Recently the “emotional turn” has swept the social sciences, with scholars expressing a renewed interest in affective imaginaries and human experience from the “inside-out.” One noteworthy feature of this turn has been interdisciplinary engagement between the humanities and the hard sciences. Scholars in sociology, political science, and philosophy are advancing new theories of human behavior, and basing these theories on laboratory studies that use brain imaging and monitoring technologies like fMRI, SPECT, PET, and EEG. This is a growing trend in history as well, with the proliferation of monographs on “neurohistory” and “cognitive history.” This paper engages with and problematizes these trends, through an affective history of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962). Using historical documents recovered from the Service Historique de la Défense (SHD) and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, the paper explores how the Front de Libération Nationale/FLN and the Jeanson Network (a French anti-colonial club) mobilized emotions in the fight for Algerian independence. The paper begins with a passage from Brian Massumi’s Ontopower. In the book the social theorist employs EEG findings, in order to argue that governments use cues to trigger automatic emotional responses from populations. As Massumi argues, by flashing the color red on American television screens as part of its Terror Alert System, the Bush Administration “wirelessly jacked central government functioning directly into each individual’s nervous system... Across the geographical and social differentials dividing them, the population fell into affective attunement.” While this type of automatic cueing might work in a controlled laboratory setting, this paper argues that lived histories of human experience betray a different reality. Governments, political parties, and interest groups tried to give affective cues that would mobilize Algerian and French populations—but individuals did not automatically pay attention to, trust, or respond to stimuli, nor were populations moved to “affective attunement” across social divides. Instead, affective cues were often ignored or contested. Considering this finding, what role did affective priming and cueing play in the Algerian Revolution? What narratives did various actors promote about the emotions of decolonization? And how can historians contribute to the study of emotions in social movements? In answering these questions, the paper explores a forgotten feature of anti-colonial campaigns: the divisive emotional performances and galvanizing “affective battles” for decolonization. Such struggles demonstrate the importance of a historical engagement with the hard sciences—and highlight the pitfalls and prospects of such an engagement.

The interwar years were a period of profound transition for Algerian society. As the European settler class, backed by the French colonial regime, continued to confiscate Algeria’s best agricultural land, economic opportunity waned for rural Algerians and many migrated en masse to Algeria’s urban centers. Desperate to support their families, women joined the labor force as domestic servants within European homes. Against this backdrop, debates about women animated Algerian society within the pages of the rapidly expanding Algerian French- and Arabic-language press. New technologies, like wire news, granted new access to political developments across the Middle East. Muslims in Algeria devoted enormous intellectual energy to analyzing how the improved status of women in spaces like Egypt and Turkey led to broader societal uplift. Commentators articulated a path forward for Algeria through aspirations and imaginings of a future Algeria with women at the center of the process. They argued that the feminist advancement of the Middle East was creating an Islamic renaissance in the present—a critical message of hope for his audience in Algeria. This paper explores how and why the emotional, the aspirational, and the imaginary mattered. This analysis of the impact of these transnational references borrows from and contributes to the growing body of work on “emotional transnationalism,” which, according to Diane Wolf, models how to analyze “the process of sustaining transnational connections through emotions.” The pride that Muslims in Algeria articulated in response to Middle Eastern developments was bound up in their own emotional response to the daily humiliations of life in a settler colony and their mounting hopelessness regarding the possibility of reforming colonial policy. In between the lines of calls for a more egalitarian society were dreams of a future in which young Algerian dreams of a modern Muslim society could be realized.

In February 2019, an anti-system protest movement known as Hirak became among the most powerful nonstate entities to arise in Algeria since independence. This paper is a discourse analysis of this ongoing movement, specifically of the online representations of Hirak’s slogans, placards, chants, manifestos, and communiques, as well as social media debates over their significance. Coupling this data with activist interviews and previous ethnographic findings, this paper looks at how and which signs and symbols (systems of signification)—including but not limited to those of the national anticolonial struggle—have allowed Hirak to enjoy unprecedented levels of symbolic power and political legitimacy in Algerian society today. What systems of signification are generated and mobilized, and what do they allow the movement to do? Findings reveal one example in the various ways Hirak’s re-contestation of once-‘settled’ questions of national belonging have allowed it to claim ownership of ‘Algerianness’ and Algerian subjecthood—a historic linchpin of social-political legitimacy—at the expense of the state. Underscoring in this way the abiding role of affect, this paper invites the yet-structuralist literature on contentious politics to make better sense of the various languages, repertoires and tactics observed in the politics of resistance. It especially allows us to rethink one of the key pillars of contentious politics: political opportunity. Social movement theory often imagines political opportunity as exogenous structures that act upon movements. However the Hirak shows a case where the meaning-making processes that arise in the intersubjective process of mobilization generate the worldviews and dispositions that allow political opportunity to operate at all. The popular ideational shifts forged through the movement’s own mobilization (notions that the ‘people’ were the rightful executors of a revolution confiscated by successive post-independence regimes) is what provided the foundational impetus and mass support for its repertoires of action in themselves (mass weekly protests, sit-ins, boycott of elections, boycott of negotiations with members of the ‘old guard’) and made them politically-available relative to past anti-system movements. This shows that political opportunity may be generated endogenously through movements’ own repertoires of action.

On December 3rd, 1994, Saïd Mekbel, a writer lauded as one of Algeria’s greatest contemporary journalists, was murdered while at lunch with a colleague in a pizzeria near downtown Algiers. He was killed by a young man who reportedly acted on the orders of one of the armed organizations then launching a revolt against the state. Over the course of the country’s civil conflict of the 1990s, oftentimes unknown agents kidnapped or killed approximately 105 media workers for reasons as equally murky as the attackers’ identities. Mekbel himself was the author of a popular editorial column named “Mesmar J’ha,” the Nail of J’ha, a common trickster in Middle Eastern and North African folklore. Through this work that the editorialist had carried on since 1990, Mekbel used irony and satire to express his distaste for the then ongoing conflict and the raw emotional experience of losing numerous colleagues and friends. As Mekbel published his editorial pieces on a day-to-day basis in the widely-read Le Matin newspaper, this source offers historians a unique pathway to comprehending how Mekbel’s emotions and emotional appeals to readers fluctuated in rhythm with events. Scholars have typically associated the actions of Algerian men with humiliation and anger during this period. The present piece underscores one example of a member of the Algerian civilian majority who rejected violence during the “Dark Decade” and argues that he embraced a range of emotions beyond anger, namely a mournful irony, to mobilize his followers into common responses to the deteriorating security situation unfolding around them. This article will highlight the agency of past actors in employing emotions to carve out their own emotional communities (Rosenwein, 2002) and the multifaceted and multidirectional consequences these efforts could have in the midst of one of the deadliest conflicts of the late 20th century. To accomplish these goals, I rely upon a close reading of dozens of Mekbel’s writings from the height of Algeria’s civil conflict along with humor and social mobilization theory and literature from the region on grief and mourning. This piece will be of interest to historians and other students of emotion in MENA seeking to better understand how past actors can seek to simultaneously appeal to, reflect, and influence emotional communities during a moment of stark political division.