Susan Slyomovics, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage (Stanford University Press, 2024).

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

Susan Slyomovics (SS): In writing this book, I took on monuments that I kept seeing in France and Algeria, ubiquitous presences that made me stop and look. For example, in 1990 when I first came to Oran, Algeria’s second largest city, I lived near the magnificent monument to the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). In 2013, when I lived in Lyon, France, I stood in front of a statue whose origins, inscribed in gold letters, were the war memorial in Oran. So, I wondered if I could understand forms of colonization and decolonization through statues, their locations, material, and visual impacts on people most affected by them. This also meant trying to comprehend material formations of France’s settler colonialism in Algeria because these memorials, statues, and monuments all register harms and losses inflicted by conquest and wars in the past. But because so many colonial-era monuments remain (and I found many were beautiful sculptures) both in France and Algeria, things can be done to them in the present—repurpose, preserve, destroy, move elsewhere, and so on.

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

SS: How and when were Algeria’s French colonial war memorials and statues constructed, for what purpose, where, and if possible, how many? Around thirty-six thousand monuments were erected between the two world wars in France (which included Algeria, whose three northern regions of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine were integrated as French provinces) as well as France’s other overseas departments. Monuments memorialized those who fought and died for France in two world wars. Unlike the so-called indigènes elsewhere in the French empire, only the “Muslim” natives of Algeria (more colonial terminology) were drafted as French subjects but never citizens beginning in 1913. The figure for World War II is some 343,000 conscripted Algerians. Monuments to the war dead, statues, church bells, and more crossed the Mediterranean Sea during the nineteenth-century imperial drive to colonize North Africa and then around 1962 in the other direction at Algerian independence. The French military, the Catholic Church, and elements of the European settler-colonial population transferred a mountain of stuff to France with their presumed owners, while post-independence Algerians preserved, vandalized, and repurposed their difficult French monumental heritage. I draw on the anthropology and folklore of art, critical heritage studies, and settler-colonial studies to examine France’s monuments in and from Algeria on the move. They are central components for envisioning the history of France’s colony in Algeria as the study of the region’s society and politics that could call for, following Kirsten Scheid, a MENA ethnography to “start with art.” 

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

SS: My 1998 book, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village, is an ethnography about the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the village of Ayn Houd, south of Haifa, who were forcibly expelled in 1948, some dispersed to a village two kilometers away deemed illegal by Israeli authorities for decades, others deported to the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or further east to Irbid, Jordan. In the early 1950s, the Romanian Jewish architect Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dada movement, salvaged, saved, appropriated, spoliated the emptied Palestinian village—these are the many opposing terms to describe Janco’s project for a Jewish Israeli Ein Hod, an artist village and a museum which still flourish. I found theoretical, architectural, and material through lines that resonated for me again, but this time between France and Algeria in my recent book, Monuments Decolonized, to consider a related situation: who uses, repurposes, moves, destroys the difficult heritage of European settler colonialism, and when and why?  For French monuments in Algeria, I claim that statuary, war memorials, and monuments were not merely aesthetic, but literally a structural component of colonial power and violence. And a monument is a structure. I ask, what happens to French colonial monuments and sculptures after Algerian independence in 1962? Do monuments decolonize and how? In between these two books, I was influenced by a series of imagined and future decolonization projects by a trio of architects, Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman. They envisioned back in 2006 possibilities for the partial evacuation—or dared to speculate about a complete evacuation of Israeli settler colonies and military bases in the Occupied West Bank. For these three architects, such sites would become liberated zones in Palestine, free from direct Israeli presence, as crucial laboratories for studying the reuse, re-inhabitation, or recycling of Israel’s colonial military architecture. Aspects of my two books have focused on the afterlives of architecture, now adding monuments, to a settler-colonial present merely imagined in Palestine as over, while in Algeria considered as a settler-colonial past, in fact, geopolitically over and done with.

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

SS: There are one hundred and ten color images, so anyone who likes reading and looking at statues, monuments, architecture, and Algeria. The book addresses the political sensibility, rhetoric, and material traditions that underpin the global history of settler-colonial expansion. Settler-colonial traditions are resilient and continue to shape the global present. For example, memories of the Algerian War enacted in France have real everyday consequences: settler “nostalgeria” (nostalgia plus Algeria) fantasizes and rewrites Algeria as a place where Muslims and Europeans got along, a brotherhood of races and religions mixing all the while it reproduces in France the actuality of colonial Algeria divided by race and religion.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SS: I am currently researching the kouloughli—offspring of Ottoman soldiers (janissaries) who married local Algerian women and were linked to the native population through maternal lineages. I look at connections between biographical knowledge and pride among Tlemcen families who claim this heritage and the large-scale socioeconomic transformations of the family in Algeria. As an example, the Tlemcen municipality maintains genealogy archives in Arabic, only through the male line for kouloughli families. These documents are in opposition to France’s colonial archives based on deformations of Algerian male surnames and reconfigurations of native households through population censuses, compulsory French colonial identity cards and forced military conscription. How did the dynamics of French metropolitan domination and Algerian resistance emerge through claims to Ottoman heritage? Who guards (perhaps invents?) and who practices and recounts the genealogical memory, marriage customs, built environment, and kinship patterns related to an attachment to pre-colonial Ottoman Algerian traditions to this day?  

J: In reflecting on fieldwork in Algeria, why was deltiology, or the collection and study of colonial postcards, so essential to this study?

SS: Colonial postcards contributed to creating meaning and signification through the everyday, repeated, and systematic practices of picture-taking by the French in Algeria. While these images are inventories of races, peoples, tribes, architecture, statues, and monuments then, they continue to circulate in Western museums and publications to this day, a century after their initial production and circulation. Even more, contemporary North Africans have become consumers of their former colonial visual histories decades after Algeria's independence. I re-photographed the sites of colonial postcards—my visual portal to monuments, statues, and war memorials—and then juxtaposed them with my own photos to create a “before-and-after” method of visual comparisons. When monuments are moved or altered, photographic fieldwork offers a visual ethnography about remnants of Algeria’s colonial heritage in France and Algeria. For example, many exceptionally reusable, unadorned, free-standing colonial-era columns commemorating the Algerian dead of the two World Wars became artistic commemorations to the Algerian War of Independence.

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5, pages 193 to 196)

It was easy to take from those that one could not see, to become the owners in charge, to not see the new owners in charge. After many statues and monuments were illegally transported to France, they were seen as part of French Algeria’s specific patrimony, an assertion of a settler community's distinct sovereign prerogative as Pieds-Noirs in the hexagon. Thus, settler collectives were constituted or reconstituted in displacements going in both directions: from the French metropole to the Algerian colony under the empire and back to the metropole from the colony after its independence.

The tenacity of repatriates to recuperate and display publicly a colonial French monument from Algeria is reflected by the most recently retrieved statue, that of Jerome Bertagna (1843-1903), sculpted by François-Léon Sicard (1862-1934). Bertagna was the colonial mayor of the eastern Algerian port city of Bône (now Annaba). His statue was inaugurated in 1907 and removed by the French army at Algerian independence. Minus its tall ornate pediment of an Algerian girl proffering a cornucopia of fruits and a young sailor in his skiff, the Bertagna statue was relocated to the Bertagna’s Beaujolais wine domains in Burgundy. When the last Bertagna descendant died in the twenty-first century, the statue was donated and again moved at the behest of a Pied-Noir hometown association of repatriates from Bertagna’s city of Bône (L’Amicale des Enfants de Bône). By 2019, funds were raised to transport and erect it in Aix-en-Provence in the courtyard of the Centre de Documentation Historique sur l'Algérie (CDHA), the Pied-Noir documentation center, library, and museum. The by-now familiar process of French statue removal was complemented by an Algerian replacement memorial to the combatant-martyrs of Annaba who died in the war of independence.

On the Algerian side, the disappearances of statues or the remains of war memorials in Algeria were attributable to France and to Algeria whose disassembly and modifications sometimes implicated the Algerian state, the municipality, and the participation of well-known artists. Early iconoclastic acts by individuals and the state after 1962 resumed during the Dark Decade of the 1990s. Targeting statues for destruction, defacement or removal is a highly performative act and one way to manage a difficult heritage. Then, the state and local associations defended French monuments and promoted new Algerian ones. Monuments in Algeria have differential rates of survival and creation even if they are not living organisms. They are metaphors in many ways. They celebrate an individual -- for particular acts or events at a particular moment in time with particular stakes for specific balances of power -- whose name is set in stone as if its story were forever cast. They celebrate events that have changed lives, usually by taking them. Once in place, a monument orders the world around it until that world changes and another story must be told, one statue destroyed and another erected.

In this book, these monuments have provided a lens on European settler spaces in Algeria, on colonizing power, destruction and preservation, on patrimony and presumed ownership, on memory and history writing. The French colonial monuments that remain standing in Algeria today often elicit care, memory, and community or state decision-making to preserve and repurpose. As well at play are the productive roles of destruction and replacement by another statue. Since 1962, Algerians have reflected on their French monumental heritage and how to decolonize it. The country adapted the material objects and institutions of colonial France to its needs by repurposing sculpture and monuments in a generative confrontation with European art.

Many scholars address this knot of French-Algerian artistic influences and cross-cultural exchanges and contacts. Some like Fanon, in his essay “On National Culture,” insist on looking to “the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art and must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must go on until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge.” Writer Abdelkebir Khatibi argues for a plural Maghreb (Maghreb Pluriel) in which hybrid cultural spaces are mediated through a “third tongue” (une langue tierce) aware of the perspective of the Other. Art historian François Pouillon notes Algerian receptivity to the art of the “colonizer Other” and suggests that Algerian art and art historical processes are attentive to “complicities,” to the “internal fissures and the interaction processes that are part and parcel of all relations, including those between dominating and dominated.” Art historian Nadira Laggoune-Aklouche considers “appropriations, transfers, borrowings and graft” constitutive of post-colonial Algerian art, a “dialectic about identity and alterity.” Similarly, Virginie Rey describes as a catachresis when post-colonial Tunisians knowingly borrow, mix, and misuse Western concepts and models to achieve self-determination and reconceptualize the independent Tunisian self.

French-Algerian aesthetic entanglements have been described in many ways. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad reflected on the cultural “sabir”: “the alienating hybridity of those caught between two worlds condemned . . . to interferences and incoherences”; and draw on linguistic analogies of cultural infiltration derived from the lingua franca Mediterranean ports sabir language of North Africa. For historian David Prochaska, state practices of replacement, repurposing and recreation of war memorials to memorialize Algerian independence on the same site where a French statue once stood speak to a “clear-cut case of a cultural pattern which has been transferred to a different social and historical context and filled with a different but analogous content.” Other scholars point to mimesis, transvaluation, sedimentation and appropriation with colonial monuments as “objets trouvés of the postcolony.” Andreas Huyssen finds the “memory art” of the Global South penetrated and transfixed by visual traces of political violence and trauma to produce a hybrid temporality that acts on and is animated by viewers. Paul Basu’s terms new post-independence monuments erected in Sierra Leone, a former British crown colony, “palimpsest memoryscapes” and the “postcolonial pastiche,” in which “pastiche” is a “collage” never a postmodern mimesis or an act of “shallow imitation, forgery and travesty. To concepts of doubling cultural patterns and their mirror images by the formerly colonized,anthropologist Anne Stoler modulates with analyses of “resilience” and “recursion”:

It’s not that the postcolonial world mimics colonial norms, structures, and relations. We need to ask what forms are resilient. Are they embedded in habits of privilege or in those of acquiescence? Are they found in what is perceived as humiliation or in what counts as duress? What conditions the possibility of some elements becoming available and not others? I think of recursivity as refoldings that expose different (social) surfaces and historical planes. Recursion is neither a faithful copy nor a direct “translation” … Recursive histories include reworkings that neither look or feel quite the same.

Each thinker has in mind new forms of thinking about art by mastering, assimilating, recombining, transforming, negotiating, absorbing, borrowing, and perhaps mimicking rather than rejecting. A sort of cross-pollinating métissage – the preferred term of Francophone Martinican writer Edouard Glissant -- seizes material and symbolic contents, forms, and mechanisms of colonial violence. Many inherited French forms -- and Algeria offers more examples than any other former French colony – have been adapted to Algeria in myriad ways. In a sense, if French colonial monuments in Algeria stood for the vast spatial appropriation by the colonizers that restrained the Algerian natives to the margins of the settler colony, they also generated something new: agency and creativity by the formerly colonized. Philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls this phenomenon the pharmakon, the pharmacological antithesis that demonstrates that each poison creates its own cure. Statues and monuments became so powerfully omnipresent, so much part of an Algerian lived experience of place and environment that the formerly colonized could refashion these imperial objects for and by themselves for decolonizing ends.

The Algerian people sometimes formed an intimate connection with a French statue or a war memorial. In effect, the history of Algerian conscription and army service during two world wars are reflected in attachments to France’s war memorials on the Algerian landscape which still evoke both national and local, colonial and post-colonial emotions on both sides. This complication involves counterintuitive perspectives about monument-making in post-independent Algeria. Public art and sculptures make tangible and visible the shift from colonial French presence to Algerian monument-making. Generated from, and generative of, Algerian cultural decolonizing projects regarding French imperialism and colonialism, public art projects often add something to the experience of the present by never ignoring the past violence. Algerian decolonizing projects address the control over the redistribution of aesthetic resources in the same spaces, as defined by Lorenzo Veracini. His description is applicable to the vast heritage of the former colonial overseers: “Decolonisation also means committing to emplaced transformation – to changing the way we live without moving.”