Translation And The Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn Orientalist

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

Feminist Mediations of the Exotic: French Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, 1921–39

This article considers why and how locality influenced feminists' perceptions of colonised women. It does so through an analysis of how militants and novelists linked with the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (French Union for Women's Suffrage, UFSF) perceived the Arab and Berber women of colonial North Africa. The organisation had branches in North Africa, and thus feminists in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia are compared to those in France. Where these women lived shaped their understanding of French women's roles in the colonies, along with their opinions regarding the rights to which colonised women could lay claim. Tensions among UFSF members are traced here through the literary figure Elissa Rhaïs, articles in the feminist newspaper  La Française  and correspondence among UFSF members. These sources indicate that while all these French women positioned themselves as mediators of colonialism and women's rights, their precise interpretations of that mediation were consistently influenced by local concerns.     

Republican citizenship in the post-Civil War South and French Algeria 1865–1900

This essay compares the American South and French Algeria from 1865 to roughly 1900. Their similarities and connections reveal the paradox of republicanism in an era of growing nation-state power. The Civil War’s outcome, particularly slavery’s abolition, inspired American and French liberals alike. But after bold initiatives to establish full citizenship for people of color in the 1860s, provincial, white rule was established in both territorial areas. Fears of socialism provoked by the Paris Commune figured in this pivot. The essay shows us transnational aspects of race-based, contingent citizenship in the post-slavery era of these two republican empires.     

Drawing Algeria into Europe: shifting French policy and the Treaty of Rome (1951–1964)

Abstract

In France and Europe today, claims arise defining so-called Muslim and European ‘worlds’ and labelling them irreconcilable. These claims ignore the intertwined history of France and North Africa. When the six founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC) signed the Treaty of Rome, French administrators still considered Algeria to be a constituent part of France, despite the ongoing war. The Algerian question was central to negotiations for the Treaty of Rome and during them, French officials attempted to inscribe Algeria within the founding documents of the European project through a policy of ‘Eurafrique’. Their partners, eager for France’s signature on the Treaty, accepted a vision of integrated Europe with borders crossing the Mediterranean. This decision raised thorny issues in the months and years to come, first in debates of how or even if the Treaty could be implemented overseas, then when independent Algeria attempted to define its relationship with the EEC. These episodes of negotiation and interaction reveal the centrality of the question of empire to the foundations of integrated Europe.     

In the Shadow of the Algerian War: The United States and the Common Organisation of Saharan Regions (OCRS), 1957–62

The traumatic decolonisation of Algeria has tended to overshadow more peaceful transfers of power elsewhere in the French African Empire. This is particularly so in the case of the Sahara, where local populations accommodated themselves exceptionally well to colonial rule after the First World War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the political stability of the region, combined with its newly discovered energetic resources and strategic value as a nuclear testing site, led the French to reflect upon ways of preparing for the Sahara a future separate from the rest of Algeria, the fate of which was increasingly clear as de Gaulle had no choice but to gear his policy towards self-determination. The Common Organisation of Saharan Regions (OCRS) intended to merge all French territories in the Sahara, in an attempt to guarantee prolonged French control over the region while justifying it on the grounds that oil revenue was to finance the development of the areas where extraction took place. The widely publicised developmental concerns of the initiative were at odds with its neo-colonial undertones, and it could not have escaped the attention of the two successive US administrations that had to deal with the controversial question of their position vis-à-vis a NATO ally embattled in what seemed a lost colonial cause. The role of the US in post-war decolonisation processes has been given more prominence in recent historiography, but it had never been studied in the case of the Sahara, in spite of repeated French fears of American interest in Saharan oil resources at the time of the Algerian war. Based on State Department archives, this paper throws lights upon an often-forgotten aspect of Franco-American relations in the context of the decolonisation of European empires.     

The Architecture of the Town Halls of the French Colonial Period in Algeria: The First Half of Nineteenth Century

The various civilizations which followed one another on the Algerian territory marked it by their presence. The architectural and urban production of each period displays its concepts and its styles, each rich with specific characteristics. The most representative buildings date to the Ottoman period and especially to French colonization. During the latter, and with the multiplication of the administrative offices, numerous public buildings represent different styles: Neoclassical, eclectic, neo-Moorish and art deco, each lying next to one another. Nevertheless, each building was intended to indicate its function. Numerous studies of the buildings erected during the first half of the twentieth century and particularly on the attributes of the neo-Moorish style were examined unlike the architectural output resulting from the Second Empire and relating to public civil architecture, due to the lack of monographic work. Our knowledge in this field thus remains to be improved and constituted. This paper is devoted to the town hall of Annaba, through which we will illustrate the attributes and architectonic specificities as well as the codes inherent in French public civil architecture in Algeria.     

An intra-imperial conflict: the mapping of the border between Algeria and Tunisia, 1881-1914

This paper explores the issue of colonial borders through a case study of the intra-imperial boundary between Tunisia and Algeria, two territories under French rule between 1881 and the first decade of the twentieth century. The aim here is to understand what was at stake when it came to separating two territories holding different legal status but both administered by the French: Algeria which had officially become a French colony in 1830 and Tunisia which was given Protectorate status in 1880. The paper considers some of the many disputes over the border that took place both in the field and in colonial administrative offices. It also raises the question of the scope of colonial rule by exploring the way the border was never fully determined and was constantly redrawn by the inhabitants of the border regions themselves, who were presented first as tribes, and later, as either Algerian or Tunisian by the French civil and military administrations, and by the political authorities in Algiers, Tunis or Paris. As they all had their own interests in the matter, disputes were common but were also sometimes resolved in unexpected ways. Finally, the paper raises a further issue concerning the question of national identity in the context of the definition of national territories, which reveals the full ambiguity of the concept of identity in the colonial situation.     

'Tout cela,je ne voulais pas le laisser perdre': Colonial lieux de me´moire in the comic books of Jacques Ferrandez

A comic-book series by French artist Jacques Ferrandez serves as a case study of how Pied-noir memories of Algeria are given expression in popular culture. Ferrandez recreated French Algeria as a virtual place of memory in his five-volume Carnets d'Orient , by borrowing images from colonial postcards and orientalist paintings, as well as stories from sources including his own family history and French travel writings about the 'Orient'. Although he provides a useful critical perspective on the colonial period, he is limited in this effort by his identification with the Pied-noir community, and his desire to memorialise French Algeria.     

HOW CHILDREN PLACE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS IN LOCAL SPACE

This study examines the ways in which children aged 11 to 15 in six adjacent neighbourhoods in a medium-sized Swedish town place themselves and others in local space. Special attention is given to how they discuss a neighbourhood stigmatized in the public discourse and how children who live in this neighbourhood react to the negative representations of the place in which they live. The study is based on group interviews and maps. The study shows that children construct representations of their own neighbourhoods as "quiet" neighbourhoods and place objects of "trouble" and "danger" somewhere else. It is argued that this is done both in relation to their personal knowledge of the neighbourhood and in relation to local and/or media representations of their own and other neighbourhoods. It is shown that the children are influenced by media representations of a stigmatized neighbourhood, but also that they are not passive reproducers of these discourses and that some of them are able to offer counter-discourses. The children living in this neighbourhood experience difficulties in defending it as the quiet place which they perceive it to be to outsiders because of the negative discourses.     

Escaping the Bind: Comparing Twenty-First Century US Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the French Response to the Algerian Revolution, 1955–1956

Faced with a growing Algerian insurgency in 1955, French Governor-General Jacques Soustelle turned to his ethnological training to convert soldiers into amateur social scientists, hoping to better know the people of Algeria and therefore ease pacification through cultural understanding. Soustelle failed to appreciate the sophistication of revolt in Algeria, a diverse array of movements that did not fit traditional European categories. Confronting similar problems in understanding the causes of Iraqi and Afghan resistance in the years following the invasions of 2001–2003, American military planners also turned to anthropology. Though not taken to the administrative extreme seen in Soustelle's Algeria, the United States Army instituted the Human Terrain System in order to better understand native populations involved in an active insurgency. American planners can learn from the French experience by developing a more nuanced approach to study that includes more advanced anthropological techniques without the baggage of the colonial system.     

Review articles La justice comme nouvelle scène de la démocratie

Over 50 years have passed since the 17 October 1961 massacre and, though the event has gained wider recognition, it still occupies a tenuous place in French history. Scholars have turned to fictional literary and filmic representations of the massacre that have appeared since the 1980s, but have largely overlooked its commemoration in music. In this essay, the author analyses two works: French rapper Médine's song ‘17 octobre’ (2006), which reimagines the massacre from the perspective of a witness who dies, and an Internet montage video (2008) which sets Médine's song to archival and non-archival video clips. Both the song and montage highlight the limits of official historical discourse through a variety of practices, including manipulating perspective, sampling and putting 17 October into dialogue with other obscured histories. The historical and historiographical work these texts accomplish illustrates the potential of such media to construct a postmemorial archive that blurs boundaries between archive and fiction, creative works and history.     

The burden of choosing wisely: biopolitics at the beginning of life

Recent transformations in French maternal health care demonstrate how the government of the beginning of life encompasses an individual woman's desires and aspirations for the uses of her own body. Women are increasingly solicited by the French health care system to express their feelings, their wishes, and their distress to a medical professional for whom the solicitation of such narratives has become a professional specificity. This essay focuses on transformations of governmental power in the realm of reproduction articulated within French maternal health care policy, professional midwifery journals, and women's health activist literature. Crucially, the regulation of reproduction in France no longer takes place primarily through sanction or prohibition, but rather through what sociologist Dominique Memmi claims is the solicitation of narratives about one's own desires and hopes for the fate of one's body, a ‘delegated biopolitics’ of reproductive control. This essay suggests that the contemporary government of reproduction entrusts individuals with little more and no less than the imperative to ‘choose wisely.’     

“They have the right to throw us out”: Élisée Reclus'New Universal Geography

Abstract: The anarchist and geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) argued for the idea of universal brotherhood for all the peoples of the world in his encyclopaedic work the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (NGU) (1876–1894). The nature of Reclus' argument and its representations of Europe, otherness and colonialism, however, are contested today, and it is unclear what insights it might offer to contemporary students of colonialism and post‐colonialism. In this paper I engage with two emblematic cases—British rule over India and French occupation of Algeria—as they are presented in the NGU, considering Reclus' analysis of imperialism and his novel critique of colonial power. In doing so I wish to demonstrate that far from being conventional, the NGU is a radical and interesting resource for those struggling to construct a critical discourse on Europe, otherness and colonialism.     

The Pasteurization of Algeria?

This essay focuses on the anti–malarial campaigns of Edmondand Etienne Sergent in colonial Algeria during the period from1900 to 1930. This Pasteur Institute of Algeria was part ofan elaborate, global network of men and institutions that constitutedthe scientific empire of Third Republic France. It was deeplyindebted to the methods pioneered by Pasteur and to the sharedfoundational myth that connected the overseas Pasteur Institutesto Paris. But the Sergent brothers’ work operated withina dynamic context of international public health too. Algeria’sEuropean settlers had also worked out a creolized identity thatwas both dependent upon and distinct from metropolitan practices.Ultimately, the Pasteur Institute of Algeria bore the mark ofthe settler colonialism that had given rise to it.     

Feminism and its ‘other’: representing the ‘new woman’ of Bangladesh

This essay examines women's oppression and organizing against gender violence in contemporary Bangladesh through the lens of television. I argue that the telefilm Ayna (The Mirror, 2006), written and directed by popular film actor and women's rights activist Kabari Sarwar, offers a window into the changing social and economic landscape of contemporary Bangladesh and the complex negotiations of power and inequality across gender, class and community. Furthermore, it offers an opportunity to unpack the social messages underlying development and modernization initiatives, the new kinds of alliances as well as dependencies engendered by them, and their multiple and uneven consequences. An investigation of the representations of competing and contradictory notions of women's subjectivity and agency in this telefilm allows us to understand how these intersect with shifting notions of local/global patriarchies, feminist solidarity and women's empowerment in Bangladesh today. Further, this essay illuminates the disjunctures between representations of the ‘new woman’ circulated through development and certain feminist advocacy narratives with women's lived realities of oppression, and survival.     

Pioneering Iranian Studies in Meiji Japan: Between Modern Academia and International Strategy

This article explores the relationship between academic studies concerning Iran in Meiji Japan (1868?1912) and Orientalism in Western scholarship. Many researchers who have limited their definition of Iranian studies to the professional works published since the 1930s have concluded that there is an indirect relation between Iranian studies in Japan and Orientalism. In contrast, this paper takes it in a wider sense to mean all academic studies regarding Iran. The paper focuses on two such important proto-academic fields regarding foreign countries in Meiji Japan: geography and international politics. It concludes that the pioneering Iranian studies scholars in the Meiji period were not totally immune to Orientalism on the one hand but, on the other, that their research on Iran was less closely connected to imperialism than the Western scholarship that Edward Said famously critiqued.     

'We've never had a voice': memory construction and the children of the harkis (1962-1991)

When riots broke out in the Bias Camp east of Bordeaux in May1975, few in France had heard of the harkis, the Algerian auxiliarieswho fought for the French during the Algerian War of Independence(1954–62). This began to change, however, as the rapidlyspreading protests instigated by their children garnered increasingmedia coverage. Seeking to end their status as les oubliésde l'histoire, the children of the harkis sought recognitionfor the history of their parents, particularly the sacrificesthey had made for France and the suffering endured as a consequence.What is particularly interesting about this campaign is thatthe children of the harkis were not alone in this desire andin fact were relative latecomers to the harki activist scene.The years since the end of the Algerian War had witnessed arange of representations offered by a series of self-appointedspokespersons who, in the absence of direct testimony from withinthe harki community, and often serving their own objectives,took it upon themselves to speak on behalf of the harkis. Thisarticle seeks to analyse the relationship between these externalnarratives, put forward by actors including the Algerian andFrench governments, the former Muslim elite of colonial Algeria,French veterans and the pied-noir community and those offeredby the children of the harkis in order to illustrate some ofthe issues pertaining to the mobilization and transmission ofFrance's colonial past in a postcolonial context.     

DEFENDING SPIRIT,SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition and behavior that were produced by physicians—namely, physiologists and pathologists, phrenologists, neurologists, alienists, and psychiatrists. It describes how, while engaged in this confrontation, French philosophy took a peculiar shape, eventually influencing the development of some sciences—namely, psychology, which emerged progressively as a discipline at the crossroads of medicine and philosophy. In the second part of the essay, starting from a terminological analysis of a series of terms dealing with “spirit,” I consider the formation of spiritualism by adopting an approach that diverges slightly from the ones proper to history of philosophy and intellectual history. I inscribe the philosophical discourses in their contexts of emergence, paying particular attention to institutional macrostructures and their inertia. This provides another perspective on “spiritualism,” which may no longer be conceived as a current or a school; rather, it should be conceived as the effect of the conditions of possibility of academic philosophy in France. It seems to me that, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century, because of the organization of the educational institutions, the French philosophers’ agenda consisted mainly in opposing all forms of materialism, mechanism, and determinism and in defending the legitimacy of their discipline.     

Portrayals of Non-North Koreans in North Korean Textbooks and the Formation of National Identity

This article examines the portrayal of non-North Koreans in North Korean textbooks to assess the influences on the formation of North Korean identity, and how such identity formation is important in Kim Jeong-il's retention of power. This study not only looks closely at textual representations; it also examines how political and ideological changes in North Korea had a critical influence on these texts. The study encompasses both lexico-grammatical analysis and the analysis of textual and visual images, based on an examination of six North Korean language textbooks published from 1954 to 2000. It demonstrates that North Korean identity is defined through the portrayal of non-North Koreans, particularly enemy others. The portrayal of non-North Koreans facilitates the formation of a solid North Korean identity – an identity that entails serving their political leaders, remaining vigilant against threats to their country, and liberating South Koreans from poverty and oppression by America and its puppet states.