Arthur Asseraf, Electrical News in Colonial Algeria (New Texts Out Now)

Arthur Asseraf, Electrical News in Colonial Algeria (New Texts Out Now)

Arthur Asseraf, Electrical News in Colonial Algeria (New Texts Out Now)

By : Arthur Asseraf

Arthur Asseraf, Electrical News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Arthur Asseraf (AA): I think the main reason I wrote this book was that I became frustrated with a certain kind of global history. Electric News describes how new technologies of information circulation created a sharply polarized colonial society in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Algeria. 

This was not the book I started out writing. At the beginning of my research, I was frustrated with a historiography that focused on Algerian history only as an attempt to explain developments in France now. So, to go beyond the French context, I was trying to figure out how to make Algerians relevant in global history, to show how they moved around, and make them look cosmopolitan and sophisticated. As I progressed, I realized that I was asking the wrong question. Of course, some Algerians under colonialism did move around and participate in global intellectual debates, but focusing on this small group of people would have missed the point. Due to settler colonialism, most Algerians could not move, and their particular experience of globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was one of restricted mobility. 

I am not the first to point out that we should be looking at those who did not move as much as those who did, examining friction as much as flows. What I became increasingly interested in was the role of media in shaping this geography. Looking at media can allow us to see how those who did not move experienced the world, and how their sense of space was reconfigured under colonialism.

I became concerned with using this particular history to help us understand our own technological transition today, in which many of us feel like media is having an effect that is fragmenting and isolating. Can we take the experience of news under colonialism not as an exception, but as location from which to rethink the role of media more broadly? 

A few years ago, I was in Galilee, in the north of Palestine, and I was speaking to an American woman who had made aliyah there. We were very close to the border, and as we looked at the forested mountains in front of us, she said to me, “Every morning I wake up and I see Lebanon, but Lebanon is more distant to me than Australia. I have family in Australia; I can imagine what it is like there. I have no idea what life is like in Lebanon.” I found her description very disturbing but also quite honest. How can media create a world where people who are physically close appear very far? This book is an attempt to answer that question by looking at a very particular place, Algeria under French rule. This is a way of using Algerian history to say something that has broader relevance to other places, and not just to fit the experience of Algerians into pre-existing narratives.

... colonialism constantly reproduced distance out of close social encounters.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AA: The book looks at the development of the printing press, telegraph, radio (and at the very end, television) in a society divided between a hegemonic European settler minority and a majority of Algerian Muslims who had little control over media infrastructure. Because of this, news stories coming from European sources were consistently reworked, distorted, and made to be relevant to audiences for which they were not intended. In Algeria, the same newspaper could produce two different imagined communities by being taken into a café and read out loud, in Arabic or Tamazight, with a completely different interpretation.

The book, thus, puts two main bodies of literature in conversation. The first is on media and how it produces social change, from Marshall McLuhan to Benedict Anderson. By looking at a society where people experienced the media completely differently at the same time, I suggest that the best question to ask of mass media might not be when but for whom

In turn, this connects with a debate that has been occurring in the historiography on colonial Algeria: how much contact was there across the colonial divide? By looking at both settlers and colonized in the same analytical frame, I suggest that contact produced friction, and that colonialism constantly reproduced distance out of close social encounters.  

J: What were the biggest challenges of doing research for this book? 

AA: The biggest challenge was in recovering people's experience of news, which is by definition ephemeral. Source-wise, a lot of information circulation happened in conversations, songs, or telegrams that were not destined to last and have disappeared. 

I tried to compensate this by drawing on state archives, and on the role of surveillance in shaping information circulation. Doing research in Algeria around 2013 changed my view of the role of the state's role in shaping information. When you live in a system where the rules are opaque, surveillance shapes your life not just through direct censorship. It also affects what information you consider sensitive, what you share in private and in public, and so on. The current Algerian government is very different from the French colonial state, but this experience made me realize that state expectations of what news is important affect everyday life, and surveillance is not separate from other forms of media.  

In the end, however, for a historian, it is difficult to reconcile my attempt to write a narrative based on long-standing change with my subject's own experience of time, which could be disruptive or non-linear. Rather than ignore this contradiction, I tried to put it in the book: there is something paradoxical about writing a history of news.

J:  Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

AA: I tried to write this book in a way that would be interesting to scholars who do not know much about Algeria, so hopefully that comes through. In particular, I hope it would be interesting to people who work on media and technology, and people thinking about settler colonialism. My dream would be that it puts to bed people's rather lazy uses of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities to explain the rise of nationalism. This was a book that Anderson himself grew frustrated with later on. Because his is a theory that relies quite heavily on media, especially novels and the newspaper, I think we have to go back to how people read newspapers to write a different history in which nationalism is only one of the political formations available to people in the region. 

For those who work on the Maghrib, I think it provides a new angle to look at colonial society. What happens when we look to the development of the newspaper, the radio, and the television for change rather than the rise of political parties? I see the book as participating in a really rich new generation of works on North African history that are expanding our sense of the past beyond the histories of political elites, and into aspects of other social groups and daily lives that provide unexpected continuities across the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods, and replace the Maghrib within wider regional contexts. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

AA: My current projects both involve looking deeper at the relationship between rumor and race. My next project takes my research forward in time, by looking at the role of rumor in shaping racial categories in France since 1962. I am interested in how people talk about race in a context where the state denies that race exists, and how this differs from the previous colonial period in North Africa.

I am also working on a spin-off book about the story of an Algerian informant who became infamous in France after going on a botched exploration mission to West Africa around 1900. As I was researching Electric News, I encountered this man, Messaoud Djebari, who fabricated information to gain social advancement that was denied to him as a colonial subject. So, I want to use him to talk about what agency North Africans had in relation to sub-Saharan Africans under colonialism, and what the role of truth might be in the circulation of information.

 

Excerpt from the book

In 1938, local activists in Tlemcen tried to republish a pamphlet they had received from Cairo, entitled ‘Palestine the martyr’ (Filastin al-shahida). The text was seized by French police before they could do so. In order to justify the Arab Revolt against the British mandate in Palestine (1936–9) as a case of legitimate self-defence, the text mentioned numerous specific acts of violence committed against Palestinian Arabs:  

‘Have you heard the news of Palestine the martyr? The sacred Arab Palestine, the land of the al-Aqsa Mosque, whose surroundings we have blessed, the first qibla, the Third Holy Place and the land of the lord the Messiah, the Prophet of mercy and peace?’

In the 1930s, the word ‘martyr’ (martyr/e or shahid/a) was one of the most common ones to be found next to Palestine in the Algerian press. Many other countries were called ‘martyrs’ both in Arabic and in French. Libya, whose enduring suffering under Italian rule was of great concern to Algerians, was also dubbed a martyr. In 1920, one of the foundational texts of the Tunisian nationalist movement was ‘Abdelaziz Tha‘albi’s book La Tunisie Martyre: ses revendications.

The word ‘martyr’ is not just a more religious way of saying ‘victim’. In both Christian and Islamic contexts, a ‘martyr’ is fundamentally a ‘witness’. A victim’s suffering is meaningless, while a martyr’s suffering bears witness to a higher truth for the whole community of believers. Individual martyrs are a well-known feature of modern nationalism. In Algeria as in many other places, the cult of individuals dead for the nation occupies a central role in the national imaginary. In independent Algeria, a martyr (shahid) is a person who died in the struggle for independence against France. The ‘Monument to the Martyr’ (Maqam al-shahid) that dominates the Algiers skyline plays the same role as Monuments to Unknown Soldiers do in so many other places around the world. But the text in 1938, like many others in this period, referred to the entirety of Palestine as a martyr. 

What does it mean to refer to a whole country as witness to a truth? Calling Palestine a ‘martyr’ meant that developments there carried lessons for Algeria. What exactly these lessons might be was uncertain. Over the course of the 1930s, Palestinian news played a central political role in Algeria because it seemed both important and distant. Distance gave Algerians a means to reconsider their own problems on a different scale, to zoom out, adjust their gaze and reconsider their relationships with each other.  

If understanding faraway events was essential, it was not easy, so news became an important site of debate and discussion. Typically, most commentators lamented that social inferiors were incapable of properly understanding the news. L’Ikdam, writing in 1921, claimed that most Algerians in the countryside had a poor understanding of the contemporary Turkish War of Independence, ‘Ask the native mass what is Angora [Ankara], nearly all will answer, unsure, that Angora must be a young daughter of a sultan from the Thousand and One Nights.’ Surveillance reports by the French administration expressed the same scepticism about the possibility of Algerians understanding world events. People were, they argued, insufficiently educated to understand the news. No one saw these misunderstandings as constitutive of the very nature of news itself, which necessarily involved mediation to carry reports across distance.

Observation of events abroad played a determining role in the formation of what would come to be known as Algerian nationalism. Much has been written on the process by which individuals come to imagine themselves as forming part of a national community, but surprisingly little on how, in order to do so, they need to be able to imagine other nations. Canonically, the first call for national independence was by Messali Hadj, the founder of the Étoile Nord-Africaine (ENA), in 1927 while at an international congress in Brussels, though the respective importance of various figures and parties in the national struggle is hotly debated. This quest by much of Algerian historiography to find the ‘first’ call for national independence has come under well-deserved criticism, especially in the work of James McDougall. One of the defining features of a nation as an imagined community, after all, is that there are always other nations out there, developing in parallel, which is what makes something like the United Nations possible to conceive. ‘Nationalism’ does not precede ‘internationalism’, for the two terms form a mutually reinforcing pair of concepts.

Well before formal calls for Algerian independence were issued, Algerians longed for other nations, for their leaders, their hymns, their flags, aware of the power that this toolkit had on the world stage. In their houses they hung portraits of Mustafa Kemal, hero of Turkish independence, or of Abdelkrim, the leader of the Rif Republic in northern Morocco.They mistook Egyptian nationalist hymns for Algerian ones well before an Algerian anthem had been written. Activists in early twentieth-century Algeria felt like the future was already somewhere else, and political mobilization was an attempt to bridge this distance between Algeria and the rest of the world. Adopting the temporality that Algerians were ‘backward’ and needed to ‘catch up’, news of developments in other places articulated the space between current realities and the desired dream. This desire relied on distance, on Algerians frequently misunderstanding faraway places for their own purposes. 

Rather than seeing this activity as a preliminary phase to ‘real’ nationalist activity, it is possible to analyse it on its own terms. No one in Algeria claimed to be Palestinian, only that Palestine’s suffering made their own predicaments visible. Before martyrs for the nation could exist, before there could be monuments to unknown soldiers for whom flames would be lit, there were distant places whose suffering made action in Algeria urgent. Before the nation could have its martyrs, there were martyr nations. 

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.