Sixty-one years ago today, on April 25th, 1961, France detonated an atomic bomb at the Centre Saharien d’Expérimentation Militaire (CSEM, the Saharan Military Test Centre) near the village of Reggane, approximately 1500 kilometers southwest of Algiers. The Algerian War was in its seve..
Roxanne Panchasi
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in France and its empire after 1945. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (Cornell University Press, 2009). She has published widely on French culture and politics including work on memory, military technologies/imaginaries, and film. Her most recent article, “‘No Hiroshima in Africa’: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara” appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a podcast series on the New Books Network.