Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria, 1930-1954
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A01=Jonathan Gosnell
Algiers
anti semitism
Author_Jonathan Gosnell
Category=GTM
Category=NHH
Category=NHTQ
Category=NHTR
citizenship
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ferhat Abbas
First World War
French Algeria
Grande Guerre
Great War
Greater France
Louis Bertrand
naturalization
R Zenati
Second World War
Spaniards
World War I
World War II
World War One
World War Two
Product details
- ISBN 9781580461054
- Weight: 552g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2002
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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An examination of French citizenship and cultural identity in Algeria during the last quarter-century of colonial rule.
In recent years, a multicultural society and changing conceptions of French identity have been the source of considerable debate in scholarship, literature and the media in France. This book examines equally contested definitionsof French identity from the past, but not those forged within the borders of the French 'Hexagon,' as French geographic space is sometimes called. It is the study of French sentiment in colonial Algeria of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, during the last quarter century of colonial rule in North Africa. It seeks to uncover elements of French identity that were generated past the Pyrenees and the Alps, beyond the bordering Atlantic Ocean, English Channel and Mediterranean Sea, outside the physical space so central to "Frenchness." It asks whether far-reaching state institutions could transform indigenous and settler populations in colonial Algeria -- Europeans, Jews and Muslims -- intoFrench men and women. It examines what these individuals wrote of French sentiment in colonial Algeria. Did they articulate alternative definitions of French identity? The colonial "periphery" is clearly quite central to France'sevolving postcolonial sense of self.
Colonial Algerian heterogeneity and the country's unique relationship to France make it an especially rich site in which to study French national and cultural identities. French military conquest and the occupation of the North African coast established one of the oldest and largest settler colonies within the French Empire. Unlike other colonies, Algeria lay relatively close to metropolitan France, a daylong journey by ship from Marseilles. No colony other than Algeria was granted French departmental status. No other land administered under the auspices of the French Empire had as numerous a European settler population, many of whom becamenaturalized French citizens. This study suggests that although Algeria had become officially French, "Algerie française", even at the pinnacle of its acceptance, was more diverse and more contested than its title suggests.
JONATHAN K. GOSNELL teaches French language and cultural studies in the Department of French at Smith College.
