Abstract
This is an important and profoundly interesting book. It is timely in every sense: it is informed by the retrospective focus prompted by the fiftieth anniversary of the 1962 Evian accords leading to Algerian independence; but it remains topical in its reflections on both France’s and, more generally, the EU’s problematic relationship with migration from across the Mediterranean, that privileged maritime space of liminality and limbo ‘helping suture, metaphorically, the métropole’s southern shores to Algeria’s coastline’ (p. 121). The opening chapter, devoted to what has been called ‘la nostalgérie française’ (largely accommodated in recent photo-book reproductions of nineteenth-century postcards), establishes both a way of seeing and a mode of remembrance with far-reaching consequences. And that the specifically visual dimension of the collective memory, whether consecrated by the state or resisting the official histories, is as pertinent today is underlined by reference to exhibitions closed or films dismissed at the point at which even images produced in the new millennium are perceived as offending pied noir or republican sensibilities. Most of the works explored are indeed those which have appeared in this last decade. What the book also succeeds in doing, in this respect, is to make a compelling case for photography’s role in the shaping of history, not as mere source or resource, but as being integral to the inflection of our narratives of the past. Necessarily, therefore, the illuminating analyses of images of the Franco-Algerian ‘psychodrame’ are grounded in an attention to context, target audience, production values and ideological positioning as well as to more traditional aesthetic and technical concerns. The result is a thought-provoking study of the residual imbrications of France and its former colony. Propagandist views from above are set against those from below, but never in simplistic opposition: the photo-journalist ‘embedded’ with conscripts during the Algerian War retains the freedom to produce images as disturbing as those shot during the notoriously violent police repression of demonstrators in Paris on 17 October 1961; the camera as an instrument of identity-defining surveillance unveils an indigenous female regard which is threatening, at odds with the ‘exoticizing and eroticizing’ Orientalist mythology of the harem. And as so many films are located on the ferries plying back and forth from Algiers to Marseilles, so the book as a whole shuttles across points of view: alternating French and Algerian cinematographic perspectives; the mournful iconography of the 1962 exodus, on the one hand, and, on the other, post-Civil War immigrant hopes of a better life; the Algerian café within the delimiting and Gaullist périphérique; panoramas of monumental Paris visited by the marginalized inhabitants of the banlieue contrasted with returns to North Africa in which its decadence, physical decay and native poverty conjure up fears of the invading ‘other’. The argument is well made that, on both sides, it is the imagined space that determines real lives, political rhetoric and public policy, a mental territory mapped in inconsistent versions of desire and revulsion. And guilt. The book challenges any comforting notion that amnesia and denial have been left behind, precisely because it is only now that temporal distance and the lifting of censorship (both legislative and self-imposed) make it possible to gain critical purchase on the postcolonial legacies of a traumatic and symbolic chapter in modern French, and European, history. The book includes some 15 illustrations, not many of which are as telling as the visual material to which detailed reference is made in the text. The latter masterfully negotiates current scholarship while modestly asserting the originality of looking differently. And not the least of this book’s achievements is that its joint authorship finds expression in a seamless clarity of writing, intelligence and insight.