In this paper, I consider the Berbers in the “banlieue” (the immigrant suburb), where in the late 1960s and early 1970s new generations of Berbers worked on “Amazigh” identity. “Amazigh” means “free men” and is the term with which Berber people refer to themselves, underlining their independence and rejection of the imposed term, Berber. Through research and interpretation of texts and poetry, they recovered and recognized a distinct history and culture as well as an oral tradition. I retrace the steps taken by these Berber research groups to show the connection with the situation today. This effort (to recover a distinct history and culture) co-exists, overlaps and is sometimes replaced by the “Beur” movement, which is comprised of the descendants of Berber and North African immigrants. Through an analysis of the creative texts of “Beur” writers such as Tassadit Imache, Nacer Kettane, and Mounsi, I look at the way they synthesize the “Beur” experience in their autobiographically-oriented texts and claim an “inbetween” space in France today.

This paper analyzes the enduring impact of Algeria, as place and memory, for Jews, Muslims, and their interactions in post-colonial France, from 1962 to the mid-1970s. It shows the overriding importance of the experience of the Algerian War in shaping each community’s regard toward Algeria, and toward one another. Focusing on the meetings, publications, and correspondence of the large Association des Juifs Originaires d’Algérie (AJOA), I argue that Algerian Jews combined commemoration and willful forgetfulness in their approach to Algeria. During the war, the community had sought to emphasize both its longstanding ties to Algeria, and its ultimate commitment to France and republican ideals. Now, as emigrants to France, these Jews drew attention to memory objects that marked the closeness of their relationship to France, that evoked episodes of anti-Jewish violence in Algeria, or that represented their ongoing physical connection to the land of Algeria. Simultaneously, in their effort to emphasize their Frenchness and put behind them the brutal circumstances of their departure, they chose to forget. Rather than evoking their longstanding relationship to the Muslims and Islamic culture that remained close at hand in many of their new neighborhoods, they treated Muslims and Islam with stunning silence. Meanwhile, I examine a particular Algerian Muslim community, that of the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville, and a key Muslim organization, the Amicale des Algériens en Europe (AMAE), to chart the multiple Muslim approaches to Algeria. In agitating for greater Muslim rights in France, the AMAE regularly drew strong parallels between the Algerian national liberation movement and the Palestinian cause. It also frequently cited connections, real or imagined, between the most adamant forces of “Algérie française” during the war, and the State of Israel. Yet the Muslims of Belleville lived side-by-side with a large community of Tunisian Jews. Their daily coexistence, while marked by occasional outbreaks of violence, proved relatively harmonious. Indeed, the presence of these North African Jews helped to foster an unmistakable sense of shared Maghrebian identity in this immigrant quarter of Paris, evoking earlier experiences of overlapping culture in Algeria. Ultimately, Jews and Muslims in post-colonial France treated Algeria and its recent war for independence with selective memory. They chose to retain certain elements of their Algerian past, while projecting present circumstances onto others. In the process, they sought to redefine their relationship not only to Algeria and its past but to the present and future French state and nation.

This paper attends to France's great shame: the native recruits of Algeria or "harkis" who fought for France during the Algerian War of Independence only to be mistreated and concealed from the nation's memory and historical record. Deviating from the conventional stories about their suffering and plight, I examine the French Fifth Republic's comparative treatment of the harkis and other Algerian immigrants who arrived in France after decolonization. I show that France made critical distinctions between the two and that the harkis, over time, became instrumental in the politics of memory and representation of France's colonial past in Algeria. The paper contends with accounts that characterize Algerians in France as a monolithic group and argues that disparate colonial experiences produced widely varied experiences among Algerians in France long after decolonization.

As early as 1948, Frantz Fanon (Algeria) and Mehdi Ben Barka (Morocco) articulated remedies such as acknowledgment, financial reparations, and repatriation of artifacts and national archives removed from colonies to colonizer states. In Frantz Fanon’s classic work, The Wretched of the Earth (p. 228), he argues for a “just reparation” for the crimes of colonialism, which, Fanon insisted, should be marked by a “double realization”: on the one hand the colonized must articulate that reparations are their rightful and just due; and on the other hand, colonizing capitalist powers must acknowledge the requirement to pay the colonized. Thus, while independence and self-determination are defined as mere moral forms of reparative justice, Fanon considers centuries of colonialism and its attendant despoliation of land, people, and resources, compelling and justifiable claims for financial indemnification. It is the case that since independence from France in 1962, Algeria never requested financial reparations from France according to available avenues through which one state may raise claims against another state. However, when France attempted to pass its 2005 law stating that colonialism’s positive features and its civilizing mission must be taught in the French secondary school system, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika swiftly demanded an official state apology -- but not reparations -- from the French government for the “crimes of colonialism.” In addition, Algeria has never ceased requesting the return to Algeria of French colonial archives on Algeria. This paper considers seemingly minor or subsidiary injustices and demands for non-monetary reparations linked to what has been called the “right to the archive.” By discussing France's refusal until 2007 to allow access to French colonial archives, two case studies are highlighted: 1) Algerians seeking information and military maps to remedy placement of millions of landmines (Morice and Challe lines) and 2) archival information about atomic test explosions conducted in Algeria in the 1950s and pre-1962 period to match against high cancer rates among dwellers of the Algerian Sahel region. Colonizer administrations in the post-independence era appropriated the formerly colonized archives and shipped them from colony to metropole, with the result that the archival pasts and histories of newly independent states reside elsewhere. Strengthening Algerian claims are facts about provenance and pertinence, meaning that though the French created the documents, they did so in Algeria (provenance), and they are about Algeria and Algerians (pertinence) in strikingly dramatic and life threatening ways.