postcolonialisms”’ (Clifford 1997: 244). The analyses of Roxanne Doty and Aihwa Ong’s interpretations of migration flows and diasporic practices, undertaken in this chapter and in the previous one, illustrate what is at stake in imagining diaspora and migration flows as rigidly circumscribed by the dynamics of nation-states (Doty) and global capitalism (Ong). More importantly, the critique of both these analyses aimed to expose the significant impact that overlooking or dismissing colonial difference had on the understanding of these practices of transnationalism. In the Franco-Maghrebian context of migration and diasporization, the notion of colonial difference not only inscribes the parameters of a socio-political legacy, which has carried a tremendous bearing on how Frenchness or Algerian-ness (for example) have been performed as national identities. Even more, the idea of colonial difference becomes a painfully lived reality with the ongoing processes of migration between the Maghreb and France. The immigré(e) embodies, in a sense, both the awkward and painful legacy of colonial occupation (in the figure of the ‘native’/indigène), and the contemporary experience of exploited labour and socio-political marginalization. Living thus on the periphery of the ‘host’ society, the immigré(e)’s claim to ‘flexible citizenship’ in an age of transnational mobility acquires the bitter irony of not being able meaningfully to claim belonging to either side of the Mediterranean. The exilé(e), as defined and conceptualized in this book, becomes both the mediator of and the pole of privilege and difference to the immigré(e)’s experience. This project has suggested that the exilé(e), on the other hand, can claim ‘flexible citizenship’ and a ‘native’ status for herself, as in the case of Derrida and Cixous, who define themselves as ‘the only FrancoMaghrebian’ (Derrida 1998: 12) and inseparab, respectively (Cixous 2006: 24), or in the case of Camus (Chapter 6). The negotiation between the exilé(e)’s ‘native’ status and her position of privilege complicates the picture of who the diasporan subject is and what her limits are in the practice of political subjectivity and belonging. Some of the limits were explicitly explored in here, such as the politics of hybridity, language and citizenship. I turned to literary texts and photographic images for the exploration of such issues, since it is the use of literary narratives and strategies that has arguably constructed a Franco-Maghrebian diasporic experience. Such an experience, narrated from the perspective of colonial

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difference, also inevitably points to the real subject or beneficiary of the kind of ‘flexible citizenship’ that comes with translocal mobility, and indicates its object perceived both as lack (the immigré(e) whose condition is that of an inassimilable difference within the body of the French nation), and as desire (the ‘native’/indigène whose function is to evoke lost moments of authenticity). What binds these issues together is an intent to offer an alternative practice of international relations as a situated web of translocal relations, one that arises out of reflections upon migration flows and diasporic practices within literary and visual narratives produced in the Franco-Maghrebian context. As the earlier discussion on the subalternization of knowledge seems to suggest, mainstream IR’s blindness to colonial difference manufactures a practice of international relations that is stubbornly state-centric and rigidly Westerncentric. To introduce the problem of colonial difference in IR entails a much more nuanced engagement with ‘transnational’ mobility and with the sociopolitical subjectivities it enables, but also with the relations and locations of power that structure ‘transnational’ practices. My methodology of reading literary narratives with a view to exploring the construction of diasporan subjects and of the relations of power that circumscribe their identifications, stems from the unique socio-political context of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter in which ‘literature and politics are intimately connected, [so that] the text and its context are inseparable’ (Toumi 2002: 6). This complex politicization of the literary text in the Maghreb traces its origins not only in the violence of the colonial encounter, but also in the complicated postcolonial realities that ensued. In the Franco-Maghrebian context, these texts become ‘stories about the absence of stories’ (Rosello 2005: 111), attempting to perform ‘the critical labour of memory’ (Balibar 2004: 222). Such a critical labour of memory, however, is itself implicated in its own relations of power and privilege effectively marginalizing those whose memory they attempt to resurrect, and those whose painful and oppressed realities they strive to denounce. Nonetheless, it is this complication of memory, forgetting and witnessing which, one hopes, allows for an IR seen as a translocal web of relations to emerge.

Notes 1 Latha Varadarajan’s (2010) recent work addresses precisely the intersections between global capitalism, the restructuring of the nation-state and the issue of the ‘domestic abroad’. She sees contemporary diasporic communities as ‘the product of two simultaneous processes: the neoliberal restructuring of the state and the diasporic reimagining of the nation within a particular historical, political context’ (ibid.: 17). While Varadarajan’s framework highlights very aptly the contemporary intersections between global capitalism and diasporic communities, the emphasis of her approach on current neoliberal dynamics limits, to a certain extent, our understanding of the multifaceted character of diasporic politics. While the Maghrebian diaspora is inevitably caught within certain contemporary neoliberal processes, I argue that this is not its foremost characteristic. The specificity of the Maghrebian diaspora lies, in no small measure, in the continuing relevance of the colonial past

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for its contemporary condition. Moreover, due to the peculiar character of the (post)colonial memory (and the repression thereof) hovering over the FrancoMaghrebian encounter, the social formations of this type of memory acquired specific forms that are not easily reducible to workings of global capitalism and the transnational struggle ‘between the bourgeoisie and the other classes’ (ibid.: 12). I take class difference to be an extremely important element of my analysis (as illustrated by Chapters 3 and 7), but I also want to illustrate that class formation and class fracture within the postcolonial diaspora are not reducible to an analysis of capitalism (though this is a very important aspect). Rather they also emerge as colonial categories of language, educational background and access to French culture work to racialize the indigènes, and then undergo postcolonial transformations and mutations. This expression appears in Balibar’s article entitled ‘Europe: Vanishing Mediator?’ (2004). James Rosenau compellingly stated the need for genuine interdisciplinarity in the practice of IR in 1973 in his book International Studies and the Social Sciences (1973: 18–19). See also Vitalis (2005: 164). Here Mignolo refers to the displacement of ‘gnoseology’ (understood as ‘knowledge’ in general, attained either by ‘mystical contemplation’ or by mathematical reasoning) by epistemology (associated with post-Cartesian reason) and hermeneutics (related to meaning and interpretation) (Mignolo 2000a: 10). In the case of IR as an American social science, see Hoffman (1987), Smith (1995), Schmidt (1998) and Vitalis (2005). For an account on the historiography of academic international relations, see Schmidt (1998). Within IR there are several exciting engagements with the 16th-century debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda. See, for example, N. Inayatullah and D. Blaney’s ‘Intimate Indians’ (2004); N.C. Crawford’s ‘Colonial Arguments’ (2002); W.E. Connolly’s ‘Global Political Discourse’ (2002); and Anghie (2006). See also Mignolo (2000b). I use Aihwa Ong’s subtitle from Flexible Citizenship, but as a question. Living and working in Hong Kong as I do now, I can claim that Ong’s remark is very far from the everyday reality of Hong Kong. The complexity of the colonial legacy in Hong Kong and its remarkable endurance in an age of neoliberal capitalism permeates the everyday deeply and in various ways. As a student of colonialism and of its impact on global politics, it has been eye-opening to live in a place that has been, since its inception, such a crucial node both within colonial global flows of goods, people and ideas, and within contemporary intersections of global capitalism. This experience has certainly had an impact on how I teach IR theory in a non-Western location. Having had to teach a graduate course on IR theories to a group of mostly local students allowed me to see the discipline through fresh eyes. My students taught me important lessons about the fragile meaning of the postcolonial and its inherent positioning vis-à-vis the ‘West’. To my question, ‘when did the postcolonial begin in Hong Kong?’ most of them replied that the postcolonial never began in Hong Kong. From their perspective, Hong Kong’s socio-political life is structured in important ways by current colonial relations (both with Beijing, perceived as the new centre of power, and with the West), and by past ones (the British colonial legacy). This expression belongs to Mignolo (2000a: 69). For an account of the history of the Maghreb, see Abdallah Laroui’s seminal study (1977). In the context of French ‘hospitality’ towards migrants, see Julia Kristeva (1993), Derrida and Dufourmantelle (1997), Tahar Ben Jelloun (1997), Derrida (2001), and Balibar et al. (2007). My translation. All quotations from this source are my personal translations.

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15 See ‘En Algérie, Nicolas Sarkozy dénonce le colonialisme français’ in Le Monde, 3 December 2007, www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3212,36-985462@51-981390,0. html (accessed 3 December 2007); and Aidan Lewis, ‘France-Algeria ties still strong’, on BBC News, 3 December 2007, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7121412.stm (accessed 3 December 2007). 16 The BBC News article quotes Sarkozy: ‘Yes, the colonial system was profoundly unjust, contrary to the three founding words of our Republic: freedom, equality, brotherhood,’ he said. ‘But it’s also fair to say that inside the system, there were many men and women who liked Algeria, before having to leave it.’ 17 James Clifford makes the distinction between diaspora, understood as communities linked together in transnational networks ‘living here and remembering/desiring another place’ (Clifford 1997: 255), and exile, taken from Said’s conceptualization of exile, as an individual experience of displacement (Clifford 1997: 365, n.9; see also Said 2000a). 18 See Said (2000a). 19 A similar argument formulated as a prescription (that of the necessity to reposition oneself vis-à-vis the West) for the purpose of transcending the violence of colonial legacies appears in Albert Memmi’s Portrait du colonisé (1985: 157), and in Alek Toumi’s Maghreb Divers (2002: 113). 20 The experience of immigration from the Maghreb to France (or to Western Europe more generally) has been largely a male experience, insofar as, within patriarchal structures of Maghrebian societies, it is the man who is supposed to provide for his family. For insightful readings of gendered migration flows between the Maghreb and Europe, see Salih (2000, 2003).

Transgressing International Relations Concluding remarks

In this book I suggested that a reading of literary texts offers an alternative understanding of International Relations (IR) as webs of translocal relations. Employing literary narratives and strategies allows for a glimpse into the performances and the intricate negotiations that go into concepts and practices disciplinary IR has taken as given, such as state, agency and actor(s). More importantly, though, it allows for a very different understanding of the ‘political’, in a manner that disavows the notion that ‘international politics’ takes place only in the realm of ‘inter-state relations’. Instead, a foray into the literary enabled me to look at the ‘political’ as performed in its everyday-ness. The importance of exploring the ‘political as everyday-ness’ becomes clear when we confront a contemporary IR of migration written from a more mainstream perspective. Its ahistorical presentation and state-centrism are blind (and indifferent?) to the continuities of imperialism, where the (post) colony is as much within the lived space of the (post)metropole as it is outside. Thus I attempted to amplify this understanding of IR as a situated translocal web of relations through recourse to photographic and literary narratives of several Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, such as Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Albert Camus, Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Leïla Sebbar. In undertaking this task, I was deeply inspired by Cynthia Enloe’s (2002: 200–1) injunction that when trying to understand the workings of a political system, the student of international politics needs both to be armed with energetic curiosity and to listen carefully at its margins. This book was thus my attempt to listen as carefully as possible at the margins of the FrancoMaghrebian political encounter. I do not claim that the margins that I have identified and examined here are the only margins, nor that their ‘marginal’ status is unproblematic. Rather the purpose of this project was to understand what it might mean to look at international relations from a different perspective, from a different space, from the vantage points of various locations/ positioning, and through a methodological approach de-legitimated by the mainstream of the discipline. Throughout this book I have attempted to question and transgress IR’s analytical economy, the self-proclaimed common sense, which has been so aptly interrogated by Enloe:

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There is, I think, a serious flaw in this analytical economy [of IR], and in the research strategy that flows from it. It presumes a priori that margins, silences and bottom rungs are so naturally marginal, silent and far from power that exactly how they are kept there could not possibly be of interest to the reasoning, reasonable explainer. A consequence of this presumption is that the actual amount and the amazing variety of power that are required to keep voices on the margins from having the right language and enough volume to be heard at the centre in ways that might send shivers up and down the ladder are never fully tallied. (Enloe 2002: 188) Following Enloe’s injunction, I thus attempted to show that ‘margins, silences and bottom rungs’ are not naturally silent and far from power. In fact, it is through complex and dynamic translocal webs of relations that such margins are kept marginal. The Franco-Maghrebian encounter provided, in my view, an intriguing opportunity for examining not only margins and silences, constituted in the various facets of the ‘native’/indigène, but also the voices and practices of what Spivak calls the Native Informants (or the postcolonial diasporic intellectuals) who see themselves as the spokespersons of the Third World’s oppressed. Therefore, I was not particularly interested in an examination of the Franco-Maghrebian encounter from the perspective of the centre. Such a perspective would have undermined precisely the notion of an ‘encounter’, with its connotations of transgression, accident and hauntingly nagging memory of colonial violence (see Chapters 4 and 5). A state-centrist vision of this encounter would have erased the hyphen that separates and unites the Franco-Maghrebian couple, and it would have assumed that we are dealing with autonomous and separate entities, rational and unitary actors: France, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. As Étienne Balibar indicates, in the Franco-Maghrebian context, the assumption of separation and autonomy is an illusion (see Balibar 1999, 2004). From Balibar’s perspective, France and Algeria, for example, are still very much bound together, ‘for France today was made (and doubtless is still being made) in Algeria, with and against Algeria’ (Balibar 1999: 162). The migration flows between France and the Maghreb disrupt a state-centric understanding of this encounter. My recourse to literary strategies hopefully allows the reader to glimpse the complicated translocal webs of power relations, which mediate political, social and cultural negotiations. Privileging a postcolonial perspective (but also gesturing towards a ‘decolonial’ one) made it possible to explore hierarchies of power in their multiple practices, fractured by race/ethnicity, gender and class. These categories are not explored as fixed and immutable indices. Rather, I tried to show that ‘their meanings derive from their specific locations and histories’ (see Chowdhry and Nair 2004: 17). Therefore, by exploring margins, silences, and bottom rungs in the FrancoMaghrebian encounter, and the voices who claim to mediate their marginality and break their silence, also I sought to understand how racial, gendered and class hierarchies illuminate each other.

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Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney assert that IR, in its current shape, is ‘itself partly a legacy of colonialism’ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004: 2). Marshall Beier (2004: 110) reminds us that ‘international relations theory is a powerful social force in its own right and is therefore susceptible to becoming an instrument of domination’. What these statements imply is that imagining the ‘field’ of IR is never an innocent practice. Following Walter D. Mignolo (2000a), I suggest that IR is in need of both intellectual decolonization and border thinking. As discussed in Chapter 2, practices of intellectual decolonization in IR have been ongoing for the last couple of decades, and have made tremendous strides towards undermining the structure and the main assumptions of the discipline. I do think, however, that it is time we moved towards border thinking. Such a practice would involve exceeding the necessity to re-read the ‘canon’, albeit in critical and imaginative ways, and to envision alternative practices that draw upon marginalized, silenced and ignored knowledges (Mignolo’s local histories). These knowledges could and should constitute an IR of multiplicity, as a ‘field’ of transgressive, translocal and translational possibilities.

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Index

Abd-el-Kader, Hadj Ali 117n4, 120n38 ACHAC (Association pour la Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine) 173n9 activism, postcolonialism and decolonial desire 167–72 Agamben, G. 39–40n11, 42 Agathangelou, A. and Ling, L.H.M. 40n16, 64 ahistorical presentation 21, 137, 204 Ahluwalia, Pal 4, 20, 33, 40n22, 125 Albert Camus the Algerian (Carroll, D.) 127 Alexander, M.S. et al 117n5 Algeria: anonymity of Algerians in writing of Camus 136; Camus and Fanon’s positions on Algerian War in 122, 123–24, 124–43; cinematic engagement with War in 86, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 102, 105, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116n3, 117n5, 117n6, 117n8, 117n9, 118n14, 118n16, 119n34; colonial Algeria 8, 12, 19n15, 20–21, 31, 121–24, 125–26, 127, 129, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 147, 152n21; French Algeria 28, 55, 89, 92, 94–95, 118n16, 151n10; Independence, Algerian War of 2–3, 4, 9, 12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 25–26, 27–28, 29–30, 37, 47, 55, 74, 83n4, 84n15, 84n18, 120n38, 152n17, 165, 182, 185, 191, 192; independent Algeria 92, 138; intractability and colonial desire 27–29; liberation and emancipation 21, 29; pied noir vision of 126, 135, 152n21; postcolonial Algeria 47, 74, 114, 147, 153n26 Algérianisme 8, 9, 126, 128 Alleg, Henri 92–93, 108, 120n36, 120n38

Alloula, Malek 62, 67, 68, 73, 196; critique of colonial photography 63, 65–66, 71, 81; narratives, photographic and literary 76, 82, 83n4, 83n6, 84n13 Althusser, Louis 23 Amrouche, Jean 9, 19n13, 136, 152n19 Anderson, Benedict 153n29 Ang, Ien 133–34 Anghie, A. 180 anti-colonialism 171–72; anti-colonial drive of deconstruction 20–21; Fanon’s conceptualization of anti-colonial liberation 143–46; liberation discourses 122, 147–48, 150; translocal and transnational scope in 170; violence, Fanon’s conceptualization of 139–40, 141, 147, 153n26 Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies (Doty, R.) 158 anti-racist movements, social change and 80–81 Appadurai, Arjun 5, 14, 179, 181, 190, 194 Appiah, Anthony 14, 38, 40n18 Arendt, Hannah 139 Arnaud, Georges 92 Arnaud, Jacqueline 45, 46 Aronson, Ronald 152n18 Arrii, Don Côme 130 The Art of Not Being Governed (Scott, J.C.) 146 Ashley, R. and Walker, R. 40n17 Ashley, Richard 33, 34, 37, 39n1, 39n4 assimilation, French mission civilisatrice and 140–41 Assman, Jan 90 Audin, Maurice 120n38

226

Index

authenticity 3, 4, 37, 43, 47–48, 49, 137, 156–57, 169, 171, 177, 194, 196, 198, 201; cinematic space and 86–116; cultural authenticity 149; fantasy of 14; ideal of 65; in literary narratives, postcolonial hybridity and 162–67; memory and 12, 15–18, 86–116; metamorphosed authenticity 11; politics of 88, 111–16; postcolonial cinematic narrative, authenticity in 87; spectral presences in narratives and photographs 62–82 authors: associated with poststructuralism 21, 22, 25–29; products of colonialism 14–15 Ayoob, M. 141 Azar, Michael 122, 125, 136, 138, 142 Badt, K.L. 100, 115 Baldwin, James 170 Balibar, Étienne 13, 26; diasporic indentifications 177, 182, 191, 201, 202n2, 205; politics of exile 44, 46, 50, 55, 57, 59, 60n4, 60n8; postcolonial hybridity 156, 173n4 Bancel, N. et al. 99–100, 118n21, 140 banlieues (suburban ghettos) 17, 80, 88, 97–98, 103, 110–12, 113–14, 119n32, 119n34, 168, 169, 171, 173–74n11; politics of exile and diaspora in Franco-Maghrebian borderland 41, 43, 53, 54, 61n17, 61n20 Barkawi, T. 97, 118n20 Barkawi, T. and Laffey, M. 5, 97 Barthes, Roland 83n7 La Bataille de Paris (Einaudi, J.-L.) 101 Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo film) 16–17, 83n4, 86, 88, 99, 101, 106, 107–8, 110, 112, 114, 120n37, 120n39; French imperial identity, torture and crisis of 91–97 Baudrillard, Jean 32, 83n7, 85n21 Bauman, Zygmunt 18n7, 60n13 BBC News 191–92, 203n15, 203n16 Beck, Ulrik 18n7 Bédar, Fatima 118n23 Beier, Marshall 40n16, 206 Bell, Duncan 90, 119n28, 119n29 Ben Bella, Ahmed 119n30 Ben Jelloun, Tahar 10, 11, 15, 19n12, 156; colonial difference 151n13, 153n23; diasporic identifications 175, 194, 197, 202n13, 204; politics of exile 42–43, 48–49, 50, 52, 53, 54–56, 58, 61n24

Ben Salama, M. 108 Benhabib, S. 42, 53, 57 Benjamin, Walter 79, 82, 85n23 Berque, Jacques 142 Bhabha, Homi 23, 29, 40n21, 42, 45, 51, 83n5, 158; colonial difference 122, 125, 148, 153n23; postcolonial hybridity 170, 174n14 Bigeard, Colonel Marcel 117–18n12 The Black Jaconins (James, C.L.R.) 144–45 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, F.) 130 Blanchard, P. and Bancel, N. 49, 60n11, 61n19, 61n25, 79, 80–81, 160, 173n8, 193 Blanchard, P. et al. 77, 79, 104, 163, 193 Bleiker, R. and Kay, A. 67, 68–69, 82, 84–85n20 Bleiker, Roland 40n12, 40n16, 62–63, 81 Bogues, A. 148 Bohelay, P. and Daubard, O. 61n21 bomb carriers (porteuses de bombes) 74 Bouamama, S. 173n10 Boubeker, A. and Hajjat, A. 173n5 Bouchareb, Rachid 118n19 Boudjedra, R. 108 Bouhired, Djamila 92 Boumedienne, Colonel Houari 119n30, 153n26 Boupasha, Djamila 117n9 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 182 Bouteldja, Houria 155, 174n13 Bowole, Makomé 97–98 British colonialism 7, 184 Brunette, Peter 100, 103, 115 Bugeaud, Marshall 111 Butalia, Urvashi 18n9 The Butts (Chraïbi, D.) 58 Cabral, Amilcar 138, 170 Caché (Michael Haneke film) 16–17, 86, 87, 88, 97, 100–101, 102, 103, 106, 109, 110, 115–16 Camille Claudel (Bruno Nuytten film) 104 Campbell, David 32, 33, 41, 62–63, 67–68, 81, 84–85n20 Camus, Albert 4, 9, 12, 14, 15, 84n18, 114, 116, 188, 200, 204; Algerian War, position on 122, 123–24, 124–43; anonymity of Algerians in writing of 136; assimilation, French mission civilisatrice and 140–41; birth and

Index early life 125–26, 152n21; colonial conquest, attitude towards 134–35; colonial difference, postcolonial promise and 143, 145, 150, 151n5, 153n23, 154n33; conciliatory approach of 123; critiques of excesses of colonialism 135–36; decolonial thought and action, limitations of 124–25; differentiated visions of Algeria in writings of 124; exile, dominance of trope in works of 126–27; exile (and exilic identification) 123–24; famine in Kabylie, documentation of 131, 151n15; irreconcilable position on Algerian War 134–43; Lauriol Plan, public support for 152n18; liberal humanism of, disconnect between ethical positioning of narratives and 141–42; liberal humanist subtext in ‘L’Hôte’ 133–34; pied noir vision of Algeria 126, 135, 152n21; political disenfranchisement of ‘natives’ 131; politics in exile 121–22, 130–31, 132; stance on colonialism 9, 12, 134–43; subjectivity-in-exile of 123–24; Third Worldism, criticism of 143; trope of exile dominant in imaginative space of works 126–27; wartime experiences 129, 135 Le Canard Enchaîné 105, 119n26 capitalism 3, 42, 64, 142, 143, 188–89, 190, 191, 192; global capitalism 176, 189, 191, 200, 201–2n1, 202n10; neoliberal capitalism 202n10 Carroll, David 122, 124, 125–26, 127, 128–29, 132–33, 136, 137, 138, 141, 152n18 Castells, Manuel 18n7 Çelik, Zeynep 109 Césaire, Aimée 19n12, 143–44, 170 Ceyhan, A. and Tsoukala, A. 41 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 149–50, 151n8, 153n30, 178 Chaulet-Achour, Christiane 14 Che Guevara 170 Cheah, P. and Guerlac, S. 40n13 Cheah Pheng 59n2 Chen Kuan-Hsing 44 Chéreau, Patrice 104 Cherki, Alice 140 Chirac, Jacques 173n6 Chow, Rey 3, 4, 20–31, 22, 23, 27, 32, 34, 36, 38; cinematic memory 115–16;

227

diasporic identifications 178, 183–84, 188, 190, 193; narratives, photographic and literary 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 75, 82, 83n1, 83n9; postcolonial hybridity 157, 164, 166, 167, 170–71 Chowdhry, G. and Nair, S. 205 Chraïbi, Driss 58 Christiansen, F. and Hedetoft, U. 57 Chroniques algériennes 1939–1958 (Actuelles III) 134 Cieutat, Michel 101 cinematic engagement with Algerian War 86, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 102, 105, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116n3, 117n5, 117n6, 117n8, 117n9, 118n14, 118n16, 119n34 Cinematic Geopolitics (Shapiro, M.) 88 citizenship and citizenship studies 41–42; see also flexible citizenship Cixous, Hélène 4, 14, 15, 19n15, 113, 120n36, 121, 185, 186, 200, 204; post-structuralism, postcolonial in IR theory and 21, 22, 25–27, 28–29, 34, 35, 39n10 Claudel, Camille 166 Clifford, James 65, 83n2, 85n21; diasporic identifications 175, 184, 187, 194–95, 196, 197–98, 200, 203n17 Cockburn, C. 174n15 Cocks, Joan 147 Code de Nationalité 110–11 Cole, Joshua 93 collective memory 90, 194 colonial Algeria 8, 12, 19n15, 20–21, 31, 121–24, 125–26, 127, 129, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 147, 152n21 colonial conquest, Camus’ attitude towards 134–35 colonial desire and politics of Algerian intractability 25–29 colonial difference: decolonial promise and 143–50; decolonial thought, action and 124–25, 128, 132, 137, 139, 150; Fanon’s articulation of 135; problem for IR 177–86 colonial disillusion, reminders of 160 The Colonial Harem (Alloula, M.) 63, 65–66, 73, 83n6 colonial memory 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 53, 86–87, 88, 92, 106, 109, 111, 114–15, 162–63, 168, 170, 173n5, 182, 191, 199–200 Colonial Myths (Haddour, A.) 8–9, 37

228

Index

colonial occupation, legacy and 200 colonial past in the postcolonial present, location of new Europe and 106–11 colonial societies, fragmented character of 148 colonial violence 3, 9–10, 11, 13, 16, 47, 51, 71, 200, 205; colonial difference, decolonial thought, action and 124–25, 128, 132, 137, 139, 150; Franco-Maghrebian borderland as cinematic space 87, 93, 102, 114; poststructuralism and postcolonialism in IR theory 21, 22, 28; postcolonial hybridity 156 colonialism 18n8, 53, 58, 66, 103, 111, 122, 124, 126, 131, 132, 133, 152n17, 182, 199, 202n10; anti-colonialism 171–72; authors, products of 14–15; British colonialism 7, 184; Camus’ stance on 9, 12, 134–43; collective approaches to 31; decolonization and 6–7; economic colonialism 182; Fanon’s stance on 134–43, 157–58; French colonialism 6, 15, 24, 29, 47, 94, 113, 122, 151n15, 160, 161, 167, 173n6, 173n7, 182, 185, 192; human rights and colonialism in French context, paradoxical relationship between 160; human rights and French colonialism, paradoxical relationship between 160; immigration policies, continuity with 168, 171; inter-national relations and 2–3; internal colonialism 184; legacies of 34, 87–88, 95, 104–7, 116, 155–56, 159, 162, 163–64, 168, 183, 192, 193, 196, 197, 206; hybridities engendered under 49; neo-colonialism 197; personal experiences of 4, 12, 21, 23, 25–29, 134–43, 165; postcolonialism and 6–7; research in France on 9–10; Western colonialism 24–25 Colonna, Fanny 95, 141 colons, portrayal of mythology of 137–38 Connolly, W.E. 202n7 Conscripts of Modernity (Scott, D.) 144 Constantinou, C. 40n12 Cooper, F. 118n13 Crawford, N.C. 202n7 ‘The Criminal Impulsivity of the Indigenous Algerian’ (Arrii, D.C.) 130 Critchley, S. 24 critical theory, focus of 7 Culture and Imperialism (Said, E.) 12–13, 50, 51

Les damnés de la terre (Cherki, A.) 140 Darby, Phillip 1, 10, 20, 64 Das, V. et al. 140 Dayan, Colin 138 de Beauvoir, Simone 117n9 de Broca, Philippe 104 de Certeau, Michel 40n15 de-humanization, violence and 139–40 de Villepin, Dominique 119n34 Debré, Jean-Louis 173–74n11 decolonial thought and action 148–49; limitations of 124–25, 149–50 decolonization 6–7, 13, 24, 44, 86, 87, 88, 111, 123, 138, 140, 143–44, 147, 163, 167; Algerian decolonization 30, 105–6; cultural decolonization 187; decolonization warfare 108; formal decolonization 182; French decolonization 159; intellectual decolonization 23, 185–86, 206; language and paradox of 183; modernist decolonization 149–50; modernization processes and 107 Delacroix, Eugène 72–73, 74 ‘departed sisters’ (soeurs disparues) 72 Der Derian, J. 30 Der Derian, J. and Shapiro, M. 40n17 Derrida, J. and Dufourmantelle, A. 202n13 Derrida, Jacques 4, 6, 9, 14, 15, 19n15, 69–70, 72, 113, 121, 128, 185, 186, 200, 202n13, 204; post-structuralism, postcolonial in IR theory and 21, 22, 23, 25–27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37–38, 39n5 Devi, Mahasweta 184 diasporic intellectuals 3, 15, 16, 42–43, 44, 48–49, 194, 195, 205; engagement with ‘natives’ 75–76; literary narratives of 11–12, 13–14; Others and 52–59; see also politics of exile and diaspora in Franco-Maghrebian borderland Dib, Mohammed 19n13 Dien Bien Phu 89, 94, 95, 96, 111, 117n5, 170 Dikeç, Mustafa 98, 119n32 Dine, P. 15, 86, 90, 91, 108, 117n5, 117n6 Dirlik, Arif 2, 7, 8, 11, 18n1, 39n2, 40n21, 43, 51, 176, 178–79 The Disappearance of the French Language (Djebar, A.) 46–48 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire, A.) 19n12

Index displacement 21, 29, 80, 123, 125, 177, 181, 187, 195, 202n4; experiences of 189–90, 203n17; politics of exile and experiences of 42–43, 50, 59 Djebar, Assia 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19n12, 117n4, 151n10, 163, 204; diasporic identifications 175, 187, 191, 194, 196, 198; narratives, photographic and literary 62, 63–64, 70–75, 82, 83n4, 83n11, 84n14; perspective on exile (and exilic identification) 47–48; politics of exile 42, 44, 45, 46–48, 50, 60n14 Doty, Roxanne 22, 32, 33, 34, 37, 41, 42, 64, 105, 180–81, 200; postcolonial hybridity 155–56, 158–59, 160–61, 172 Drif, Zohra 108–9 Durmelat, S. 89, 93, 117n9 Dussel, Enrique 146 Dyer, Richard 165–66 École d’Alger 8, 9, 126, 128, 132, 151n5 economic colonialism 182 Edkins, Jenny 11, 22, 31, 32, 33, 35–37, 40n20, 47, 131; cinematic memory 86, 89, 91, 96, 97; narratives, photographic and literary 62–63, 68, 73, 76, 81, 82 Einaudi, Jean-Luc 101, 118n23 Enloe, Cynthia 204–5 Escobar, A. 121 Étoile nord-africaine 120n38 L’Étranger (Camus, A.) 124, 127 Eurocentrism of IR, critique of 4–5 European Orientalist painting 73–74, 84n13, 164–65 L’Exile et le Royaume (Camus, A.) 124 exilé(e) – exil(and exilic identification) 1, 3, 6, 12–13, 17, 25, 39, 59, 62; authoritative voice of 63; Camus and Fanon as 123–24; Djebar’s perspective on 47–48; flexible citizenship and 177, 186–90, 200; Frenchness, privileged inclusion within 190; hybridity, differentiated experiences of 44, 51–52; immigré and, asymmetrical and unequal claims to citizenship and political subjectivity 195, 200–201; immigré and, Ben Jelloun’s poignant distinction between 61n24; immigré and, exilé ambiguities and 194–95; immigré and, fragile and troubled connection between 18n10, 53–54, 64, 197–98; immigré and, language and 58; immigré and, political categories of 58; immigré and, relative social

229

positionings of 42–43, 49–50, 51, 59, 175–76, 178, 188; immigré and, world visions and voices of 53; immigré aspiration to status of 56, 162, 166; immigré lives, credibility of accounts by exilés 167, 200–201; migration and, narratives of 180–81, 189, 195, 199; ‘model émigré’ 56–57; moralism and 198; paradox of diasporic intellectual 194; politics in exile, between strangeness and alienation 125–34; politics of exile and diaspora in Franco-Maghrebian borderland 41–59; Said’s reflections on 50–51, 195, 203n17; transnational mourning, memory and diasporic communion 57–58; transnationalism and diaspora, lures for 196–201; trope of exile dominant in imaginative space of Camus’s works 126–27 exotic value of the women’s bodies 80 ‘Exposed Singularity’ (Edkins, J.) 31, 35, 68 L’Express 92 Ezra, E. 97 Fabian, Johannes 85n21 false images 68 famine in Kabylie, documentation of 131, 151n15 Fanon, Frantz 4, 5, 9, 12, 13, 14, 19n12, 105, 106, 116, 170; alienation from metropolitan ideals 129–30; anticolonial liberation, conceptualization of 143–46; anti-colonial violence, conceptualization of 139–40, 141, 147, 153n26; birth and early life 129; colonial difference, articulation of 135; colonial difference, decolonial promise and 121–22, 141, 147, 151n4, 151n7, 153–54n31; colonial societies, fragmented character of 148; colons, portrayal of mythology of the 137–38; decolonial impulse, revelation of 148–49; decoloniality, limits of vision of 149–50; de-humanization, on violence and 139–40; decolonial thought and action, limitations of 124–25; differentiated visions of Algeria in writings of 124; emancipation from oppressive logic of colonialism, idea of liberation as 157–58; exile (and exilic identification) 123–24; Independence War in Algeria,

230

Index

position on 122, 123–24, 124–43; irreconcilable position on Algerian War 134–43; land, issue of access to 132; Manichean logic and French colonial rule in Algeria 138; North African migrants, first encounters with 130; political solidarity in anticolonial action, call for 150; radical dimension of theory of liberation 143; radical humanism embedded in historical anti-colonial struggle 142–43; sovereign nation-state, ambivalence towards 148; stance on colonialism 134–43, 157–58; subjectivity-in-exile of 123–24; violent resistance, endorsement of 123, 147; vision of liberation 138, 140, 142–43, 148–49; wartime experiences 129 Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade (Djebar, A.) 64, 70–71, 72, 73–74, 83n4, 117n4, 151n10, 191, 198 fantasies, re-performance of 73–74 Farrington, Constance 151n7, 153n27 Favereau, Éric 76–77, 78, 81 feminine exclusion, Djebar’s poetic articulation of 74, 82 Femmes d’Afrique du Nord. Cartes Postales (Sebbar, L., Taraud, C. and Belorgey, J.-M.) 70, 76, 77–78, 165, 167, 191 Femmes d’Alger 64, 72–74 Feraoun, Mouloud 136, 151n5 Ferrié, J.-N. and Boëtsch, G. 83n6 fetishism 66–67, 79 The Fiction of Imperialism (Darby, P.) 1 Fierke, Karin 106–7 The First Man (Camus, A.) 124, 136–37, 152n21 flexible citizenship: exile (and exilic identification) and 177, 186–90, 200; ironies of 186–90; migrant (and migrant identity) and 177, 186–90, 200; transnationalism and 175–76, 178–79 Flexible Citizenship (Ong, A.) 180, 193 FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) 9–10, 44, 84n18, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 101, 107, 116n3, 117–18n12, 117n9, 118n14, 119n26, 135–36, 138, 148, 152n18, 153n26 Foucault, Michel 33, 40n19, 46, 85n21, 144, 145, 171; colonial history, approach to 122; knowledge, vision of 121

France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (Rosello, M.) 162–63 France-Observateur 92 Franco-Maghrebian borderland as cinematic space 86–116; authenticity, politics of 88, 111–16; Cinematic Geopolitics (Shapiro, M.) 88; Code de Nationalité 110–11; colonial past in the postcolonial present, location of new Europe and 106–11; colonial violence 87, 93, 102, 114; image as catharsis for trauma 90–91; memory, mutual constitution of 86; memory, tropes of 87–88, 89–106; panEuropean process for common European identity 109; post-Cold War European failure to protect Muslim communities 109; postcolonial cinematic narrative, authenticity in 87; Silencing the Past (RolphTrouillot, M.) 114; trauma within, inhabiting colonial trauma in postcolonial present 97–106, 115; traumatic memory, Algeria and Vietnam 90; traumatic memory, memorialization and 96–97; see also Battle of Algiers; Caché; La Haine Franco-Maghrebian encounter 2–3, 7–8, 9, 14, 16, 51, 192, 196, 201–2n1, 205; cinematic reflections on 87, 101; colonial difference and 189, 199; diasporan cultures 3; diasporic intellectuals, formations of 13–14, 194; hybridity haunting and performing in 44; image, text and ‘native’ within 12; intellectuals 3, 12–15; language in 58, 83n11; literary narratives in 8–12, 62–64; margins and silences, exploration of 205; memory suppression and neutralization of responsibility in 10; migration flows 189, 191, 205; poststructuralism, roots in violence of 24–25; sanctification of colonial defilement of the ‘native,’ strategies for 3, 4, 16, 22, 32, 82, 85n26, 190, 198; socio-political context of 201; translocal relationships and 176–77; transnational relationships and 180–81 French Algeria 28, 55, 89, 92, 94–95, 118n16, 151n10 French colonialism 6, 15, 24, 29, 47, 94, 113, 122, 151n15, 160, 161, 167, 173n6, 173n7, 182, 185, 192

Index French mission civilisatrice 140 French Resistance against Nazis 89, 93–94, 95, 117n5, 118n14, 129, 135, 142 Frenchness, privileged inclusion within 190 Gafaïti, Hafid 49, 52, 60n11, 156, 159, 177, 187, 191, 193, 194–95 Galeano, Eduardo 84–85n20 Gandhi, Mohandas K. (‘Mahatma’) 153n26 Garanger, Marc 84n15 Garmandi, Salah 46 Gates Jr., Henry Louis 138, 150n2 Gaye, Amadou 76–77 Geertz, Clifford 10 gender: class, race and, ‘triangulation’ between 79; gendered ‘native’ 70–76 Génération Métisse (Sebbar, L.) 166, 167; postcolonial cool and 64, 76–82 George, Jim 5, 32, 33, 40n14, 40n17, 64 Gergen, Kenneth 91 Geromini, Charles 138 Gibson, N.C. 125, 152n21, 153n26 global connections 11 Globalization and War (Barkawi, T.) 118n20 globalization of memory 119n29 Golomb, Jacob 133, 151n11 Gordon, Lewis 122, 135 Gottesman, Eric 69 Of Grammatology (Derrida, J.) 30–31 Gramsci, Antonio 139 The Grapes of Despair (Ben Jelloun, T.) 54–56 Griff, Jeanette 118n23 Gross, J. 182 Grovogui, S.N. 40n16 Gruffydd Jones, Branwen 6, 40n21, 179 Guha, Ranajit 153n22 Ha, Marie-Paule 44, 51, 59n2, 195–96 Haddour, Azzedine 4, 8–9, 20, 37, 40n22; colonial difference 126, 127, 128–29, 132, 141, 151n5 Hadj, Messali 120n38 La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz film) 16–17, 86, 87, 88, 97, 98–99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109–10, 111, 112, 113–14, 116n1 Hajjat, Abdellali 169, 173n7, 173n10 Halimi, Gisèle 117n9

231

Hall, Stuart 13, 37, 43, 44, 49, 51, 166, 184; colonial difference 144, 145, 147, 148; narratives, photographic and literary 66–67, 79, 83n7, 85n21 Hamilton, P. 83n8 Haneke, Michael 16–17, 86, 87, 97, 100–101, 102, 112, 115–16 Hargreaves, Alec 86, 168, 173n5 ‘hauntology,’ practice of 70, 72 Hedetoft, U. and Hjort, M. 57 Hedetoft, Ulf 55, 59, 60n13 Held, D. et al. 18n7 Hemery, D. et al. 173n5 Henley, J. 61n20, 119n34 Hiddleston, J. 31, 39n5 Himmler, Heinrich 117n11 historicized memory 82 Ho Chi Minh 170 Hobbes, Thomas 5 Hoffman, S. 33, 202n5 L’Homme Révolté (Camus, A.) 142, 153n24 Honig, Bonnie 56–58, 59 Horne, Alistair 92, 117n4, 117n5, 118n14, 118n16, 152n17, 152n18 The Horseman on the Roof (Jean-Paul Rappeneau film) 104 Hospitalité française (Ben Jelloun, T.) 52, 55 ‘The Host’ (Camus, A.) 124, 130–31 Hozic, Aida 19n16, 117n7 human rights 158; French colonialism, paradoxical relationship between 160 L’Humanité 92 Hutcheon, Linda 20, 23, 25, 128, 159 Huysmans, J. 41 hybridity 44, 51–52; as denial of belonging 80; differentiated experiences of 44, 51–52; fetishization of 79; hybridities engendered under colonialism 49; postmodern hybridity 54, 157; transnational citizenship, hybridity and 48–52; see also postcolonial hybridity Hyndman, J. 42 hyper-memory 9, 16, 47, 89, 108 Ighilahriz, Louisette 117n9 immigration policies 168, 171 immigré(e) – migrant (and migrant identity) 3, 11–12, 13, 62, 64, 103, 120n35; co-production of 190; colonial disillusion, reminders of 160; colonial occupation, legacy and 200;

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contrapuntally lived experience of 195–96; as defiled ‘native’ 194–95; exilé and, asymmetrical and unequal claims to citizenship and political subjectivity 195, 200–201; exilé and, Ben Jelloun’s poignant distinction between 61n24; exilé and, exilé ambiguities and 194–95; exilé and, fragile and troubled connection between 18n10, 53–54, 64, 197–98; exilé and, language and 58; exilé and, political categories of 58; exilé and, relative social positionings of 42–43, 49–50, 51, 59, 175–76, 178, 188; exilé and, world visions and voices of 53; flexible citizenship and 177, 186–90, 200; imprisonment of 169; ‘indifferent defiled image’ 178; inhospitable conditions of the ‘homeland,’ driver for 189; Maghrébins, immigrés and beurs, postcolonial strangers 162–72; as metamorphosis of indigène 199–200; migrant aspiration to status of exilé 56, 162, 166; progressive constructions of identity and 167; self, displacement and 195; stereotype of 196–97; struggles and situations in postcolonial worlds 169–70 Imperial Encounters (Doty, R.) 156 imperialism 1, 3, 6, 28, 64, 138, 155–56, 191; continuities of 204; inter-national relations and 2–3; national imperialism 46; new imperialisms 196; rigidities of 50–51 ‘The Importance of Being Ironic’ (Krishna, S.) 1 Inayatullah, N. and Blaney, D. 2, 202n7, 206 Independence, Algerian War of 2–3, 4, 9, 12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 25–26, 27–28, 29–30, 37, 47, 55, 74, 83n4, 84n15, 84n18, 120n38, 152n17, 165, 182, 185, 191, 192 Indigènes (Rachid Bouchareb film) 118n19 De Indis (Vitoria, F. de) 180 intellectual mission of liberation 1, 12–13, 50–51 inter-national relations 2–3 inter-state relations 204 internal colonialism 184 International Relations (IR): analytical economy of, flawed presumption in 204–5; colonial difference, problem for 177–86; colonial legacy in IR

today 206; decolonization of 6; Eurocentrism of, critique of 4–5; literary productions, political dimensions and effects in 10–11; literary texts and alternative understanding of 204; migration in 158–62; moral politics of comparison 181–86; politics of encounters 4–8; post-structuralism and postcolonialism in theory of 20–39; self-referential world of 2; situated and translocal web 204; theory of 1; transgressive, translocal and translational possibilities in 206; translocal webs of relations 4–8; visuality in 62–63, 68–69, 81–82; see also post-structuralism and postcolonialism in IR theory Ireland, S. 182 Isaac, J.C. 136, 140, 141 Isin, E.F. and Wood, K.P. 47, 53 Isin, E.F. et al. 53 Jabri, V. 40n12 James, C.L.R. 144–45 Jay, Martin 85n21 Jeanson, Francis 95, 118n14, 118n17 Kant, Immanuel 5 Kassovitz, Mathieu 16–17, 86, 97, 103, 105, 110, 111, 112–13, 115, 116, 120n35 Kassovitz, Peter 120n35 Kawtari, Tarik 169, 173n10 Kay, Amy 62–63 Keller, Richard 125, 130, 136, 140 Kemp, A. 173–74n11 Kerchouche, D. 120n38 Khanna, Ranjana 16, 86, 102, 114, 115 Khatibi, Abdelkabir 19n13, 186–87 Khiari, Sadri 168, 174n13 Kipfer, Stefan 156, 157, 159, 168, 174n13 Kohn, M. and McBride, K. 122, 138, 139, 147, 148, 157 Krishna, Sankaran 1, 33, 40n16, 122–23 Kristeva, Julia 32, 57, 202n13 LaCapra, Dominick 87–88, 106 Lacoste, Y. 173n5 land, issue of access to 132 language: postcolonial politics of 43, 44–48; subverting imperial language from within 26–27; as tool for liberation 45, 183; as tool of resistance against liberation 43 Lapeyronnie, Didier 61n17, 106, 119n32

Index Laremont, R.R. 153n26 Laroui, Abdallah 202n12 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 179–80, 202n7 Lauriol Plan 152n18 Lauriol, Marc 152n18 Lazreg, Marnia 49, 67, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 116, 117n5, 117n9, 120n37 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 105, 119n26 Lee, Spike 110, 113 Leenhardt, Jacques 116 legacies of colonialism 34, 87–88, 95, 104–7, 116, 155–56, 159, 162, 163–64, 168, 183, 192, 193, 196, 197, 206 legitimacy of liberation 47 LeSueur, James 84n18, 92–93, 125–26, 136, 139, 141, 147, 153n26 Lewis, Aidan 203n15 Liauzu, Claude 173n6 liberal humanism 133–34, 141–42 liberation 116; Algeria’s liberation and emancipation 21, 29; anti-colonial liberation discourses 122, 147–48, 150; authoritarian liberation 47, 108; class fractures in struggle for 106; emancipation from oppressive logic of colonialism, Fanon’s idea of liberation as 157–58; Fanon’s vision of 138, 140, 142–43, 148–49; from French mission civilisatrice 140; intellectual mission of 1, 12–13, 50–51; language as tool for 45, 183; language as tool of resistance against 43; legitimacy of 47; Muslim women, exhortations towards liberation of 74–75; ‘national liberation state’ 149; political objective of 44; politics of 157; from ‘regime of truth’ of colonial enterprise 138; symbols of 74 Libération 105 Lin, Maya Ling 96–97 Lionnet, F. and Shih, S.M. 104 Lippmann, Walter 161 Lisle, D. 40n12 literary productions: alternative understanding of IR and 204; colonial legacies and memory in FrancoMaghrebian context 190–96; political dimensions and effects in IR 10–11 Locke, John 5 Loomba, Ania 47, 51, 184 Lorde, Audre 121, 150n1 Loshitzky, Yosefa 86, 87, 88, 97, 103, 104, 109, 110, 112, 116n1, 119n34 Louis XIV 117n11 Löytömäky, S. 105

233

Luxemburg, Rosa 166 Lyotard, Jean-François 4, 121, 127, 146–47, 185, 186, 188; poststructuralism, postcolonialism in IR theory and 21, 22, 23, 25–26, 27–28, 29, 32, 35, 39–40n11, 39n8 McClintock, Anne 39n2, 60n12, 79, 80, 84n17, 118n21, 183 Macey, David 40n22, 122, 128, 129, 130, 138, 140, 147, 148, 150n2, 151n4, 153–54n31, 153n26 Machiavelli, Niccolò 5 McNevin, A. 53 Maghraoui, Driss 52, 156, 159 Maghreb: diaspora of, literary narratives of 11–12; difference that cannot be told 186–96; flexible citizenship, ironies of 186–90; intertwined histories in 6; literature, colonial legacies and memory in Franco-Maghrebian context 190–96; Maghrebian cultures 7; Maghrébins, immigrés and beurs, postcolonial strangers 162–72; see also Franco-Maghrebian encounter Malcolm X 170 Mammeri, Mouloud 151n5 Mandaville, P. 2, 18n3 Mandouze, André 95, 118n15 Manichean logic, French colonial rule in Algeria and 138 Manzo, Kate 51 Marley, Bob 109, 110 Massu, General Jacques Émile 91, 117n9, 118–18n12 Mato, D. 82 Mbembe, Achille 93, 138–39 Mellen, J. 95, 101–2, 117–18n12 Memmi, Albert 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19n12, 160, 170, 204; colonial difference 129, 136, 138, 140, 151n16, 153n23; diasporic identifications 175, 183, 185, 194, 195, 197, 203n19; politics of exile 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53–54, 58, 60n11, 61n18, 84n17, 113 memory 2, 13, 26, 47, 53, 59, 70, 177, 190, 201; authenticity and 12, 15–18, 86–116; collective memory 90, 194; colonial legacies and memory in Franco-Maghrebian context 190–96, 201–2n1; colonial memory 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 53, 86–87, 88, 92, 106, 109, 111, 114–15, 162–63, 168, 170,

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173n5, 182, 191, 199–200; globalization of 119n29; historicized memory 82; hyper-memory 9, 16, 47, 89, 108; mutual constitution of 86; national memory 86, 163; nomadic memory (mémoire nomade) 71; persistence of 185, 186; suppression of 10, 38; transnational mourning, memory and diasporic communion 57–58; traumatic memory 17, 87–88, 89–90, 91, 97, 106, 109; tropes of 87–88, 89–106 Mernissi, Fatima 73, 74, 164 Mes Algéries en France (Sebbar, L.) 167 Meskell, Lynn 119n28 Mignolo, Walter D. 7, 11, 18n6, 19n13, 123, 143, 144, 146, 151n3, 206; diasporic identifications 175, 176, 177–78, 179–80, 185, 186, 187, 188, 202n4, 202n8, 202n11 migrants: migrant lives, credibility of accounts by exiles 167, 200–201; see also immigré(e) – migrant (and migrant identity) migration: exile and, narratives of 180–81, 189, 195, 199; in International Relations (IR) 158–62; North African migrants, Fanon’s first encounters with 130; romanticization of 78; securitization and 41; social categorization of immigrants 42–43; statecraft as analytical lense for politics of 157; translocal links and migrant communities 156 MIR (Mouvement des Indigènes de la République) 157, 167–68, 169, 170–72, 173n9, 174n13, 174n14 misérabiliste imagery 77–78 Mitchell, W.J.T. 68 Mittelman, J.H. and Pasha, M. 153n28 mobility practices 43–44, 48–52 ‘model émigré’ 56–57 Le Monde 117n9, 191–92, 203n15 Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida, J.) 26, 69–70, 186 Montaigne, Michel de 117n11 Montesquieu, Charles Louis, Baron de la Brède et de 117n11 moralism: exile and 198; moral politics of comparison 181–86 Morgenthau, Hans Joachim 10 Morrissey, L. 39n5 Muppidi, H. 175 Muslim women, exhortations towards liberation of 74–75

Naficy, Hamid 4, 17, 112, 199 ‘The Name of Algeria’ (Lyotard, J.-F.) 27–28 Nancy, Jean Luc 35, 36 Nandy, Ashis 96, 177 narratives, photographic and literary 62–82; Alloula’s critique of colonial photography 63, 65–66, 71, 81; antiracist movements, social change and 80–81; authenticity, ideal of 65; bomb carriers (porteuses de bombes) 74; colonial harem, native woman in 64–69; defiled image of ‘native’ 71–72; ‘departed sisters’ (soeurs disparues) 72; diasporic intellectuals’ engagement with ‘natives’ 75; exotic value of the women’s bodies 80; false images 68; fantasies, re-performance of 73–74; feminine exclusion, Djebar’s poetic articulation of 74, 82; Femmes d’Alger 64, 72–74; fetishism 66–67, 79; gender, class and race, ‘triangulation’ between 79; gendered ‘native’ 70–76; Génération métisse, postcolonial cool and 64, 76–82; ‘hauntology,’ practice of 70, 72; hybridity, fetishization of 79; hybridity as denial of belonging 80; migration, romanticization of 78; misérabiliste imagery 77–78; racialization, racial hierarchies and 79–80; reality-woman (réalité-femme) 71; representation of HIV/AIDS in Africa 68; ‘savage immigrations’ (immigrations sauvages) 77; Sebbar’s Femmes d’Afrique du Nord 76, 77–78; spectral presence of ‘native’ in 69–82; spectrality, notion of 69–70; stereotyping 67–68; Third World, representation of 68–69, 75–76; triangulation of text, image and ‘native’ 63–64; visual performance of social field 67–68; visuality in International Relations (IR) 62–63; visuality in IR, perception of ‘native’ and 81–82; visuality in IR, preoccupation of critical analyses on 68–69; Women of Islam 74–75 nation-state 2–3, 7, 18n2, 49, 86, 94, 96, 143, 155–56; diasporic identifications and 175, 176, 178–79, 180, 187, 191, 199; epiphenomena of nation-state or global capitalism 200; restructuring of 201–2n1; sovereign nation-state, Fanon’s ambivalence towards 148

Index ‘On National Culture’ (Fanon, F.) 150 national imperialism 46 ‘national liberation state’ 149 national memory 86, 163 Nations Without Nationalism (Kristeva, J.) 57 Nayak, M. and Selbin, E. 11–12 neo-colonialism 197 Neoliberalism as Exception (Ong, A.) 60n13, 183 Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o 149–50, 153–54n31 Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive) 173–74n11 Nivat, Anne 117n9 Noiriel, Gérard 52–53, 168, 173n5 nomadic memory (mémoire nomade) 71 Nora, Pierre 82, 191 Nuytten, Bruno 104 Nyers, P. 40n16, 41 Nyers, P. and Rygiel, K. 41 OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète) 95, 118n16, 118n17 O’Brien, Susie 60n15 Obuchowski, Chester 92, 117n11 On Guard (Philippe de Broca film) 104 Ong, Aihwa 14, 42, 52, 59, 60n13; diasporic identifications 175–76, 177, 180, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 187, 188–90, 190–91, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198–99, 200, 202n9, 202n10 Orford, A. 42, 69, 141 Orientalism (Said, E.) 1 Orientalist painting 73–74, 84n13, 164–65 Oscherwitz, Dayna 86, 98, 103–4 Osterweil, A. 100, 103, 109 Other: idealization of ‘native’ as 21–22; Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida, J.) 26, 69–70, 186; self-referentiality and ever elusive ‘Other’ 29–32 Ouzegane, Amar 136 pan-European process for common European identity 109 Papon, Maurice 101, 109, 118n23 paradox of diasporic intellectual 194 Parry, Benita 139, 143–44, 148, 150, 154n32 Pasha, Mustapha 172 Pasqua, Charles 110 Performative Encounters: France and the Maghreb (Rosello, M.) 69–70 Persaud, R.B. 18n4, 180

235

persistence of memory 185, 186 personal experiences of colonialism 4, 12, 21, 23, 25–29, 134–43, 165 Philcox, Richard 151n7, 153n27 Picasso, Pablo 74, 117n9 pied noir vision of Algeria 126, 135, 152n21 politics: of colonial memory, cinematic perspectives 12, 86–116; disenfranchisement of ‘natives’ 131; of encounters 1–18; of encounters, IR and 4–8; of ethics of post-structuralism 11–12, 20–39, 40n21; as everyday-ness 204; in exile, between strangeness and alienation 125–34; of liberation 157; liberation, political objective of 44; political systems, Enloe’s approach to 204–5; solidarity in anti-colonial action, Fanon’s call for 150; translocal webs of relations 4–8 politics of exile and diaspora in FrancoMaghrebian borderland: banlieues (suburban ghettos) 41, 43, 53, 54, 61n17, 61n20; citizenship and citizenship studies 41–42; diasporic intellectual, Others and 52–59; displacement, experiences of 42–43, 50, 59; exilé(e) – exile (and exilic identification) 41–59; language, postcolonial politics of 43, 44–48; migration and securitization 41; mobility practices 43–44, 48–52; social categorization of immigrants 42–43; transnational citizenship 44, 48–52; unified moralism 42 Pontecorvo, Gillo 16–17, 83n4, 86, 87, 91, 92, 94, 95–96, 99, 101–2, 105–6, 108, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116n1, 119n30, 120n36, 120n38, 120n39 Portrait of the Decolonized (Memmi, A.) 16 post-structuralism 2–3, 4, 5, 18n6, 121, 128, 155, 174n14, 185; politics of ethics of 11–12, 20–39, 40n21 post-structuralism and postcolonialism s in IR theory 20–39; Algerian intractability and colonial desire 27–29; anti-colonial drive of deconstruction 20–21; authors associated with poststructuralism 21, 22, 25–29; colonial desire and politics of Algerian intractability 25–29; colonial violence 21, 22, 28; deconstructive and postcolonial politics in IR 20–21,

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32–35; idealization of ‘native’ as the other 21–22; post-structuralism’s problematic politics of difference 21–22; postcolonial intractability in International Relations 35–39; self-referentiality and ever elusive ‘Other’ 29–32; subverting imperial language from within 26–27; theoretical miscegenation, associating post-structuralism and postcoloniality in IR 29–39; Young’s White Mythologies and Postcolonialism – An Historical Introduction 23–25 postcolonial Algeria 47, 74, 114, 147, 153n26 postcolonial anti-colonialism 168 postcolonial cinematic narrative, authenticity in 87 postcolonial hybridity 155–72; activism, postcolonialism and decolonial desire 167–72; authenticity in literary narratives and 162–67; colonial violence 156; Maghrébins, immigrés and beurs, postcolonial strangers 162–72; migrant communities and translocal links 156; migration, statecraft as analytical lenses for politics of 157; migration in International Relations (IR) 158–62; Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, yeux verts (Sebbar, L.) 156–57, 164–67, 169, 171, 172 postcolonial intractability in International Relations (IR) 35–39 postcolonial violence 3, 10, 15, 16, 86–87, 101, 116, 121–22, 123, 144, 146–47 postcolonialism, colonialism and 6–7 postmodernism 18n6, 30, 32–33, 36, 38, 115, 121–22, 128, 144, 146 postmodernity 7, 17, 24–25, 34, 40n21, 49, 155; postmodern hybridity 54, 157; postmodern nomadism 166–67; postmodern open-endedness 20; postmodern selfhood 116 The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau, M.) 40n15 Prashad, Vijay 110, 148, 149, 153n26, 153n28 Queen Margot (Patrice Chéreau film) 104 La Question (Alleg, H.) 92–93 Quijano, Anibal 143 Quillot, Roger 142

Rabemananjara, Jacques 153–54n31 racialization, racial hierarchies and 79–80 radical humanism 142–43 Rao, Rahul 122, 148, 149, 150, 171–72 Rappeneau, Jean-Paul 104 Ray, L. 91 Reagan, Ronald (and administration of) 7 reality-woman (réalité-femme) 71 ‘Reflections on Exile’ (Said, E.) 50 research: in France on colonialism 9–10; research imagination 5 resistance literature (littérature de combat) 8–9 Riad, Slim 102 Roberts, Hugh 95, 114, 117–18n12, 119n30 Robertson, R. 18n7 Robine, Jérémy 168–69, 171, 174n13 Roblès, Emmanuel 151n5 Rolph-Trouillot, Michel 190 Rose, Sven Erik 97, 112, 113, 116n1 Rosello, Mireille 7, 69–70, 82, 83n11, 97, 101; diasporic identifications 187, 191, 193, 196, 197, 201; postcolonial hybridity 161, 162–63, 164, 165, 166 Rosenau, James 202n3 Ross, Kristin 86, 88, 91, 98, 107, 108, 115, 159 Rouyer, Philippe 101 Said, Edward 1, 5, 12–13, 28, 39n7, 78, 120n39, 170, 172, 203n17, 203n18; colonial difference 122, 123, 138, 142; reflections on exile 50–51, 195, 203n17 Sajed, Alina 34, 39n3, 110, 173n10, 202n10, 202n14; colonial difference 151n6, 151n7, 151n9, 154n33; narratives, photographic and literary 83n10, 84n19, 85n26; politics of exile 52, 60n5, 60n9, 61n22 Salan, General Raoul 96 Salgado, Sebastião 35–37, 73, 84–85n20 Salih, R. 203n20 Sarkozy, Nicolas 191–92, 203n15, 203n16 Sartre, Jean-Paul 23, 93–94, 135, 138, 147 Sassen, Saskia 18n7, 50, 53, 59 Saurin, Julian 5, 6, 40n21, 179 ‘savage immigrations’ (immigrations sauvages) 77 Sayad, Abdelmalek 3, 48, 52 Schloss, Carol 67 Schmidt, B.C. 202n5, 202n6

Index Scholte, J.A. 18n7 Schroeder, Erin 97, 104, 110, 112 Scorsese, Martin 110, 113 Scott, David 142, 144–47, 148, 149, 150, 154n33 Scott, James C. 146 Screening Strangers (Loshitzky, Y.) 88 Sebbar, Leïla 10, 11, 16, 19n12, 118n22; diasporic identifications 175, 191, 194, 196, 204; Femmes d’Afrique du Nord 76, 77–78; narratives, photographic and literary 62, 63–64, 70, 76–80, 80–81, 82, 83n4; politics of exile 41, 50, 60n11, 60n16, 61m21; postcolonial hybridity 156–57, 163–67, 169, 171, 172 The Seine was red, Paris, October 1961 (Sebbar, L.) 118n22 self, displacement and 195 self-referentiality: and ever elusive ‘Other’ 29–32; self-referential world of IR 2 Senghor, Léopold 83n12, 150, 153–54n31 Sepúlveda, Gines de 179–80, 202n7 Shapiro, Michael 11, 40n16, 86–87, 88, 120n37 Shapiro, M.J. and Alker, H.R. 199 Sharma, S. and Sharma, A. 105, 106, 111, 112–14 Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, yeux verts (Sebbar, L.) 156–57, 164–67, 169, 171, 172 Shilliam, Robbie 18n5, 153n25, 186 Shohat, Ella 39n2, 40n21, 50 Sigg, B.W. 93 Silencing the Past (Rolph-Trouillot, M.) 190; Franco-Maghrebian borderland as cinematic space 114 Silverman, Max 119n33, 156, 159 Silverstein, P.A. 151n6, 184 Smith, S. 33, 202n5 social categorization of immigrants 42–43 Soguk, Nevzat 8, 17–18, 40n12, 40n16, 42 Sontag, Susan 74, 78, 82, 83n7, 198 Soyinka, W. 138 Soysal, Y.N. 42, 48, 57 Spear, Thomas 61n24 spectrality, notion of 69–70 Spectres of Marx (Derrida, J.) 69–70 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 16, 23, 29, 31, 33, 40n21, 40n23, 170, 174n14, 184, 198 state-centrism 3, 37, 41–42, 49, 57, 160, 172, 204, 205, 210

237

Stavrianos, L.G. 153n28 stereotypes 14, 30–31, 37, 66, 113; colonial stereotypes 130, 177; migrants 196–97; narratives, photographic and literary 67–68, 69, 77; postcolonial stereotypes 157, 159, 161, 163–64, 165, 166–67, 169; racial stereotypes 193–94 Stoler, A.L. and Cooper, F. 6, 125 Stoler, Ann Laura 84n17 Stora, Benjamin 15, 38, 152n17, 173n6, 182; cinematic memory 86, 89–90, 91, 92, 94, 105, 108, 113, 117n5, 117n6, 117n8, 119n26 subjectivity-in-exile 123–24 suppression of memory 10, 38 symbols of liberation 74 Tanase, V. 122, 125, 136, 141 Témoignange Chrétien 92 ten Kortenaar, Neil 157 ‘Third World’ 38, 52, 63, 64, 86–87, 97, 110, 115, 120n39, 122, 147–48, 149, 168, 205; contemporary forms of ‘Third World’ protest 171–72; representation of 68–69, 75–76; Third Worldism, Camus’ criticism of 141–42, 143; Third Worldist fantasy of the Western critical intellectuals 32, 170 Thucydides 5 Todd, O. 152n21 Tomlinson, J. 18n7 Toumi, Alek 39n9, 44, 45, 58–59, 60n6, 151n6, 182, 183, 187, 201, 203n19 Toussaint L’Ouverture 144–46 translocality 2, 7; diasporic translocality 181; translocal relations 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 18n1, 156, 176, 182, 190, 193, 201, 204; translocal webs 2, 4–8, 18n10, 172, 175, 178–79, 180, 201, 204, 205 transnational citizenship 44, 59; hybridity and 48–52; politics of exile and diaspora in Franco-Maghrebian borderland 44, 48–52 transnational illiteracy 175 transnational mourning, memory and diasporic communion 57–58 transnational networks: transnationalism 187, 203n17 transnationalism 57–58, 107, 119n29, 148, 180, 188–89; anti-colonialism, translocal and transnational scope in

238

Index

170; flexible citizenship and 175–76, 178–79; lures of diaspora and 196–201; ‘transnational,’ conceptions of 2, 18n3; transnational citizenship 44, 59; transnational citizenship, hybridity and 48–52; transnational dimension of literary narratives 195; transnational illiteracy 175; transnational networks 187, 203n17 traumatic memory 17, 87–88, 89–90, 91, 97, 106, 109; Algeria and Vietnam 90; memorialization and 96–97; trauma within, inhabiting colonial trauma in postcolonial present 97–106, 115 Trinh T. Minh-ha 75–76, 82 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 88, 111, 114 Tsing, Anna 11, 18n2 Ulloa, Marie-Pierre 94–95, 117n5, 118n17 unified moralism 14, 42, 177, 190 Varadharajan, Latha 2, 27, 31, 32, 37, 39n2, 64, 201–2n1 Vercors (Jean Bruller) 95, 118n15 Vergès, Jacques 92 Vidal, Dominique 61n17, 110–11, 119n32 Vidal-Nacquet, Pierre 118n23, 173n6 Vincendeau, G. 110 ‘On Violence’ (Fanon, F.) 13, 132–33, 139–40 violent resistance, Fanon’s endorsement of 123, 147 Vircondelet, A. 122, 125 visuality: in IR, narratives, photographic and literary 62–63; in IR, perception of ‘native’ and 81–82; in IR, preoccupation of critical analyses on 68–69; visual performance of social field 67–68 Vitalis, Robert 180, 202n3, 202n5 Vitoria, Francisco de 180 Vogl, M.B. 67, 83n6

Wacquant, L. 119n32 Waever, O. 41 Walker, Rob 33, 40n17, 109 Walters, W. 41 Waltz, K. 10 wartime experiences: Camus 129, 135; Fanon 129 Wayne, Mike 96, 105–6, 114 Webber, Jonathan 109 Weber, Cynthia 10, 15–16, 33 Weil, Patrick 129, 151n12, 152n21 Western colonialism 24–25 White Mythologies and Postcolonialism – An Historical Introduction (Young, R.) 23–25 Wilder, Gary 94 Winock, Michel 94 Wolf, E.R. 153n28 Woman and Chinese Modernity (Chow, R.) 27, 184 Women of Algiers in their Apartment (Djebar, A.) 64, 70, 71, 72–73, 73–74, 75, 191, 198 Women of Islam (Djebar, A.) 74–75 Woodhull, Winifred 28, 39n8, 83n6 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, F.) 12, 124, 139, 143, 147, 148–49 Writing Diaspora (Chow, R.) 70, 83n1, 164, 178, 184 Xenos, N. 42 Yacef, Saadi 92 Yacine, Kateb 19n13, 136 Yale French Review 61n24 Young, Robert J.C. 4, 20–21, 23–25, 28, 29, 31, 79–80, 186; White Mythologies and Postcolonialism – An Historical Introduction 23–25 Zoos humains. Au temps des exhibitions humaines (Bancel, N. et al.) 99–100

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