CONFERENCE: 'The Algerian War of Independence: Global and Local Histories, 1954-62, and After'

This conference seeks to mark a major shift in the historiography of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Accounts of this war have largely remained confined within, and constrained by, the boundaries of the French and Algerian nation-states and the conflicting narratives of each. Recent work by Anglophone (especially American) scholars has broadened the field by offering international histories of the war, but such work has moved even further away from engaging with the realities of the conflict as it actually unfolded “on the ground” within Algeria and within the Algerian emigrant community in France. A fuller understanding of the war requires bringing together both global and local scales of analysis, paying attention simultaneously to the global connections and significance of the Algerian revolution and France’s Cold War counter-insurgency, on the one hand, and to the complex, often very divisive, local experience of the war for Algerian men, women, and children, on the other. Inseparable from such rewriting is critical attention to the construction and voicing of individual, familial, and local memories and memorialisations (and the concomitant forgetting, or silences) of the war, and its key role in social memory in Algeria and France since 1962.

Convenors:

Andrea Brazzoduro (Trinity, Oxford), James McDougall (Trinity, Oxford), Natalya Vince (Portsmouth & Algiers 2)

The conference will open with the screening of el-Bi’r/Le Puits/The Well (Algeria, 2016) followed by a Q&A with the director Lotfi Bouchouchi (Wednesday 10 May 2017, 8pm)

Pre-registration: OxfordAlgeriaConference2017@gmail.com

Programme: https://oxfordalgeriaconference2017.wordpress.com