The objective of this dissertation is to examine the mutually constitutive relationship between historiography, collective memory, and cultural narratives in the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in present-day France and Algeria. Taking the turn of the twenty-first century as its point of departure, this study analyzes modern cultural and media representations of the Algerian War to demonstrate the sustained traumatic impact of the anti-colonial conflict in contemporary France and Algeria. Integrating methodological approaches from history, memory studies, and literary and cultural criticism, the interdisciplinary nature of this scholarly inquiry highlights the complex nexus of narratives that have coalesced around the Franco-Algerian conflict in a postcolonial context. Furthermore, by calling attention to points of contact and historical complicity between the Algerian War and other histories of violence over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the transhistorical perspective of this study also serves, in part, to plot the transmission and transformation of its memory over time and in discrete spatiotemporal arrangements. Situating the singular case of the Algerian War within a set of scholarly conversations about the cultural representation of historical trauma, this dissertation offers an important contribution to the study of postcolonial memory and its transnational migrations.

Creator

• Grimm, Rachel Mihuta

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-t36a-9174

Subject

• French literature
• African literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15143
• etdadmin_upload_744294

Keyword

• Algerian literature
• Algerian War of Independence
• French literature
• Memory studies
• Torture
• Postcolonialism

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright