Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation

Notes

Notes to pages 00–00 247 Notes 1. Immigration Politics in the New Europe 1. Such reticence was in contrast to the large international media coverage of anti-Semitic violence in France in 2002–2003 in the wake of the al-Aqsa Intifada and the U.S. war in Iraq. 2. The last issue has proved especially important for Turkish residents, as giving up Turkish citizenship means, according to Turkish law, forfeiting their rights to own property in Turkey. 3. For a nuanced and revealing history of French immigration policy and scholarship, focusing on how immigrant difference has been written out of French history, see Green (1991) and Noiriel (1988). 4. Algerians were additionally subject to a separate 1973 statute by which children of Algerian immigrants born in France after 1962 to parents born in Algeria under French colonialism (i.e., when Algeria was legally three states [départements ] of France) were considered full French citizens at birth. This provision retrospectively treated their parents as if they were French citizens. In point of fact, Algerian Muslims were granted a degree of French citizenship only after World War II, and then with only partial representation and partial rights. 5. These revisions, known collectively as the “Pasqua Laws” after the conservative minister of the interior, also revoked the special provisions for Algerians. The Pasqua Laws were rescinded after the election of the socialist Lionel Jospin as prime minister in 1996. 6. “Does not the manifest tolerance of the ethnicities and religions that are included in the notion of British subject, which does not invite them to share an esprit général but claims to respect their particularities, end up immobilizing the latter and perpetuating the racial or religious wars that are shaking up the Commonwealth as well as the United Kingdom?” (Kristeva 1993: 12). Schnapper adds, “In countries founded on the principle of collective [as opposed to individual] integration , we witness the formation of ethnic quarters” (1992: 97). 7. Such nostalgia, as Marilyn Ivy suggests, is decidedly modern, a product of nation formation (Ivy 1995). 2. Colonization and the Production of Ethnicity 1. For a general discussion of North African Muslim heteropraxy, focused primarily on Morocco, see Geertz (1968) and Gellner (1969). For a critique of this 248 Notes to pages 00–00 approach, see Hammoudi (1997) and Messick (1993). For a detailed historical account of precolonial Algeria, see Valensi (1969). 2. The dey Hussein was reported to have yelled “Leave! Roman (roumi), son of a dog. Leave! Leave!” and to have slapped the consul across the face with his fly swatter (Garrot 1910: 648). 3. For a detailed discussion of the differences between strategies of assimilation and integration, see Wright (1997: 327). 4. “Teachers have been invited to consider themselves as the agents and collaborators of the commandants and to inspire themselves from their advice. After the military conquest, the French language and idea have become the new weapons (armes) with which to enter into the fray (mener le bon combat)” (Anon. 1924: 252). 5. For a critical reading of the French “civilizing mission” as it played itself out in the Pacific, see Bullard (2000). For a discussion of processes of disenchantment in another colonial context, see Bourdieu (1979) and Mitchell (1988). 6. For an erudite history of the Berber peoples from antiquity to the present, see Brett and Fentress (1996). For a nuanced anthropological history of colonial and postcolonial Kabylia, see Mahé (2001). 7. Abdellah Hammoudi (1993: 15–32; 1997: 98–133) has brilliantly discussed French anthropologists of Berber ritual and political structures as “pioneers” of colonialism in Morocco. See Said (1993: 97–110) for a larger discussion of the role of European scholars and intellectuals in maintaining the “cultural integrity of Empire.” 8. The appellation “Kabyle Myth” was first formulated by Charles-Robert Ageron (1960) in his seminal article, “La France, a-t-elle un politique kabyle?” (“Does France have a Kabyle policy?”). He identified the myth of Kabyle superiority as operating primarily from 1840 to 1870, though with antecedents going back to 1826 (before the French occupation) and corollary attitudes continuing into the twentieth century. What changed, according to the author, was the assumption of the assimilability of the Kabyles (cf. Guilhaume 1992: 236–241; Lucas and Vatin 1975: 45). For a detailed description of the myth, see Lorcin (1995) and Sayad (1992). 9. See Assia Djebar (1980) for a postcolonial literary dramatization-cum-eruption of Delacroix’s harem scene. For a further discussion of French colonial...