Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (review)

Algeria's recent violent history has continued to confound social scientists. The abrupt reversal in early 1992 of a promising experiment in democratic reform spiraled into a deadly cycle of violence between the military-ruled government and radicalized Islamist factions, violence that rivaled in horror the "cycle of Satan" remembered by an older generation that had lived through the French-Algerian war. Innocent civilians caught in the middle of an escalating dialogue of atrocities suffered through yet another tragic chapter of modern Algerian history. The 1990s violence was all the more shocking set against the backdrop of a post-1962 Algeria widely pictured as moving toward economic progress, political stability, and social equality.

Growing up in Morocco gave anthropologist Abdelmajid Hannoum a valuable Maghribian sensibility in authoring this book's reflections on Algeria's modern history. The five chapters, "Conquests and Archives," "Translation and the Colonial Imaginary," "Colonial Violence and Its Narratives," "The Historiographic State," and "Coming Round: Transgression, Sacrifice, and the Nation" follow a rough chronology from the early colonial period to 2009. Personal anecdotes, beginning with the author's Moroccan childhood and ending with research trips to Algeria as late as 2007, lend an engaging texture to the essays.

The author's opening story sets a tone of ambivalence toward colonialism/modernity. He recounts an interview with a Moroccan academic who, having lost his father to a French bullet in an anti-colonial protest, still felt grateful to the French for having brought modernity to North Africa. The author goes on to challenge the simplistic separation of the religious from the secular in social science discourse. He views both as modern categories in need of serious rethinking. He persuasively argues that the violence often associated with Islam as a religion, from the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, was in reality the product of modern forces. Algerian culture became modern through colonial conquest and domination. The combined power of modern technologies, together with the control of knowledge by the colonial state, forced on the Algerian people a structural violence that Europeans themselves had experienced earlier. In other words, modernity was inherently violent. Colonialism inflicted this violence on Algeria in multiple forms.

Although technology is mentioned briefly, the role that industrialized technologies played in shaping the outcomes of violent encounters between colonizer and colonized is left out of the story. The essays focus instead on the transformative power of the colonial state's ethnographic and historiographic discourses. The ethnographic delineation of Algerian society, together with a hegemonic historical narrative, are viewed as colonial constructions serving colonial interests. The first three chapters are particularly illuminating in tracing the formation of the colonial myths of Algerian society and history by means of ethnography, translation (Ibn Khaldun, in particular), and the narratives surrounding the 1871 Mokrani Rebellion.

The author correctly points out that modern Europeans were not the first imperialists to make culture an instrument of political domination. Quotations from Tacitus and Ibn Khaldun illustrate this nicely. The author downplays material forces, leaving the reader wondering what distinguishes modern imperialism from earlier forms of empire building. Other than a brief reference to Max Weber's "bureaucracy" as a manifestation of modernity, the book's answer remains vague and the logic appears circular. The violent process of implementing modernity in Algeria was made possible by the violence of conquest, which "was based on a system of representation that itself was regulated by violence" (pp. 13-14). When every event in Algerian history since 1830 is infused with both violence and modernity, both of which are left vaguely defined, the analysis begins to sound tautological.

The final chapter makes a leap from the colonial period to the outbreak of the civil war following the cancellation of elections in January 1992. Can President Chadli Bendjedid's reforms and the fateful military coup that ended them be understood without taking into account a convergence of forces in the 1980s — demographic pressures arising from high birth rates, the discrediting...