Manchester Workshop – Thursday 7 January 2010

Our upcoming workshop for contributors to our special issue of Modern & Contemporary France (May 2011) has been announced. Please see details below and pass on to anyone who may be interested in attending.

VISUALISING THE FRANCO-ALGERIAN RELATIONSHIP SINCE 1954

1-day workshop, The University of Manchester, 7 January 2010

This workshop is being held as part of an AHRC-funded project, ‘France-Algeria: Visualising a (Post-) Colonial Relationship’. Its aim is to facilitate the exchange of ideas between contributors to a special issue of Modern and Contemporary France to be published in May 2011. Bringing together specialists in French and Algerian visual culture from the UK, US, France and Algeria, the workshop and special issue will address the different ways in which the Franco-Algerian relationship has been represented in visual culture from the outbreak of the Algerian War to the present day. It will explore a range of work, including contemporary Algerian cinema and visual culture, and the negotiation of memories of colonisation and the War in French, pied-noir and Franco-Algerian film and photography.

Attendance at the workshop is free of charge. To register, please contact the organisers, Joseph McGonagle, or Ed Welch, by 30 November 2009. If you wish to join us for lunch, please let us know when you register (a subsidised fee of £10 will be payable on the day) and if you have any dietary requirements.

The workshop will take place in Room C24, Sackville Street Building, The University of Manchester.

A map of the campus can be found here (Sackville Street Building is marked No 1 on the map)

Further maps and travel details can also be found here

PROGRAMME

0900-0930:

Registration and Coffee

0930-1100:

Helen Vassallo (University of Exeter), ‘Re-mapping Algeria in France: Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France’

Amy L. Hubbell (Kansas State University), ‘Returns, Ruins and the Slipping Past: Pied-Noir Visual Returns to Algeria’

1100-1130:

Coffee

1130-1300:

Marie Chominot (Université de Paris VIII), ‘Photographie et guerre d’indépendance algérienne: la construction d’une invisibilité’

Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London), ‘Algeria as Analogy: Terror, Torture and Mediation’

1300-1430:

Lunch

1430-1600:

Nadira Laggoune (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Algiers), ‘Le phénomène d’appropriation/réapproriation dans l’art algérien contemporain’

Amanda Crawley Jackson (University of Sheffield), ‘Architectural Modernism and Re-appropriation in the Work of Kader Attia’

1600-1630:

Tea

1630-1730:

Guy Austin (University of Sheffield), ‘Imag(in)ing Algeria: Film Style and Constructions of the Nation’

Roundtable discussion and conclusion

North to North: A Journey in Postcards from Manchester to the Maghreb

A new blog has been launched to accompany the project North to North: A Journey in Postcards from Manchester to the Maghreb by John Perivolaris, which we have commissioned as part of our AHRC-funded exhibition, New Cartographies: Algeria-France-UK to be held at the Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK, during 1 April – 15 May 2011.

The exhibition is one of the major outputs of our three-year AHRC research project, France – Algeria: Visualising a (Post-) Colonial Relationship, which began in September 2008.

This six-week exhibition will examine how Franco-Algerian relations have been represented in a range of contemporary visual media and confirmed artists include Kader Attia, Bruno Boudjelal, Yves Jeanmougin and Zineb Sedira.

The commissioned project North to North will lead to the creation of an original installation by Perivolaris, which will be premiered at the Cornerhouse exhibition.

To find out more about it, and to follow John’s progress, visit http://thecardographer.wordpress.com/.

17 October 1961: 48 years later

Following on from the preceding post, the public sphere is a distinct theme on which we will undoubtedly concentrate further, but given the fact its anniversary has just passed, it seemed apposite to return to thoughts on 17 October 1961: an event whose presence and absence with the French public sphere has intrigued us from the beginning of our collaborative research.

The site Algeria-Watch yesterday published online a summary of articles dedicated to the event’s commemoration from the Algerian daily newspaper Le Soir d’Algérie. The title of the first article included – ‘«Paris se souviendra, la Seine témoignera»’ – reminded me of comments made earlier regarding the place of the Seine within visual representations of this event. As a recent post suggested, the book 17 octobre 1961 17 illustrateurs (Paris: Au nom de la mémoire, 1999) that accompanied a Paris exhibition commemorating the event seems distinctive at the time within French visual culture for showing a grim aspect of the night that neither Elie Kagan’s photography nor that published in contemporary press articles appears to have captured: the sight of protestors falling into the Seine, and consequently it establishes visually a clear photographic link between this iconic passage of water and the massacre. Although other photography of that night clearly situates the protestors within central Paris, the relative lack of architectural iconicity within many of the most widely-disseminated images might explain the need for the Algerian philately to inscribe this moment precisely within the French capital – the cradle of the French Revolution and from which the enlightenment of French republican universalism supposedly emanates – and thus establishes a chilling contrast between the French Republic’s often vocal championing of human rights and the pressing practicalities of war. Relating to our thoughts on the nature of the public sphere in France, its buttressing through visual culture, and the events of this night, one image from the commemorative book seems to resonate particularly:

© Jacques Ferrandez

The prominence of images of the Seine in this collection might be read as symptomatic of its absence from much of the contemporaneous photographic iconography of the event, but the marriage here between this and a famous saying from the colonial era may also serve as a reminder of the borders and limits of a national public culture. As Todd Shepard has discussed, proponents of France’s occupation of Algeria in many ways saw France and Algeria as a discrete national space, rather than an international or transnational one, and although our study’s focus is upon the French public sphere and its attendant visual culture, this is not to neglect the work of images during the time of the greater colonial cross-Mediterranean public sphere to which the above image alludes.

Algerian independence brought with it a schism that may have disrupted the previous circulation of images between the two spaces but the continuing pivotal role played by diasporas travelling between France and Algeria suggests that breaches to the postcolonial borders of the (henceforth) Hexagon’s public sphere are commonplace and that therefore access to its visual culture is far from watertight. Indeed, the recent development and popularity of the internet in both countries has naturally facilitated the traversal of such borders, albeit virtually, and shows how easily in some ways they may be penetrated. Indeed, a related question we might also wish to ponder in our research, then, is where public culture begins and ends in cyberspace?  Can nationality simply be assigned according to the suffixes of certain domain names? And to what extent could one view French and Algerian public cultures as partially conjoined virtually online? Many sites online weave connections between the two national geographical spaces and associated public cultures, and our later discussion in our research of pied-noir-themed websites, for example, may shed further light on this. These roles of the public sphere, and our own intervention into it via our 2011 exhibition at the Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK, are also issues with which we must duly necessarily engage.

France, Algeria and the public sphere

The previous posts on plaques commemorating 17 October 1961 in France and Algeria point to a key question of our study, namely the ways in which both Algeria, and the Franco-Algerian relationship past and present, continue to manifest themselves in the French public sphere. Doing so, we would argue, means paying attention to a range of phenomena, from the most visible and substantial (major films, documentaries, memorials or political events) to what might at first sight appear to be the most ephemeral or marginal. During a trip to France in September, for example, I encountered a display in Bordeaux’s Librairie Mollat:

Book display in the Librairie Mollat, Bordeaux, September 2009

The occasion for bringing the display together seemed to be the publication of Des Hommes (Editions de Minuit, 2009), a new novel by Laurent Mauvignier about anciens appelés who are confronted by memories of the war after 40 years. Mauvignier’s book is surrounded by a number of others on the period of the Algerian War, among which, in the bottom left hand corner, is the current edition of Henri Alleg’s La Question, his famous account of torture at the hands of the French army during the conflict, also published by Minuit in 1958. Also present is work by some of the most well known historians of the war, including Benjamin Stora’s La Gangrène et l’oubli (1991), just visible on the left of La Question, and a new book by Jean-Luc Einaudi (known in particular for his work on 17 October 1961). Notable too is that the display is anchored in the top right hand corner by a (newly published) collection of vintage postcards of colonial Algiers (Alger d’antan, or ‘Algiers of Yesteryear’, as the title has it), part of a series which revisits French cities and regions in nostalgic mode. Interspersed with books on the war of independence are a book on the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, and a history of the first years of Algerian independence in the 1960s.

The display got me thinking about all the ways in which Algeria – or more precisely, perhaps, memory of an Algerian past – continues to be envisioned within the public sphere, and how the visual enactment of Algeria through images (and photos in particular) might consolidate a certain understanding or remembrance of that past. In the first place, it is notable for its condensation of the broad sweep of Algerian and Franco-Algerian history in the twentieth century, from the colonial to the post-colonial period; but it is also interesting for the way in which it articulates French metropolitan preconceptions of that history. The display is dominated by the period of the war, both materially (in terms of the number of books on the subject) and visually (in that the most noticeable images are those representing war-time scenes). The images on the books by Harbi and Stora (La Guerre d’Algérie) and Jeannine Verdès-Leroux (L’Algérie et la France) are both populated, articulating the historical relationship between France and Algeria in human terms first of all (and more specifically, in terms of grounded and specific encounters between individuals), and signalling it as a relationship predicated on difference and rupture. Also notable about both of these images is the way in which they both gender that relationship, albeit in different ways. I will return to this question in a subsequent post.

In the context of the material and visual dominance of books on the Algerian War, the location of the album of postcard views of colonial Algiers at the back of the display, almost receding into the distance, would seem to sum up nicely its nostalgic function. It stands as a memorial to a place lost forever, a place which remains unobtainable behind the rupture represented by war and independence; and what’s also interesting about the image which adorns the cover is that it presents Algiers as empty of people, and asks us to focus above all on the beauty of its cityscape (a cityscape which – the book will go on to remind us – was in large part the fruit of colonial industry). The other striking thing about this book, finally, is its very existence – one which indicates a continuing fascination with (aka market for) France’s Algerian past. The modes in which this past is presented, articulated and consumed, and the significant role played by images in that process, deserve careful consideration.

So what’s interesting about something as ephemeral as a book display is the way in which, even in the brief encounter a book browser might have with it, certain perceptions, understandings and meanings of Algeria, and France’s Algerian pasts, are engaged with, asserted and played out. Their significance, arguably, lies precisely in their apparent insignificance. On the one hand, this is just a collection of books on Algeria. On the other, bringing them together serves to underline how certain accepted meanings or received opinions – what the French theorist Roland Barthes would term the doxa – enter circulation and come to be played out. Engaging with book displays, or with other minor or marginal phenomena such as street names, also requires us to think about how we conceive of and understand that seemingly abstract, and yet ultimately real and tangible thing known as the public sphere.

17 October 1961: Carrelage Revisited

To return to the image of the carrelage in Algiers dedicated to 17 October 1961, Amina Menia’s photo was taken on a main road near to the university, right in the heart of the city. This commemoration in postcolonial Algiers of an event that took place in the colonial métropole’s capital provides an intriguing example of how memories travel between France and Algeria, across the Mediterranean, across time, and are represented in different ways. Much of this is hardly surprising, and indeed is to be expected, but given the silence and controversy that has surrounded the events of 17 October 1961 in France, it’s instructive to compare this memorialisation in Algiers of the massacre with two of the much smaller plaques photographed in Paris.

Further research by ourselves, informed by Hariman and Lucaites’ book No Caption Needed that analyses the circulation of iconic images in different genres and media, will attempt to trace some of the main tropes and themes that have been used to represent this event, such as within the 1999 book that accompanied a Paris exhibition dedicated to 17 October 1961:

17 octobre 1961 17 illustrateurs (Paris: Au nom de la mémoire, 1999)

Some of the imagery employed in the Algerian carrelage certainly recurs there – such as the prominence of the baton-wielding CRS and centrality of the river Seine – and it also shows what no photograph I have yet seen appears to: people actually falling into the river.

Within the carrelage, the inclusion of an iconic landmark such as the Eiffel Tower is also noteworthy – dispelling any ambiguity amongst viewers as to the event’s location by clearly anchoring it within the French capital – and generating a striking tension between the bloody violence of the foreground and centre with the instantly-recognisable tourist attraction in the background. Another element that catches my eye is the man sitting alone by the river in the near foreground: evoking an image made that very night at the Concorde metro station by Elie Kagan:

© Elie Kagan

The men crouching and cowering along from him might also recall another famous image of that night, a version of which was used on the cover of Jim House and Neil MacMaster’s Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory:

Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: OUP, 2009)

Furthermore, the anonymous mass of protestors, bird emblazoned with the Algerian flag, and prominence of the colours green, white and red upon the tiles places the struggle for independence firmly upon French soil – perhaps even positing the centre of Paris (but only for this brief moment?) as Algerian: a visual reversal of the often-cited phrase of the time; ‘L’Algérie, c’est la France’:

L'Echo d'Alger, 7-8 November 1954

The cartoonesque explosion-like bubble with the date on the right provides a further visual jolt, and must certainly fix the date in the viewer’s mind – no doubt, of course, the number one intention.

One final point: elements of the carrelage were reproduced on the fortieth-anniversary commemorative stamps, posted earlier. Permitted thus to bypass the constraints of physical geography, sections of the carrelage can circulate within and outside Algeria: across the Mediterranean to France, and far beyond; physically as a material object as well as virtually in cyberspace.

The carrelage in Algiers might serve various purposes for passers-by, but in what way might those of the postage stamps differ? What message might they send, and to whom?

17 October 1961: Memory and Charonne

The Observer, 9 September 2007

I was drawn to the choice of photo that accompanied this book review in The Observer, a British newspaper, in the context of how memories of 17 October 1961 have travelled across the Channel, are mutating over time, and have been twinned with the commemoration of the notorious incident at Charonne metro station on 8 February 1962, when 8 people were killed after Paris police broke up a peaceful anti-war protest. As has been widely noted, contemporary coverage in the French press of events at Charonne significantly outweighed the column inches given to 17 October 1961, and whereas the events at Charonne immediately provoked massive public outrage in France and were regularly commemorated, silence and forgetting quickly surrounded 17 October 1961 and endured many years.

In a sense, then, the photo demonstrates the increasing memorialisation of 17 October 1961 since the 1990s and attempts to suture 17 October 1961 and Charonne via Maurice Papon – chief of the Paris police during both events – at a time when pressure groups campaigned to raise awareness of Papon’s complicity in both. But their combination here in this photo also seems timely given that over the last decade, as awareness of 17 October 1961 in France appears to have gained in prominence, the importance of Charonne’s place in narratives of the Algerian War within French visual culture seems by comparison to have diminished markedly.

This image was apparently taken in 1997: the year Papon stood trial for and was ultimately convicted of ordering the arrest and deportation of 1690 Jews from France to Nazi death camps in Germany during the Occupation in World War Two.  The spray paint on the floor indicates the number ‘300′ – a reference to one of the estimates of the numbers killed during 17 October 1961 – and the article focuses on this event in particular. Charonne hasn’t quite been airbrushed out of memory for British readers, however, given the words on the banner but neither the review nor the photo’s caption refers to it.

In terms of the significance of this for traces of the Algerian War within France, this example from a UK publication is no doubt merely of marginal interest, but it’s intriguing that the reviewer and the picture editor – despite the banner – choose to focus on one and not the other: in some ways epitomising the clear increase in France of the “grievability”  of the victims of 17 October 1961 over the last two decades.

Would this have happened ten years earlier in 1987, and what might this suggest about the ways in which the prominence of Charonne appears to have gradually been eclipsed by that of 17 October 1961?

17 October 1961: Sebbar – Different Covers…

17 October 1961: Daeninckx – Different Covers: Same Story?

17 October 1961: Carrelage, Algiers

17 October 1961 Carrelage, Algiers © Amina Menia

17 October 1961: Philately

17 October 1961 Commemorative Algerian Stamps

17 October 1961 Commemorative Algerian Stamps First Day Issue