History’s Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature (review)

Seth Graebner sets out a number of objectives in this study of Algerian literature: the exploration of the manifestations of nostalgia for vanished cultures and places, regarded as one of the defining tropes of the relationship between France and North Africa and seen as taking the Algerian city as a privileged place for debates about the relationship between literary and historical discourses; the study of particular places, as a basis for a consideration of “the dialogue between literature ‘high’ and ‘low,’ and history popular and academic” (2); analysis of essays, newspapers, and fiction in order to reveal how Algeria “developed a historical consciousness through literature” (4); along with an attempt to historicize debates over the identity of the colony, debates argued in terms of urban history. Given the range of authors and historical periods covered—from Louis Bertrand at the turn of the twentieth century, via the Algerianists, Audisio, Camus, and Robles, to two of Algeria’s most radical writers of the postcolonial period, Kateb Yacine and Rachid Boudjedra—some of these objectives are at times inapplicable, at times restrictive when not treated in relation to other topoi that are, nevertheless, key elements of the conflicted imaginary geography of colonial Algeria (e.g., the rouliers’ interior for Bertrand, the settler’s bled for the Algerianists, an expansive “Mediterranean” for Audisio and Camus). When, however, the focus is squarely on urban space (Algiers and modernity, Oran, the Casbah) or specific aspects thereof (e.g., the architectural style known as arabisance), it clearly shows the colonial city to be both an icon of the European presence and a site of conflict/negotiation. It is sometimes well served here by Graebner’s use of the notion of “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia developed in Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001)—used as an alternative, no doubt, to established approaches like that of Edward Said or Pierre Nora (whose concept of lieux de mémoire) is critiqued in the closing chapter). Frequently, however, history’s not always nostalgic place gives way to a much wider perspective, when Graebner retraces, for instance, the ideological underpinnings of Bertrand’s “Latin Africa,” the politics of the Centenary, Ferdinand Duchêne’s anti-Kabyle discourse, or Roblès’s Spanishness. The analyses and conclusions adduced here will be familiar to readers of the two books of the 1990s that countered the strategic amnesia that had, until then, erase colonial writing in France and Algeria: La littérature algérienne de l’entre-deux-guerres (Lanasri, 1995) and Writing French Algeria (Dunwoodie, 1998). The decision to extend the study to incorporate the postcolonial period (via Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma and Boudjedra’s Topographie idéale pour une aggression caractérisé) gives rise to closely argued readings, but exposes History’s Place to the risk of generating in the unwary reader a false sense of continuity, since it is not accompanied by a detailed account of the fundamental shift (psychological, political, ideological) that transformed colonial relations during World War II and the events of 1945, seedbed of the armed conflict launched in 1954.

In short, am ambitious undertaking that, where well focused, adds a great deal to our understanding of Algerian literature’s engagement with the colonial city.