In this dissertation, I map the experimental margin of Algerian cinema between 1965 and 1979 against the paradigmatic film about Algeria, Gillo Pontecorvo and Yacef Saadi’s The Battle of Algiers (1965). I focus on the period immediately following the successful conclusion of an eight-year war waged by the Algerian National Liberation Front against France. It is known as the “Golden Age” of Algerian cinema, a span of nearly fifteen years after the film industry was nationalized when culture was generously financed by newly exploited petrochemical resources in the Sahara. This mapping has two aims, the first of which is straightforward: I read four films made in Algeria by Algerian filmmakers closely in light of their socio-political contexts and I argue that together they represent a significant and overlooked minor history in Algerian film. The films are Tahia Ya Didou! by Mohamed Zinet (1969), Omar Gatlato by Merzack Allouache (1976), La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua by Assia Djebar (1976), and Nahla by Farouk Beloufa (1979). They are significant formally and in terms of their critical reception at the time and since the late 1960s and early 1970s among Algerian filmmakers, but they are crucially significant as ambivalent testimony about life after the colonial period and about the traumatic effect of the long and violent struggle for liberation. Second, I read these films against the Battle of Algiers in its socio-political context. I argue that the aspects of the War of Liberation that fall out of this canonical portrait of decolonial resistance are precisely those taken up by the experimental margin I examine elsewhere in the dissertation. My reading of Pontecorvo and Saadi’s classic film is critical not only in terms of its representation of violence perpetrated by the French but also in the aspects of Algerian history it occludes, namely the history of women. If the margin provides a space for testimony for the trauma of the war, the Battle of Algiers reifies a Fanonian understanding of revolutionary violence, an understanding that is constitutively exclusive of women’s role in the war. I read extensively with Karima Lazali on the clinical situation of Algerians post-war. I draw on archival materials from Algeria and France including production notes and documentation of contemporary reception, especially by Algerians. On contextual questions, I read Algerian sociologists, politicians, filmmakers, and film critics as much as possible. My commitment to de-centering especially a French perspective on Algeria allows the rich semiotic exchange between filmmakers, artists, architects, and political activists to emerge and to challenge the hegemonic perspective that Algerian culture post-war was entirely dominated by its authoritarian government.

This dissertation offers readings of novels by Pierre Guyotat, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano and other lesser-known French authors of the twentieth and twenty-first century, analyzing the representation of the “appelés d’Algérie,” the last citizens of France to be mobilized in a wartime draft. Dating back to the Third Republic, military service played a key role in turning both metropolitan and colonial populations into Frenchmen, though clearly not under the same conditions or in the same way. A historically informed account of military service’s role in citizenship formation can provide a useful analytic frame for clarifying literary engagements with contemporary French “identity-talk,” i.e. political and discursive deployments of identity and identity politics, as well as debates around laïcité, universalist assimilationism, and “communautarisme.” In early literary responses to the Algerian War, the character of the conscript serves to criticize the rising tide of consumerism and Americanization in postwar France. In novels by Daniel Anselme and René-Nicolas Ehni, draftees participate in a homosocial republicanism in which “fraternité” trumps both atomized individualism and the normative heterosexual couple, a locus of consumption. In novels by Perec and Modiano, resistance to conscription enables a critique of universalist citizenship, as the figure of the insubordinate or ambivalent conscript provides an opportunity to reckon with Jewish identity and French anti-Semitism. My analysis addresses the unequal and uneven distribution of political rights based on “identity” factors as well as the asymmetrical deployment of the term “communautarisme.” Certain of Guyotat’s texts are perceived to respond politically and aesthetically to the Algerian War, even though they refuse the conventions of realism, verisimilitude, and even representation. Using Foucault to read Guyotat, my analysis of his work provides an opportunity to address twentieth-century French debates concerning engaged and autonomous art, as well as the relationship of radical politics to radical form. I turn in my last chapter to recent novels by the prize-wining French novelists Alexis Jenni, Laurent Mauvignier, Jérôme Ferrari, and Alice Ferney. Set in part during the Algerian War, these novels draw explicit parallels between colonial violence and race-based violence in France today. These rhetorical parallels can obscure historical contingency and complexity, such as the evolving construction of the concept of “race.” Likewise, these novels contrast a virile, homogenous military and an effeminate, fractured republic and can be read as parables for the rise of the Front National in contemporary France. My analysis shows how these works can both participate in and critique particular racialized and gendered views of the French republic.

This dissertation is a philological study of transnational revolutionary print culture in French and Arabic during Algeria’s War for Independence (1954-1962) and its first post-independence regime (1962-1965). Investigating the ways in which women have been written into historical narratives, it is also a feminist historiography. During this era of global decolonization, the Front de libération nationale (FLN)—Algeria’s vanguard revolutionary party—integrated itself into a global coalition of revolutionary movements that provided mutual material and ideological support and self-identified as part of the Third World. While female freedom fighters (mujāhidāt) attained widespread fame as global symbols of anticolonialism, their intellectual work as intermediaries in constructing national and transnational anticolonial culture remains understudied. This dissertation analyzes the mujāhidāt’s discursive interventions in the project of liberating women, the nation, and the wider colonized world. In doing so, it challenges the masculinist and institutionalist biases prevalent in international relations, a field that has predominantly considered men as global political leaders and privileged government documents and official diplomatic correspondence as source material. Among the varied writings that I examine, two mouthpieces of the FLN take center stage: El Moudjahid (est. 1956) and Révolution africaine (est. 1963). My study of the mujāhidāt’s participation in the construction of national and transnational anticolonial culture consists not only of close readings of their writings in nationalist publications, but also a more holistic analysis of the worlds that these periodicals sought to project an image of via references to and excerpts of literature, film, theoretical texts, interviews, and testimonies. While each mujāhida’s contribution to national and transnational community-building varied, the central argument of my dissertation is that despite working in a patriarchal political and publishing environment, the mujāhidāt were able to express themselves by maneuvering at the margins. That is, they deployed a diversity of rhetorical tactics that subtly contested the premises of the system in which they operated, thus exercising power from a seeming position of weakness. While articles authored by the mujāhidāt are a major part of my corpus, I also read more holistically for gendered discourses of liberation in the print and visual culture of the 1950s and 60s. To contextualize the gendered expectations under which they had to write, Chapter One opens with an analysis of “Algeria’s personality” as it was articulated in nationalist texts, with the concept of “family honor” being an essential part of this personality. Chapter Two examines in literature and films that were commonly referenced by nationalist periodicals another key component of this personality: “authenticity,” and more specifically its expression as feminine revolution authenticity. Investigating how mujāhidāt writers navigated such expectations of authenticity, Chapter Three demonstrates how they promoted their own repertoire of female revolutionary icons in nationalist periodicals, especially the figure of the uneducated but radicalized mother as a bastion of cultural authenticity. Finally, Chapter Four reflects on disjunctures in nation-building narratives during Algeria’s post-independence regime. Examining the FLN’s world-building project of cultural diplomacy and national edification primarily via its periodical Révolution africaine, it examines the mujāhidāt’s modalities of intervention in the cultural debates at the intersection between women’s emancipation and the global anticolonial struggle.