Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988–2015 ed. by Patrick Crowley (review)

Over the last two decades, anglophone scholars trained as students of France have paid rather heated attention to Algeria, embracing various frames to analyse Algerians and Algeria in relation to France and the French, whether as a colony, as an extension of the metropole, in the context of Francophonie, or by placing 'metropole and colony in a single analytic field' (see Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, 'Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda', in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Stoler and Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1–56 (p. 4)). This, ironically, has led to vibrant scholarly discussions in which 'Algeria' is at stake but in which scholars trained as specialists of Algeria itself are in the minority (or wholly absent), and this makes the collection of essays that Patrick Crowley has edited and introduced particularly welcome. It is the only recent edited collection that I know of to focus on Algeria, but what really sets it apart is how Crowley has brought together scholars wholly attentive to what their evidence reveals about Algeria in recent decades with others who also take seriously how 'cultural artefacts — such as the novel, film, music, dance, and the visual arts — can both represent what was or is and help fabricate new ways of thinking, whether among scholars or their publics' (p. 3). Two additional frames help such diverse approaches hang together: the particular attention each article gives to transnational dynamics and developments, and the welcome focus on developments since 1988, when Algeria's Arab Spring avant la lettre led to the end of single-party rule by the Front de libération nationale, the party that had led the country to independence from France in 1962. Crowley's Introduction effectively maps out why each of these frames is so useful to scholarship on contemporary Algeria. Another great strength of the collection is to give readers access to exciting work by promising young scholars — Fanny Gillet's 'The Archive and Contemporary Art in Algeria (1992–2012)' and Samuel Sami Everett's 'The Many (Im)possibilities of Contemporary Algerian Judaïtés' stand out, as each attends closely to Algerian materials to make novel interventions in discussions that stretch beyond Algeria (and France) — as well as to the most important historians in France and the UK currently working on Algeria; the articles by Malika Rahal, James McDougall, and Walid Benkhaled and Natalya Vince are important in their own right but also introduce readers to approaches and questions each has pioneered in other recently published work. Benkhaled and Vince's 'Performing Algerianness: The National and Transnational Construction of Algeria's "Culture Wars"' is a must-read for graduate students and other scholars entering into research that touches on Algeria's recent history. They draw heavily on analytic schemas that Rahal and McDougall have introduced, to make a compelling case that, despite the often intense political, linguistic, religious, or other debates that divide them — or perhaps because of them — contemporary Algerians share 'a social cohesiveness that, when taken at face value, the actual content of the debates denies' (p. 265). They argue for a 'post-dramatic analysis of Algeria' (p. 266), a convincing argument that — in the way they anchor it in empirical evidence, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and theatre studies — nicely summarizes the utility of this interdisciplinary collection.