Tempered by the fire of the war of independence, the Algerian state emerged in 1962, gloriously dazzling in a mythical postcolonial glow, and imbued with considerable third-worldist prestige. In this context, political opposition movements to the National Liberation Front (FLN) were faced with the challenge of opposing the first Algerian regime, while still supporting the nationalist project of constructing the state. This paper will examine what discourse communist opposition developed in order to position their movement both in support of “state building” as well as of the socialist orientation of the Ben Bella and Boumediene regime, and in opposition to the government’s repressive policies. Branded “soutien critique” [critical support] by their critics, this complex positioning was necessary both due to the international context, and because of the specificities of the Algerian post-colonial and post-war situation. The communist party, in the shape of the Parti de l’Avant-Garde Socialiste (PAGS), was therefore an underground party from the moment it was created, in 1966, while at the same time, organizing and invigorating mass movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Based on interviews undertaken with former activists over the past three years and the collection of party documents retained by individuals, during the same period, the paper will also allow for an examination of the more recent filters that construct militant discourse regarding the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, it will focus on the democratization that occurred between 1988 and 1992, as well as the civil war that followed, and how these events questioned actors’ relation to the nation, and the way of narrating their past in that respect. Thus, I will discuss the very possibility of opposing the FLN regime for PAGS members. My line of analysis interrogates the underlying and/or explicit definition of the nation supposedly sealed in 1962, a definition that has evolved along with the changing meaning of the event of 1962 over time.

Taking a gendered perspective and using oral history, this paper considers Algeria’s year of independence, 1962, as both event and metaphor (Amin, 1995). In the first part, it seeks to sketch out a revolutionary moment, bringing nuance to the popular and academic vision of women going ‘back into the kitchen’ in 1962 after the ‘parenthesis’ of their wartime activism, whilst at the same time exploring how continuities between the colonial and post-colonial periods – and notably men and women’s levels of education and socio-economic status – determined to what extent independence would offer individual women new opportunities. In women’s testimonies, 1962 is neither a cut off point nor a year 0, but a whole new world in which many things stay the same. The second part of the paper engages with the highly politicised historiography of Algeria. It explores the symbolic significance which 1962 has acquired in discourses of independent Algeria, as the watershed moment when either independence was consolidated (the ‘dominant’ discourse, in the sense it is promoted by the state) or the revolution stolen (the ‘non-dominant discourse’). It seeks to unpick how women’s narratives of where they were and what they were doing in 1962 are entwined with and filtered through anxieties about their own political legitimacy and relationship to power in Algeria then and now. The paper principally draws on twenty-eight oral history interviews with women who participated in the War of Independence (1954-62) in a wide variety of roles – from urban bomber to villagers in rural support networks – and who were in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, France or indeed Switzerland at the moment of, and in the months following, the Evian accords of March 1962 and independence in July of the same year. These interviews are contextualised by a survey of the contemporary press as well as published testimony and secondary sources. By engaging with the multiple meanings of 1962, the paper seeks to contribute to broader debates about colonial/ post-colonial periodisation, the interactions between discourses and lived experience (i.e. how discourses circulate and become part of the recounting of lived experience), and how to construct one’s sources for a period in which archives can be difficult to access and political debate has in many ways filled the gap left by a lack of historical research. Reference: Amin, S. (1995) Event, metaphor, memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992. Berkeley: University of California Press.

When ‘things go wrong’ in Algeria it is often blamed on a Zionist conspiracy. Such a suggestion has been made about the recent revolts that have significantly altered the political physiognomy of Algeria’s neighbours since 2011. While the financial co-opting of state functionaries has damped-down possibilities for popular social change in Algeria the socio-economic demands in the North African popular uprisings elsewhere has seen an increase in the expression of non-dominant claims and forms of expression. This paper is about the complex nature of anti-Jewish prejudice, to the backdrop of such expressions, in contemporary Algeria and representations of the once-was, but now invisible, Algerian Jewish minority. The analysis will examine the socio-historical processes that underlie the perceptions implicit within these and the dynamics of the dominance of a particular kind of thought that opposes the plurality of voices that make up the region’s cultural heritage. In an attempt to listen to Algerian alterity, this survey will attempt to ascertain the significance of contemporary perspectives, often viewed as past, but always re-interpreted in the present, concerning alliance, affective sympathy and opposition to ‘the Jew’, the ‘Other’, and the fellow Israélite or Yahud addzairi - a local term encompassing ethnic and religious components of Judaism. The purpose of this paper is to try and uncover what lies behind these multiple perceptions of Algerian Jews and what they tell us about the techniques of a political system that appears anxious about an urbanized and young population finding a unifying voice by embracing the cultural diversity of its territory and its history. Behind the references to Zionist plotting seeking to infiltrate the Nation, lie, it will be contended, a number of unresolved issues with the past and narratives surrounding the inception of the State that do not necessarily represent ‘the People’. The empirics of the paper will evaluate whether the current climate of change, which recalls the social movements in Algeria at the end of the 1980s, has modified the discourse surrounding the notion of alterity in Algeria today. I propose to do this by concentrating on the representations of the Jew in Algeria in 2012 emanating from official narratives by selecting and reviewing French and Arabic language written press published in Algeria in 2012. I will include in this review conference proceedings, academic output and Algerian film documentaries of the year in which the 50th anniversary of Algerian Independence was celebrated.

This paper will explore the ways in which contemporary political subjectivities in Algeria are articulated through socially held perceptions of the recent past, specifically during the much under-researched period of nation-building in the 1970s. This period represents the longest period of stability since independence and was characterised by authoritarian state-led development and considerable regime legitimacy. The paper will posit that the emancipatory promises made by postcolonial nationalism in Algeria during the 1970s are just as important as the decolonisation struggle in understanding shifting constructions of national consciousness. In addition, the paper will unpick how this period is viewed through the turbulent identity politics of the 1980s, the violence of the 1990s and the neoliberal economics and reinforced state power of the 2000s, as well as through generational change. The paper draws on a year’s urban ethnographic fieldwork in the working-class Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued – where many of the changes in historical and social discourse in Algeria, from socialism to Islamism and beyond, have been definitively inscribed on the urban landscape. In addition, popular culture will be a main source of data. Widespread depictions of past-present disjuncture, visible in nostalgic depictions of the everyday certainties of the 1970s and socialist era sociability, express past emotional investments in the future and have multiple functions and meanings in the present for different generations. As a way of relating to the present, nostalgic practices are shaped situationally in the process of their creation and re-enactment. Such practices may be politically neutral, expressing a yearning for youth, but may be utilised by political agendas to articulate criticism of present politics or bolster political legitimacy. Furthermore, in a country in which history is routinely believed to have been ‘confiscated’ by powerbrokers, 1970s nostalgia provides a rare opportunity for consensus around a ‘safe’ past that acted as emotional refuge throughout the turbulent 1980s and 1990s.

This paper aims to investigate the connection between the sentiment of despoilment and the image of the former colonizer in contemporary Algeria. Indeed, memories of the colonial period and the war of independence have often been instrumental to the construction of a post-independence hegemon over the past fifty years. Such memories have served as a stage to the founding myth of the State: the military’s aspirations of tutelage and the ascendancy of the revolutionary family. However, beyond this reinterpretation by the ruling coalition, memories of colonization are also used to express claims for equality and justice from below these too form a part of postcolonial national consciousness. Thus, the current Algerian political, economic and social discontent is often linked to the memory of what is seen as archetype of tyranny: colonial rule. For example, brutal coercion by the police can be compared to the exactions of French troops. Public construction projects that do not have the backing of the local population can be presented as a form of “colonization”. In some cases, the unequal development of the country, especially to the detriment of the South, is seen as a proof of ruling elite racism toward a category of sub-citizens. Subsequently, the former revolutionaries are turned into internal colonizers. This non-dominant discourse can be understood as an answer to the tendency of the ruling elite to foster a narrative that legitimates the current order by advancing a caricatural vision of the people as violent and immature. This work draws on interdisciplinary tools, borrowing from the fields of critical theory as well as sociology and political science. It centers on nine month of extensive fieldwork, during which I used semi-directive interviews and observations in situ during protests and political meetings. I also collected pictures, newspapers, cartoon, chants sung at soccer games, rumors and popular jokes that enabled me to use sources that are often overlooked in political science