On 5 July 1962, Algeria became an independent nation, bringing to an end 132 years of French colonial rule. Algeria Revisited provides an opportunity to critically re-examine the colonial period, the iconic war of decolonisation that brought it to an end and the enduring legacies of these years.Given the apparent centrality of violence in this history, this volume asks how we might re-imagine conflict so as to better understand its forms and functions in both the colonial ...

This book explores the commemorative afterlives of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), one of the world's most iconic wars of decolonisation. It focuses on the million French settlers - pieds-noirs - and the tens of thousands of harkis - the French army's native auxiliaries - who felt compelled to migrate to France when colonial rule ended.Challenging the idea that Algeria was a 'forgotten' war that only returned to French public attention in the 1990s, th...

France's Lost Empires brings together ten essays that collectively investigate the historical, cultural, and political legacies of French colonialism and, specifically, the endings of the French empire(s). Combining analyses of three "lost" territories (Canada, India, and Saint Dominigue) of the "first" French colonial empire, that of the Ancien Regime, with investigations of the decolonization of the "new" colonies of the "second" French overseas empire (specifically in ...

In the mid-nineteenth century, French colonial leaders in Algeria started southward into the Sahara, beginning a fifty-year period of violence. Lying in the shadow of the colonization of northern Algeria, which claimed the lives of over a million people, French empire in the Sahara sought power through physical force as it had elsewhere; yet violence in the Algerian Sahara followed a more complicated logic than the old argument that it was simply a way to get empire on the cheap**.**

Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925-61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a volunteer in the Free French Army, in which he saw combat at the end of the Second World War. In Algeria, Fanon came into contact with the Front de Lib�ration Nationale, whose ruthless struggle for independence was met with exceptional violence from the French forces. He identified closely with the liberation movement, and his poli...

From a Nation Torn provides a powerful critique of art history's understanding of French modernism and the historical circumstances that shaped its production and reception. Within art history, the aesthetic practices and theories that emerged in France from the late 1940s into the 1960s are demarcated as postwar. Yet it was during these very decades that France fought a protracted series of wars to maintain its far-flung colonial empire. Given that French modernism was created du...

Interpreting the Republic focuses on contemporary French literary and cinematic works (1986-2003) that reflect on what it means to belong to a nation such as France by giving voice to those who find themselves marginalized by French society. While citizenship and belonging can be, and indeed are, interpreted differently depending on the socio-cultural and political context, it is the foundational universalist republican principle of egalitarianism that has remained the sacred cow of French...

The Killer Trail tells the tale of one of the most notorious atrocities to take place during the European 'scramble for Africa', a real life story of insane violence in the heart of an exotic continent that eerily prefigures fictional accounts such as The Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. The Voulet-Chanoine mission left Dakar in 1898 for the centre of Africa and the region of Lake Chad with the aim of establishing effective borders between the French and Bri...

Long repressed following the collapse of empire, memories of the French colonial experience have recently gained unprecedented visibility. In popular culture, scholarly research, personal memoirs, public commemorations, and new ethnicities associated with the settlement of postcolonial immigrant minorities, the legacy of colonialism is now more apparent in France than at any time in the past. How is this upsurge of interest in the colonial past to be explained? Does the commemoration of em...

Why does everything sound better if it's said in French? That fascination is at the heart of The Story of French, the first history of one of the most beautiful languages in the world that was, at one time, the pre-eminent language of literature, science and diplomacy.In a captivating narrative that spans the ages, from Charlemagne to Cirque du Soleil, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow unravel the mysteries of a language that has maintained its global inf...

Each of these essays begins with the words “A Canadian is . . .”. Each one is very different, producing a fascinating book for all thinking Canadians.Irvin Studin is an idealistic young Canadian who wanted to do something extraordinary for his country. So he decided to approach leading Canadians — he calls them “sages” — to tell us what they believe defines us. The people who responded eagerly, to produce an essay of 1,500 to 2,000 words, are, in his words, “all distinguished Canad...

In light of cultural crises such as the Danish cartoon controversy and the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris, Christopher Caldwell’s incisive perspective has never been more timely or indispensible. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is destined to become the classic work on how Muslim immigration permanently reshaped the West.This provocative and unflinching analysis of Europe’s unexpected influx of immigrants investigates the increasingly prom...