Algeria Revisited: History, Culture, and Identity ed. by Rabah Aissaoui and Claire Eldridge (review)

Included in Algeria Revisited is a collection of essays presented at the 2012 University of Leicester conference held fifty years after Algeria's declaration of independence. The essays provide an in-depth re-examination of the Algerian experience of French colonization and consider the long-term legacies of that experience at the personal, national, and international levels. This re-exploration of Algeria's colonial past and postcolonial present engages with the interlinked issues of relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, questions of identity construction and reconstruction, and the abiding issues of memory, forgetting, and commemoration. Such exploration successfully casts a new light on the enduring relevance of the Algerian colonial experience and encourages new interpretations of Algeria's shared and traumatic national history as well as its modern relationship with France in a wider global frame. One focus of the book is on the (re)construction of identity in colonial and post-colonial contexts and on the emergence of hybrid identities within those contexts. In "Algerian Female Identity Re-constitution and Colonial Language: A Postcolonial Malaise in Assia Djebar's L'amour, la fantasia," Rachida Yassine discusses Djebar's engagement with the French language as a vehicle for her writing and the conflicting questions of identity and belonging that arise when expressing the self through the language of the colonizer. This issue is also discussed by Blandine Valfort and Sophie Bélot in their essays where they explore the common themes of cultural dispossession and linguistic duality in the works of Jean Sénac and Maïssa Bey respectively. For Djebar in particular, the use of French is a source of considerable internal conflict as she suspects that by using the colonizing language she contributes to her own personal alienation from the world of Arabic women. She is also conscious that French as a medium may be incapable of communicating the Algerian experience. Despite this personal malaise, Yassine argues, Djebar uses the French language to subvert the colonial and patriarchal discourses that dominated the Algeria of her childhood and adolescence. This linguistic subversion is two-fold: Djebar's transcription of Algerian women's oral accounts of their experiences during the War of Liberation not only gives a voice to this traditionally silent/veiled group but also affords Djebar an opportunity to reverse the traditional linguistic power balance between colonizer and colonized and recreate oral Arabic expressions in written French. By imposing features of the colonized language upon the language of the colonizer, Djebar creates a new language from the trauma of the colonial experience. As Yassine argues, using the French language in this subversive way is an attempt "to weave together conflicting cultural codes rather than remaining subject to the exigencies of their separation" (130). This is an apt summation of the volume as a whole. By bringing together new and dynamic pieces of research, Algeria Revisited offers a new perspective on Algeria's ongoing and active engagement with its postcolonial identity and reinforces the enduring importance of the Algerian experience in a global context.