In Search of Algeria: Between Literature, History, and Cultural Studies

Patrick Crowley, Algeria: Nation, Culture, and Transnationalism: 1988-2015 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017)

Valérie K. Orlando, The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950-1979 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017)

Tristan Leperlier, Algérie, Les écrivains dans la décennie noire (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2018)

[This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

Algerianists frequently lament Middle East studies’ inability to recognize the wonderfully complex, multilayered, and fascinating country that is the subject of their inquiry. But on second look, its complex configuration, so different from better covered Arab countries, explains why Algeria is marginalized in scholarship as compared to, say, Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Algerian experience is frequently reduced to three historical markers—the War of Independence against France (1954 to 1962), the civil war in the 1990s, and the “Algerian exception” in 2011—and a few common tropes: Algeria as not quite Arab, Algeria as uniquely tied to France through its migrants, and Algeria as a country plagued by a perpetual cycle of violence (which, according to “experts,” might as well be written in its DNA). In the meantime, Algeria has also emerged as a privileged terrain for postcolonial studies, a pot in which to brew a rich blend of empire, violence, multilingual literatures, experimental poetics, alienated subalterns, and transnational connections with the old metropole. This scholarship tends to draw on Francophone texts, from which it derives a narrative of cultural hybridity to contrast with the execrable media portrayal of the Arab region in the aftermath of September 11.

This reductive portrayal is a serious shortcoming that Algerianists have sought to address, driven by global academic conversations and by Arab cultural studies. This is evidenced by three recent publications (and several upcoming others): Patrick Crowley (University College Cork) has an edited volume on Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988-2015 that brings together a fantastic group of established and rising scholars to properly investigate transnationalism in the past three decades in Algeria. Valerie Orlando (University of Maryland) in The Algerian Novel proposes a reading of Algerian Francophone literature coming to terms with decolonization and independence through the angle of the French New Novel. Tristan Leperlier (EHESS Paris) in his published doctoral thesis Algérie, Les écrivains de la décennie noire breaks new ground by combining Bourdieusian sociological and literary frameworks to explain how “the transnational and multilingual literary field reacts to political crises” (27).

Together, these works illustrate a growing appetite for expanding the field of Algerian studies to new chronologies and new themes while offering an intelligible account of “Algerianness.” They seek to capture the Algerian experience through its cultural production and draw on a multitude of disciplines including history, literary criticism, and sociology. Arab cultural studies, as Tarek Sabry writes, needs to contend with postcolonial studies and how it impedes a grounded approach to Arab culture. Arabs “seldom pose the postcolonial question” themselves and the discipline occults Arab political agency by “deconstructing the complexities of the ‘postcolonial’ text than on the ‘postcolonial’ subject per se, whose condition and material realities it ought to be representing.”[1] It is fixed on abstract ephemeral notions (such as “entrapment, inbetweenness, alienation, dislocation or hybridity”) and elaborate “post-colonial texts over the ‘real’ material conditions and ‘realities’ which govern the lives of the real, living and breathing postcolonial subject,” leading to ludicrous outcomes where, rather than “listening to the subaltern,” the Arab postcolonial subjects, they are reified, put on display, and silenced “under the pretext that they cannot speak [and] positions the postcolonial theorist as their immediate speaker.”[2]

Arab cultural studies, by contrast, offers rigorous methodologies and self-conscious approaches to its object of inquiry, focusing on “Arab media, culture and society” within a specific spatiality and temporality, and asks rigorous questions such as “how does the cultural material [...] relate to and inform ‘contemporary’ articulations (both sociological and philosophical) on Arab culture and society?”; “what are our points of reference for what was said, and to what epistemic space ‘paradigm’ did [they] contribute? [...] How do we connect it to the existing body of intellectual work on Arab culture(s) and society?”[3] All the while, it seeks to produce an “epistemic space in which it can operate and develop paradigms” while it “build bridges and linkages with Arab and Islamic thought” or Arab reason to ensure its authenticity.[4] These remarks leave us with two major lines of inquiry: first, how these books on Algeria make use of the past, and second, how they represent the cultural landscape. We will then be a step closer to contextualizing and deconstructing how these works adopt the image of a “plural Algeria” as an aspiration going forward.

1. Bringing the Historical Back

All three volumes go beyond the War of Independence (1954-1962), by addressing the nation-building period of the 1960s and 1970s (Orlando), the civil war in the 1990s (Leperlier), and its aftermath from 2005 to 2015 (Crowley). Citing James McDougall in his introduction, Crowley defines the aim as filling in the historiographical gaps, the transitions and transformations “in the shadow of three revolutions” (1962, 1988, and 2011; 10), to which the other two literary studies add a generational framework to underline the crucial link between historical period and style of writing. In fact, both Crowley and Leperlier take the October 1988 riots in Algiers as the historical turning point to explain the Algerian cultural present. The 1990s saw a string of assassinations of famous writers (Tahar Djaout) and singers (Cheb Hasni and Matoub Lounes), and even President Mohamed Boudiaf, which shocked Algerians’ and sparked their cultural production (7). Leperlier’s book, with an image of Algeria bleeding on its cover, explains that this new configuration of the literary field began in 1988 with the “liberalization of the cultural and media sector, shifting [...] the rapport between writers and the political field” and the passing of the giant Kateb Yacine (14). 

While there is unanimity around 1988 as the new “center of gravity,” these books make different uses of history. Crowley seeks the historical context as an opportunity for “interrogations and exploitations of that period and of the relationship between nation and context” and not to “fetishize context – establishing it as the arbitrator of authentic representation” and instead to provide nuance and multiple experiences (4). His contributors heed this call with chapters that often reinterpret conventional approaches to Algerian historical categorizations. For James McDougall, revolutionary moments are clarified in light of prior ones; hence the events of 2011-12 are compared to the riots of October 1988, which inevitably invites comparison with the ongoing events of 2019. Malika Rahal introduces nuance and pushes back against teleology by noting that “making sense of this period is difficult due to the rapid succession of the events in question” and against the facile idea that “the democratization process ended in the ‘black decade’ of the 1990s” (82). Instead, by following the PAGS (the Algerian New Left), its trajectory from clandestine existence to legality, and its difficult choices after 1988 (especially regarding the Islamist takeover), she alleviates the determinism of the context and places agency back on those who produce cultural works.

The other two adopt more implicit approaches toward the historical context. Due to the nature of Leperlier’s sociological methodology and his fieldwork (his interviews of Algerian writers and use of press clippings), his book is written within the historical period but offers little engagement with the historical narrative or chronologies, missing an opportunity to retell a cultural history of this period. Orlando’s use of the past is more puzzling and problematic. While the book announces its focus on the post-independence period, and indeed most of the novels she considers were published in that period, she firmly anchors her reading “backwards” to the colonial period. When addressing the context of the nation-building years, she paints in monochromatic, broad-brush strokes a period of “soul searching and questioning over the tenuous place of the individual in a world of chaos and disorder, violence and bloodshed, in wars of liberation of the modern century... that inspired the origins of the modern Algerian novel” (13-4). While the post-independence period is regularly dispatched with by evoking “national disillusionment,” “failure to live up to national ideals,” “Arabization policies” or “Third World ideals,” those feelings are reached in relation to the colonial experience, which clearly provides the inspiration for all these novels as we see in the three chapters dealing with the 1970s generation. Rachid Boudjedra’s novel follows an Algerian immigrant worker in France who meets his demise in the metro (chapter 6). Nabile Farès writes about his national disillusionment after independence drawing from stories about the Kabyle mountains and the FLN fighters during the 1954-1962 war (chapter 7). Yamina Mechakra’s novel was published in 1979, but its topic was women during the war of independence and the topic of “vacant goods” (abandoned lands and houses after independence), “the plot of which takes place between the years 1955 and 1962,” with little attention paid to the condition of women and women writers after independence (255, chapter 8).

Overall, The Algerian New Novel frequently appears disconnected and disinterested in establishing any linkages with recent scholarship on Algerian history to contextualize its literary analysis. It is frequent to find Orlando quoting extensively from single sources, which are seldom up-to- date: chapter 4 on Mohammed Dib cites repeatedly “the Turkish journalist and historian Arslan Humbaraci” and his 1967 book Algeria: A Revolution That Failed, written based on his observations at the time, for in-depth analyses of the process of nation-building.[5] Taking for granted the words of her novelists that “The History of Algeria, a history that is opaque” we regularly find problematic passages that mystify rather than clarify: “Within the historical framework of the period 1961-66, these two novels, depicting the ripple in time between colonial and postcolonial Algeria, are remarkably similar in how each novelist attempts but fails to describe a reality that is outside itself in the sense that its entire context is unknowable and unreadable” (125, 138). 

These three books and their approach to history offer a spectrum and highlight the pitfalls of insufficient historical awareness when it comes to writing cultural studies. It hurts the literary analysis in particular when history is used superficially, in the case of Orlando’s book. Instead of broadening the topic to the post-independence years, it traps Algerian literature in the colonial question and its authors in nostalgia, malaise, alienation, and national disillusionment. As a result, the book’s epilogue, which offers coverage of Francophone literature during the civil war as a continuation of the themes of malaise and discontent, contrasts heavily with Leperlier and Crowley’s account that 1988 provided a fundamental rupture in the cultural field and new forms of writing to express this new stage in the country’s history, especially in the debate on what it means to be Algerian (section 3). 

2. Representing the Algerian Cultural Landscape

“How can we talk about ‘Algeria’?” Crowley asks, without falling into the narrative of a country torn by “culture wars, by unbridgeable divides between French speakers and Arabic speakers, seculars and Islamists, Arabs and Amazigh, etc” (3). This question highlights the act of representation, which we can break down into three forms in these works: representation as “depiction” (or observation), the literary product of an experience expressed in novels, and a critical inquiry into those self-styled Algerian spokespeople. 

The representation of the current Algerian cultural landscape to come out of Crowley’s volume is an encouraging success, especially in how it approaches Algeria for itself and not through France’s eyes, without sacrificing the emancipatory potential of transnational perspective from restrictive national discourse. It does so with a grounded approach toward this cultural production, studied in its context, and defined broadly (music, plastic arts, dance, sports, and entertainment). Langlois’s chapter on musical traditions (Andalusian music, Raï, and Kabyle songs) opens a way to discuss the country’s internal borders and the uses of music by various social and political groups; Hecking’s chapter discusses youth and urban street dances, such as capoeira, and the possibility of new political patterns of mobilization; Gillet’s chapter on the plastic arts as a form of archival remembrance of the civil war and its traumas; and Dine’s chapter on sports and national identity in Algeria, on football stadium violence and transnational patterns of consumption of sports entertainment.[6]

These chapters portray a dynamic Algerian cultural landscape centered around their actors’ choices and subjectivities, while opening fascinating avenues for methodological and thematic advances, within the themes of Arab cultural studies (for instance, creative youth dissidence, global networks, state recuperation and clientelism, and cultural trauma).[7] They mostly avoid blanket statements and problematic generalizations, while opening a space for new forms to be included later (cinema, television, theatre). Unfortunately, these chapters seldom engage in dialogue on shared themes (such as resistance between Gillet and Langlois, youth in Dime and Hecking).

These chapters also offer a cautionary tale about ignoring ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria to update empirical understanding. Dine’s chapter on sports is too broad and plagued by tired generalizations. It misses an opportunity to explore a topic that has been made visible by the current Algerian Hirak: the culture of football supporter groups that have produced street mobilization in 2019. Instead, Dine rests his argument on simplistic tropes regarding “stadium violence” as “precursors of the riots to come,” or “the only alternative for many young Algerians seeking escape from el hogra would appear to be el haraga – literally the burning – of former identities along with identity papers – associated with clandestine migration and ensuing European exile” (211).

When it comes to the literary representation of Algerian cultural experience, these recent publications continue to reify Algerian Francophone and postcolonial novelists, despite valid questions about their specific fields of experience compared to Algerian society as a whole. Orlando’s book offers an extensive inquiry into the Francophone literary tradition in Algeria and how it was inspired by the French Nouveau Roman that will add another brick to the edifice of a postcolonial and interconnected postcolonial and world literature.[8] In so doing, it presents a fundamental limitation: it accounts for the poetics at length without giving equal weight to reordering the politics and acknowledging the resulting worldview that emerges from it. As a result, Orlando offers us a study that succeeds in recreating the feeling of reading these novels, rather than going beyond to draw deeper from the cultural experience of Algeria from which these authors emerged. In chapter four, Orlando compares French novelist Claude Ollier and Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine as two experimental representatives of the Nouveau Roman. She continuously states that their style is one that is “unreadable,” “opaque,” and “removed from reality,” but that they were also “seeking to convey the incomprehensibility of the Algerian nation from two viewpoints” (119). She justifies this as a poetic device to reflect “Algeria as a space that is both real and unreal, concrete and temporal” and that “the sociopolitical climate of the times fostered rethinking the lines drawn between fiction and reality,” claiming that “we must enter a third world—a third space of literary imagination” (123, 141). This chapter encapsulates this work’s fundamental flaw with this work: a failure, or a disinterest in engaging with the Algerian subject’s worldview that would be grounded in tangible realities. While this approach may owe to different disciplinary specifications, literary criticism in this case, the reader learns virtually nothing about Algeria in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Algerian Francophone literature continues to occupy a significant space in the field: in Crowley’s volume, Corbin Treacy writes about the “‘88 Generation” and Olivia Harrison explores how Algerian Francophone writers adopt new themes beyond their fraught colonial relationship with France (while still within the anti-imperial dialectic). Both chapters offer more substantive engagement with the Algeria in which these novelists operate: one grappling with the civil war’s impact for Treacy, and one engaging with other imaginations, including the question of Palestine or the post-9/11 world for Harrison (falling under the label of “transcolonial”). These two texts still share with Orlando an approach that is centered on the writer, who still comes across as an alienated subject, plagued by cultural malaise because of Algerian contradictions, which are dispatched under simple headings—national disillusionment, hollow Third World ideals, oppressive Arabo-Islamism—that we are forced to take for granted. This Algeria is mediated by the Francophone writer’s malaise and unable to offer alternative portrayals for the external reader, curious to understand the inner workings of Algerian culture.

The breakthrough comes from Leperlier’s innovative sociological book. He maps the literary field after 1988 and succeeds in re-territorializing Algerian culture by embracing its transnational nature (chapter 4). He avoids making it dependent on France or overshadowing its grounded stakes inside the country. Leperlier tackles Algeria’s “language wars” and demystifies the relationship between Arabic and French writers, in what is bound to spark pushback and debate in the field. In the second chapter “Language Wars?” posed as a question, he treats the conflict between Tahar Wattar (Arabic) and Tahar Djaout (French) not as a conflict between languages, but for prominence in the Algerian Writers Union (137). Similarly, he dismisses the claim that Islamists purposefully assassinated Francophone intellectuals because they were symbols of an alien culture. Instead, Islamists targeted the cultural field as a whole and figures associated with the regime. These misconceptions grew because several Francophone writers produced and controlled a victimized narrative during their French exile, where they gained a podium to talk about Algeria’s struggles. In fact, the subtlety of the Algerian cultural sphere and the war was that “the civil war in the literary field was not in essence a language war, but it became one.” (155, 160)

Consequently, these works each offer a different angle to represent the Algerian cultural landscape through its literary field: a transnational approach, a transcolonial approach, and a grounded field-based approach. They deal differently with the Algerian subject’s agency: as a by-product of larger forces (France, global forces) or their own decisions and stakes. These themes allow us to turn the projector on these writers and the third meaning of representation: how novelists have emerged as spokespeople for their fellow Algerians, an “avant-garde,” having a “responsibility” to be a “witness.” Here again, we see a clear dividing line between the three books. Orlando’s approach builds the novelist as the anti-colonial spokespeople and authors of the authentic Algerian national aspirations (“littérature de combat”) who were marginalized after independence by the oppressive state authorities. Their novels “spoke truth to power” from the margins. Treacy upholds this representation of the writer-intellectual: a new generation of writers such as Mostafa Benfodil grew up with terrorism, village massacres, and assassinations. Their novels express their responsibility to “witness” and process their societies’ traumatic legacies. From the War of Independence to the civil war, the Algerian Francophone intellectual’s role remains constant in this construct.

Leperlier pushes back against the prophetic intellectual. He claims that the 1990s was the “swan song of the writer as the novelist as paragon of the intellectual,” as represented by Rachid Boudjedra as a celebrated “Voltaire-like Prophet” (94).[9] Instead, he points to several systemic shifts (declining symbolic capital, emergence of critical journalism), and instances where they stayed silent, including after the repressive handling of the October 1988 riots. Several Algerian writers took advantage of their status as intellectuals by publishing “testimony literature” in France, against the massacres in Algeria that fed into French media narratives (“barbaric Islamic violence” vs. steadfast enlightened Algerians), rather than having objective aesthetic quality.[10] By the civil war’s end, Leperlier writes, the Francophone novelist was no longer the national representative of the past (despite figures such as Kamal Daoud continuing to be elevated).

In conclusion, these works show that representing the Algerian cultural landscape involves a dynamic account of its cultural productions and a contextualization of those who produce them, that highlight in both cases their agency. Transnationalism and field-based approaches offer innovative angles. As we approach the question of “Algerianness,” the habitual tension between a cultural literary field that is impacted by transnationalism or one shaped by local stakes in Algeria is a false one. Rather than opposition and tension, both are Algerian. They need, however, to properly account for their interplay. 

3. Competing narratives on “Algerianness”

This recent scholarship is built on a strong push to ascribe “Algerianness” with a plural and cosmopolitan narrative—partly to counter post-September 11 narratives on the Middle East, or French academia’s fixation with colonialism and the war of independence. Crowley devotes his volume as a call to the “Algerias to come,” already at work and changing the country (19). Orlando shines light on authors who “affirm the concept of plurality” that picks “cosmopolitan transnationalism” and difference rather than restrictive Arab and Islamic frameworks (287). Together, these books enrich the growing literature on the Mediterranean and portray Algeria as a Camusian space of interfaith acceptance drawing from the image of neo-Andalusian convivienca, offered as a response to the 1990s civil war.

However, this idea of Algerianness often blurs the line between an authentic portrayal of Algeria that is, and Algerianness as plurality that remains an aspiration to be realized. For example, Sami Everett’s chapter addresses the Jewish component of Algerianness multiculturalism. He accounts for “successive evocations of instances of intersection between algerianités and judaïtés” including the chaabi music group El Gusto who build on a “mythical Andalusi/Berber/North African togetherness” (68). Meanwhile, he downplays whether this is merely a displacement and projection of a debate in France with different stakes that would undermine the reality of Algerian pluralism. Similarly, Jessica Ayesha Northey addresses Algerian heritage associations working to safeguard archeological sites such as Spanish forts in Oran with EU funding and committed civil society, emphasizing the idea of a legacy ready to be reactivated in the right circumstances. Hecking’s chapter on capoeira and dance also contains an underlying defense of progressive values. Her interviewees state that “capoeira ‘saves’ from the violence of the street” (191-3). In these cases, establishing pluralism is probably more important to the scholars than it is to the actors themselves.

These examples remind us of our relationship to those counterparts on the ground, and the risk of imposing our narratives or espousing their ideological positions. A cosmopolitan Algerian is more appealing than a “banal” and “everyday” one. Yet, when Le Monde Diplomatique recently revisited the sites of village massacres twenty years ago, the journalist did not find a country ready to embrace its plural legacy (“except in a few intellectual and artistic circles in Algiers”). Instead, the journalist depicts with realism the unresolved traumatic aftermaths and a clear religious turn (even from Islamists’ victims).[11] Myopia regarding “the other Algeria” is a greater risk for Algerian cultural studies than academic neglect. 

Against this approach on plural Algerianness, both Leperlier and Edward McAllister in Crowley demonstrate the way to address the social construction of competing narratives on Algerianness. Leperlier discusses expertly how Francophone Algerian novelists shaped their own narrative through “testimony literature,” but also by emerging as the privileged counterparts (or informants) for literary scholars in the academy, as we frequently see close-knit relationships between academic scholarship and these writers. McAllister’s chapter arguably offers the most conceptually advanced argument that the nostalgic narrative of “la belle époque,” the glorious 1960s and 1970s, is a response to today’s generations economic anxiety and uncertainty. It represents a prime example for what is done right, from oral interviews to a complex engagement with memory studies that portray Algeria as it appears and decoded under the surface. It successfully deconstructs complex narratives about youth, masculinity, nostalgia, and Algerianness.

Natalya Vince and Walid Benkhaled’s concluding essay in Crowley’s book, “Performing Algerianness,” offers a lucid and seminal map of the three competing narratives and their deployment in Algeria. They find that the interactions between these versions, “taken together, these different groups collectively perform Algerianness,” showing the particular iteration of culture, knowledge, and power that defines Algerianness (245). Algerians have learned to navigate, borrow, and recognize the three categories of Algerianness for strategic purposes, citing the examples of two opposing ideological public figures, Khalida Messaoudi Toumi and Cheikh Chemseddine. This should extinguish the Manichean narrative of Algerian “cultural wars” (Francophones vs. Arabophones).

This epilogue invites Algerianists to substitute the narrative of a “beautiful mess,” to portray the Algerian “cultural present tense” starting from the way Algerian subjects navigate the field themselves. The epilogue invites scholars to reach out from the text, question their subject’s subjectivity, and avoid imposing their aspirations for Algerian society and culture. Each scholar holds a greater responsibility as they will continue to shape the image of Algeria for generations of students in Europe and North America. As Vince and Benkhaled concede, the narrative of “cultural wars” looks to have a long life ahead, because of “the continuing political expediency of these categories.” Labels such as hizb fransa [party of France] or barbus [bearded men] continue to “provoke an instant reaction from one of the two others and allows for easier access to the public stage,” and the printing press (262). 

Conclusion: Slow Cooking and Algerian Cultural Studies 

The historian Donald Holsinger once characterized the story of Algeria as a “three-part tragedy.”[12] The present challenge for Algerian cultural studies is to move beyond the dramatic genre and toward theoretical rigor. These three works drive the conversation forward but they represent a mixed bag because of the rushed temptation to address the scholarly shortage on Algeria. The participants in Crowley’s volume offer rich studies, often informed by quality fieldwork and original material, but occasionally suffers from incomplete reflection. Orlando’s volume is a testament to Algerian Francophone literature’s rich and transnational nature, but the book’s prose can be painful to follow, poorly structured, and contains numerous factual errors that masks the originality of her contribution. Finally, Leperlier’s book was a doctoral thesis that breaks new ground by combining a rigorous sociological account to literature in French and Arabic but still would have greatly benefited from cutting down its methodological sections and offering more narrative substance.

This review has argued that Algeria is best understood by transversal methodologies, multilingualism, and research strategies that include a significant component of oral history and interview in Algeria (as evidenced by Edward McAllister, Tristian Le Perlier, Malika Rahal, or Britta Hecking). Second, academic studies need to be more forthcoming about the value of discourses, culture, and power in Algeria. When it comes to Francophone novelists, the frequency of their coverage leads the uninformed observer to assume they are the only existing (or valid) spokesperson for today’s Algeria, rather than doing the work of framing them in the overall field. Finally, Algerian cultural studies should work to acknowledge and decode the rules that govern Algerian culture, rather than impose Manichaeism or images of beautiful and messy melting pots. To adopt a cooking metaphor, it will require slow cooking and a greater attention to our ingredients.