Awakening from the Algerian War: Mon colonel

2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-100
Author(s):  
Nicole Beth Wallenbrock
Keyword(s):  
Algerian War

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

Memories of a French Migration Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-72
Author(s):  
Laura Jeanne Sims
Keyword(s):  
Algerian War ◽  
African Origin ◽  
North African ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Algerian War Of Independence ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
North African Origin

This chapter examines how the French state created a crisis through its management of the arrival and installation of the Harkis in 1962. The Harkis, Algerians of North African origin who supported the French army during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), faced reprisal violence in Algeria at the end of the war and many were forced to migrate with their families to France. In response, French officials attempted to prevent the Harkis from escaping to France and placed some of those who succeeded in internment camps. Comparing the treatment of the Harkis with that of the Pieds-Noirs, the descendants of European settlers in Algeria who likewise fled to France in 1962, highlights the structural racism underlying French perceptions of and reactions to Harki migration. This chapter also explores the ways in which second-generation Harkis have constructed collective memories of the crisis and their attempts to hold the state responsible for its actions.

France Accused: French North Africa before the United Nations, 1952–1962

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Thomas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
United Nations ◽  
North Africa ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
North African ◽  
Un General Assembly ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Nationalist Parties ◽  
Major General

In the decade after 1952 France faced sustained United Nations criticism of its colonial policies in north Africa. As membership of the UN General Assembly expanded, support for the non-aligned states of the Afro-Asian bloc increased. North African nationalist parties established their permanent offices in New York to press their case for independence. Tracing UN consideration of French North Africa from the first major General Assembly discussion of Tunisia in 1952 to the end of the Algerian war in 1962, this article considers the tactics employed on both sides of the colonial/anti-colonial divide to manipulate the UN Charter's ambiguities over the rights of colonial powers and the jurisdiction of the General Assembly in colonial disputes.

The Algerian War and French Memory

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Algerian War

Benjamin Stora, Imaginaires de guerre: Algérie-Vietnam en France et aux Etats Unis (Paris: Decouverte, 1997), 252pp., FF 125, ISBN 2-707-12667-5. Benjamin Stora, Le transfert d'une mémoire – de ‘l'Algérie française’ au racisme anti-Arabe (Paris: Découverte, 1999), 148pp., FF 75, ISBN 2-707-12968-2. Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 250pp., ISBN 1-859-73927-x. Charles-Robert Agéron, ed., La guerre d'Algérie et les Algériens, 1954–1962 (Paris: Armand Colin 1997), 346pp., ISBN 2-200-01895-9. Jean-Jacques Jordi and Mohand Hamoumou, Les harkis, une mémoire enfouie (Paris: Autrement, 1999), 139pp., FF 120, ISBN 2-282-60866-1.

The Prisoners of Algiers: An Account of the Forgotten American-Algerian War 1785-1797

1967 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 694
Author(s):  
Alexander DeConde ◽  
H. G. Barnby
Keyword(s):  
Algerian War

The Afterlife of Empire in Beckett’s How It Is

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Anthony Cordingley
Keyword(s):  
Algerian War ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Moment

Abstract Relationships of political domination in Beckett’s Comment c’ est (1961)/How It Is (1964) are typically read through a specific historical moment (the Holocaust, the Algerian War) or literary representation (Dante, Sade). This article reveals spectres in the text from the long history of the colonisation of Ireland to the legacy of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism; it explores Beckett’s sense of complicity in the Anglo-Irish Ascendency.

Vidal Naquet, la memoria e la storia

2009 ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Vidal Naquet
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Social Interests

- In the first, an autobiographical interview, L'histoire est mon combat, the A. underlines the civil and political commitment with which as an historian he reports the crimes, especially during the Algerian war, denied by the authorities, but revealed as the truth through his researches. His studies of ancient Greece are perceived in contiguity with his political and social interests. The second book, Les assassins de la mémoire collects the author's essays on the negation of the Shoah; the detailed examination made by Vidal-Naquet of the arguments and attempts to destroy the Jewish memory are reviewed. On these themes Pierre Vidal-Naquet has also written one of his most interesting essays, entitled An Eichmann of paper.Key words: Vidal Naquet, History, Memory, Negazionism.Parole chiave: Vidal Naquet, Storia, Memoria, Negazionismo

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