Call for Papers: 1962, A World

Oran, Algeria
14–16 October 2012

Proposal Deadline: 15 April 2012

The symbolic and exemplary resonance of Algeria’s independence escapes the limits of either Algerian or French history. The interdisciplinary colloquium “1962, A World”—which will take place 14–16 October 2012 in Oran, Algeria—aims to analyze and describe 1962 as a matrix of events, stories, histories, and a system of multiple and antagonistic meanings. In other words, the colloqium`s goal is to make visible ignored links, contradictions, repetitions, tensions, touchy subjects, and avatars of 1962 as perceived as a world.

1962 is one of the crucial turning points of the “20th century of extremes.” It evokes multiple stories: Algeria’s liberation from colonial domination and its proclamation of independence; the end of French Algeria and the construction of a postcolonial republic in France; the seeming decline of empires and the forward march— as yet an unfulfilled reverie—toward a different and more equitable world. The symbolic and exemplary resonance of Algeria’s independence, whether as realm of memory or crucible of identities, escapes the limits of either Algerian or French history. Historians of the Algerian War for Independence have situated 1962 in a narrative that includes such markers as the opening shots of the war for liberation (1954–1955), the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954), the Bandung Conference (1955), years of Moroccan and Tunisian independence (1956),  the independence turn of other African states (1957-1960), and the Conference of Casablanca (1961).

Additionally, 1962 has often been viewed over the last fifty years as a stage upon which the closing shots of French colonial history flickered out. Yet it must also be recognized as the opening night of a new staging for (inter)national realities, made possible by the violent struggle over Algeria’s decolonization. As such, 1962 can, for example, be understood as a historical and anthropological turning point for the many political, cultural, artistic, and social movements that—starting from the Maghreb and elsewhere in Africa—defined the 1960s, 1970s, and thereafter. These movements, whether third-worldist, pan-Africanist, socialist, feminist or youthful, produced emancipatory stories that interwove visual and folk art, literature, and new medias. Taking off from the margins, they created a rhyzomatic universe that arcs beyond nations and has yet to be mapped.

What did 1962 as an event produce? What are its limits? What are its chronologies and historical impacts? What should we make of 1962`s current importance? What resonance has 1962 had beyond the Algero-French relationship, in the past and the present? The methodological and epistemological premises of this interdisciplinary colloquium “1962, A World” aim to bring into focus these multiple (often quite distinct) visions and to trace the bifurcations produced, shaped or rearticulated by Algaria`s war of independance. We will aim to trace the genealogy of 1962 as a "world" and map the sometimes problematic, yet often fecund, intersections and superimpositions thereby reproduced.

This call for papers is addressed to people working in diverse disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to history, sociology, anthropology, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and the history of visual and audiovisual arts who want to present advanced, exploratory or preliminary research. Studies should bring ethnographic or discursive interests to bear on what 1962 (re)produced.

Proposals can be linked to one or more of the themes outlined below, but these are meant to suggest rather than limit; proposals linked to other themes are welcomed. Additionally, colloqium organizers welcome diverse forms and means of communication, including presentations, panels, posters, artwork, and performances. We  are particularly interested in proposals from doctoral students or younger scholars affiliated with universities or research centers located in the Global South. We are exploring ways to finance such participants to include transportation and/or housing.

Proposal submissions should be under 300 words and must be accompanied by the following elements:

• Title of the communication
• Name(s) of communicant(s)
• Three (3) key words
• Institutional membership (status and affiliation)
• Contact information: postal address, country of residence, email, telephone
• Mini-CV (relevant publications, and academic, professional, and/or other contributions and activities).

Proposals should be sent to 1962unmonde@rizeway.com before 15 April 2012. We will notify those accepted by May 2012. Registration fees are €35 for doctoral students and post-docs, and €60 for researchers. Funds collected will go towards the travel costs of doctoral students and junior researchers.

Colloqium hosts are the Centre National de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle (CRASC) and Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines en Algérie (CEMA) based in Oran, Algeria, and the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) of Paris, France. For more information, contact Giulia Fabbiano (gfabbiano@hotmail.com) or Malika Rahal (malika.rahal@ihtp.cnrs.fr).

Colloqium Themes

1962, Towards a Genealogy of Knowledge

As a new chronological frame, 1962 inaugurated novel spaces and forms of knowledge production and diffusion. What is necessary is a genealogy of knowledge that exposes how disciplinary norms and governance have framed research on colonization, wars for independence, decolonization, and the postcolony. In other words, how can we analyze the tensions, the commitments, and the ways that power-knowledge worked?

The Power of Archives

Particular attention must be given to questioning the archives—their accessibility; their legitimacy; their existence; and their status and form (whether as written documents, through oral transmission, official sources, artwork or as popular forms of cultural expression). Critical work on archival questions will detail what conditions and sources make possible claims to objectivity about the past and open up new possibilities to think differently. Particularly welcome are efforts to explore types of archives that escape or trouble definitions embraced by the mainstream of the historical profession, notably those that invite interdisciplinary cooperation, creativity, and inventiveness.

The (Moral) Economy of Knowledge

Can we map the various national and transnational sites that produced, financed, and disseminated knowledge of 1962 and continue to do so? Would this allow us to understand the economics, to measure hegemonic power, to historicize the force fields and the impediments that frame and orient them?

Subjects and Objects, Legitimate and Illegitimate

What can be gained by re-examining existing research as a foundation that reveals critical insight into what subjects have been deemed legitimate or illegitimate? Such an approach might make clear what well-trodden topos and over-examined questions block from view.

1962, Inventing Revolution

1962 as the entry point into a new era invents the revolutionary moment, its practices, its narratives, its arguments, and its failures. The aim is to explore the era that 1962 shaped, in its reach and its expectations—third worldist; socialist, feminist, youthful, Pan-Arab, Pan-African, and internationalist, and to in turn show how this era represented 1962. These currents invent “their” Algerian Revolution, often transforming 1962 into "their" victory at the same time as other states and actors take up the repressive tactics and techniques of control and governance the French government developed during and for the war. When we unmoor 1962 and distinguish it from Algeria’s independence struggle, might it open possibilities to detail how it is taken up elsewhere through the political and analytical readings and tactical uses that are made of it?

Revolutionary Postures and Impostures

1962 transforms Algeria’s war for liberation into a revolutionary matrix, the prototype of revolutionary postures and thought. It creates, through the disappearance of dissension and internal conflicts, a novel orientalist leitmotif and myth—at once populist and gendered for liberatory and emancipatory movements. Returning to this invention promises to raise several questions. How did the revolution construct and masculinize history and the people—a “singular hero” that rose as if one man? How did it theatricalize them and, in doing so, also create marginalized, feminized, and forgotten figures? How, in the sanctification of liberation did 1962 legitimate violence as "necessary"? What was the cost in terms of what sometimes became a violent denial of the day-to-day complexity of social relations during and after the struggle? How did other utopias, carried by, among others, the Palestinian national movement, the African National Congress, Black Power, Latin American revolutionaries (e.g., Cuban and Shining Path revolutionaries, the Sandinistas, and Chiapaistas) take up, discuss, and take into account (or not) the relevance of 1962?

Pathways, Movements, Spaces

The invention of "revolution"  is also the invention of decolonization. What can we make of the pathways, the movements, the holding spaces that 1962 prefigures and anticipates in the establishment of “regroupment camps" in Algeria and France and in the emergence of Algiers as the paradigmatic example of an integrated city, a segregated city, an insurgent city, and a pacified city (first the martyred city of “The Battle of Algiers” then the “Mecca of Revolutionaries”? These crucial references provide grounds for rethinking  contemporary categories such as the frontier, circulation, mobility, exile, and the ways in which  developments from the ground up redefined them? What of the political, juridical, and repressive practices that worked to master human and cultural fluctuations and to diffuse conflict?

A Word, a Vocabulary: Rereading Implementations and Effects

The reiteration of the revolutionary moment requires that we qualify specific terms that we use and that were used. We must localize our vocabulary in specific forms, in order to measure their transcontinental disseminations. These concepts have often undone Eurocentric typologies and opened up new repertoires of claims, which are still being inventoried and deployed as the current Arab Spring and spread of “Indignation” remind us.

1962, Postcolonial Imaginaries

1962 is an event with multiple implications that include rupture, frontier, narration, representation, invention, as well as bricolage. This polysemy has catalyzed new and sometimes counter-intuitive connections and understandings in terms of culture, politics, and identities.

1962 as Tool-Box

From a postcolonial perspective, thinking 1962 requires attention to the politics of how it has been taken up in literature, art, cultural debates, sports, and linguistic debates in different regional and continental contexts at distinct moments. How has this revolutionary imaginary of rupture and renewal been taken up in Algeria, but also in Africa, Europe, the Americas, India, Asia, and Oceania? What can we say about the authors and actors who did so? What are the forms and frames through which it has been referenced? How have various political, military, and media efforts to make use of the struggle for emancipation enlarged, inversed, deformed or transformed its meanings?

Identity Politics, Poetics of Otherness

After 1962, identities that previously had gone unheard of or had not existed before (e.g., harkis, beurs, pieds noirs, Maghrebis) take form, while others are redefined, their possibilities to affirm or make claims reconfigured (e.g., Muslims, Berbers (Tamazight), North African Jews, Touregs, Algerians). In asking what 1962 did to questions of language, memory, and identity—of what it means to be a minority—we are also questioning how 1962 opened or continues to open up new ways, poetic as well as political, to analyze  various forms of otherness that it (re)produces and inspires.

Europe as Province

1962 dissolved and redrew national frontiers and the geo-political meanings attached to them. This was true not just for France and Algeria but also in the spaces and connections that link North to North, South to South, and South to North. How do pre-existing empires split and “provincialize”. How do new “empires” take shape as they have, for example, during the Cold War, through neoliberalism, religious politics or commerce?

1962 as Inspiration

The arts, literature, music, theater, and live performance have  all embraced 1962 as an exceptional date and a unique moment of possibility, giving it meaning in ways that go beyond (and, sometimes, tell us more than) its political echoes. What do such representations tell us about the world of 1962 and since then through the forms and genres that are chosen and invented? How do the creators of such diverse representations—each traddling the historical and the political without ever being wholly reducible to them— frame memories and shape understandings? How does attention to artistic representations, forms, and stagings reveal the politics of memory, and how memories and histories are spread and recounted? What types of discussions become possible and interesting as a result, between “scholarship” and understandings and imaginaries produced by artists?

A Portrait Gallery of 1962

What did 1962 do to the political, intellectual, scientific, and artistic landscapes in which it resonated? How can attention to notable individuals—Germaine Tillion, Mostefa Lacheraf, Jacques Derrida, Che Guevara, Kateb Yacine, Angela Davis, Malcom X, Abdelmalek Sayad, Mohamed Arkoun, and Pierre Bourdieu are but a few that come to mind—help us think, alone or or in their interactions, about topics related to 1962?