Academic literature on the topic 'Algerians – France – Attitudes'

The present study discusses the ambivalent behavior found in the character(s) in a francophone novel written by a third world writer. This ambivalence is represented by the attitude of the East that is against the colonialists on the one hand, but admires them and imitates their identities and attitudes on the other. This ambivalent discourse is widely represented in a francophone work entitled Le Mouchoir (1987) by Mohamed Kacimi El-Hassani. This novel satirically tells about Algeria in the post-colonial period and the narrator’s efforts to oppose colonialism. Textual citations and pieces of evidence from the novel that are used to support the analysis are those that are related to postcolonial and ambivalence issues. The analysis is also supported by historical evidence of French colonialists’ behavior towards indigenous Maghreb. The interpretation of the findings is supported by Homi Bhabha's ambivalence theory. Moreover, this study was conducted using Fairclough's critical discourse analysis methodology with which the textual analysis of the novel follows three levels of discourse, namely micro, meso, and macro levels. This study found that the hypocritical nature of the characters such as that demonstrated by the narrator and Mahfoud reflects the postcolonial nature of "ambivalence". This characteristic places Algerians in a "liminal space" of contestation between the narrator and Mahfoud and between Algeria and France.

The first part of the article briefly covers the history of immigration to France, social conflicts associated with migrants, and the results of French research on discrimination of immigrants in employment. In spite of the high unemployment rate, compared with other European Union countries, France remains one of the centres of migration and receives a significant number of migrants and refugees every year. The origins of immigration to France go back to the mid-19th century. Initially, it was mainly for political reasons, in order to find a job or receive an education. Between the First and the Second World Wars, France accepted both political (e.g. from Russia, Germany and Spain) and labour migrants (from Africa and Indo-China). After World War II, the French government actively invited labour migrants from the French colonies, primarily, from North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). When the Algerian War ended, the Harkis – Algerians who served in the French Army – found refuge in France. By the late 1960s, the Moroccan and Tunisian communities were formed. Up to the 1980s, labour migration was predominant. However, with time, the share of refugees and those who wanted to move to France with their families started to increase. This caused a growing social and political tension in French society resulting in conflicts (e.g. the 2005 riots in Paris). Moreover, the numerous terrorist attacks and the migration crisis of 2014–2016 had a particularly negative impact on the attitude towards migrants. All these issues have to a certain extent affected the employment of the Muslim population in France.

Leila Sebbar, since the beginning of her literary work, has been describing her identity experience connected with her mixed family origins: the writer’s father was Algerian and her mother French. This prevailing thread in her texts demonstrates the weight of the (re)construction of identity, frequently incoherent and delicate, in order to confirm her ethnic and cultural affinity.The author of this article is interested in problems, so close to the writer, of identity and history. The point of departure of the reflection on Sebbar’s attitude towards mother tongues of her parents is the analysis of her autobiographical novel “Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père” (2003). “We are not born with one identity, an identity is always gained, built”, maintains Sebbar and through this statement she confirms the role of the cultural baggage in the broad sense of the word, in the life of an individual coming from a culturally diversified environment. The questions of the ignorance of the Arabic language also lead the writer to define not only the picture of the individual family history but also common history, the history of the inhabitants of Algeria during the French colonization. The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961 (1999) is a story in which its author continues to exploit, tirelessly, the issue related to the history of its two countries: Algeria and France. For Leïla Sebbar, to return to the traumatic events of the massacre of dozens of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961 means to enter into incessant dialogue with the painful past. It seems that the writer’s will to confront the past is one of characteristic qualities of her works. In an original, far from stereotypical, way she tries to disclose errors and fights the oblivion and repression of uncomfortable events from history. The aim of the article is to analyze the non-stereotyped strategies that Sebbar uses to build his characters and to reflect on the modes of representations of History and identity.

ABSTRACTIt is normally assumed that antisemitism in post-war France needs to be understood primarily in the light of the German occupation of 1940–4. This article seeks to describe the relationship between political antisemitism and events after 1945. Special attention is given to the issue that obsessed a large part of the French right: the loss of Algeria. It is argued that between 1954 and 1962 right-wingers came to took on the Jewish population of Algeria, which was often fervently opposed to French withdrawal, with new favour. Furthermore, many right-wingers began to admire Israel, which seemed so successful in combating Arab nationalism and which was widely believed to have links with the Organisation de l' Arméte Secrète. Changes in attitudes to Israel and the Jews were linked with a wider change in the French right that had been going on since 1945: most of the right now focused their loyalties around ‘l' occident’ a block of nations led by America and including Israel rather than around the France that was so important to Gaullist thinking. Finally, an attempt is made to show how the French right's new attitude to the Jews influenced its reaction to the 1965 Presidential election campaign, de Gaulle's denunciation of Israel in 1967 and the student riots of 1968.

A characterization of the shame-inducing legacy of colonialism lies at the heart of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach. By employing Albert Camus’s aesthetic style, Hage’s novel investigates the ironic paradoxes in Camus’s philosophy of absurdism and his political stance regarding Algerian independence from France. Through the motif of the “gaze,” (the mode of looking that shames the specular object), the novel links shame to what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks calls the “regime of the look,” a system of visualizing and encoding race. Through three textual manifestations of shame, Cockroach points out that Camus’s own representation of Arab bodies instantiates a paradox in his attitude about independence. Indeed, because of his commitment to the absurd and an ethics of fraternity, an oblique feeling of shame surfaces in Camus’s writing; this shame both disrupts the logic of Camus’s philosophy and contributes to the affective experiences of some postcolonial subjects.

The question of how to deal with the “Muslim problem” has once again arisen in France, opening old wounds of colonization and cultural racism. France’s rich Christian past and the historical context of the French-Algerian conflict are key players in the modern suffering of Muslims in French Society. Its colonization of Africa included nations such as Morocco, Indochina, Madagascar and notably in this context, Algeria in 1830. In their valiant fight for independence, the National Liberation Front was launched by Algerians and resulted in a bloody struggle that still haunts the Muslim-French relations in modern France. Though Algeria achieved its independence in 1962, the overall negative attitude towards immigrants from the region remains. Beyond the impact of colonization, the imbalanced living conditions of Muslims and their fellow Frenchmen, as seen by the French banlieues, have turned into a hunting ground for jihadists. The skewed standard of living, exacerbated by the predatory manner of jihadists, suggests that the French be held under a standard of collective responsibility. Thus, under the failing social constructs of the banlieue, Abdelmajid Hannoum’s article “Cartoons, Secularism, and Inequality,” published following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, speaks to the means by which the French ideals of fraternity and equality do not apply to the Muslim populace on the basis of historical animosity and ingrained Islamophobia. Moreover, failure of the French government to unbiasedly enforce their policy of complete secularism plays into the discrimination against Muslims and interferes with the performance of religious traditions, such as in the case of the 2004 ban, which unjustly prevents females from wearing their hijabs, burkas and niqabs. As addressed in The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism by Mayanthi Fernando, there had been attempts to police the religious headwear of Muslim women previously which calls into question the validity of France’s claim to secularism. Legislation like the ban of 2004 allows for blatant discrimination. Unchecked, these factors lead to violent outbursts of extremist retaliation, which is followed by the notion of collective responsibility and pushing of a narrative that holds all Muslims as potential terrorists. Through media, unchecked publications run rampant with this damaging ideal, supporting islamophobia to help to justify discrimination. In the instance of the Charlie Hebdo attack, the common narrative pointed to the attack occurring from born and bred Muslims, but in reality, the guilty parties were driven into jihadism by a number of failings in social service programs. To supplement the research and cold fact, the novel I Die by This Country by Fawzia Zouari, which is based on a real French headline, speaks to the ongoing, every day struggle that French Muslims still endure. There is an evident link between the lasting economic, political and social inequalities faced by 21st century French-Muslims and their historical conflicts with French imperialism and deep-rooted Christian attitudes. The influence of history on the struggle of French Muslims in the 21st century is displayed by the grouping of Muslims into lower income communities, as well as headlines of police violence and anti-Muslim attitudes taken on by political leaders. The conflicts faced by Muslims within the French state is not secularism and until all citizens are, in the eyes of the state, regarded as French first and foremost, conflicts of violence and terror will continue to gain a foothold.

In his defenses of empire, Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the need to achieve grandeur for France, and his writings on Algeria have shaped our understanding of his political career. In pursuing empire abroad as a remedy for weak politics at home, scholars maintain that Tocqueville abandoned the participatory politics of Democracy in America. This essay argues, however, that the focus on Tocqueville’s international turn has obscured his interest in the greatness of domestic party politics. It demonstrates that Tocqueville championed a version of grandeur tied to the latent energies of the lower classes and distinct from the Bonapartism and aristocratic nostalgia that characterized his thoughts on empire. This version of grandeur was a political reclamation of disagreement and debate that supported great party opposition to counter the malaise of bourgeois rule. The essay concludes by comparing Tocqueville’s attitude toward foreign others, whose freedoms had to be sacrificed to the cause of French nationalism, with his description of the lower classes within his own nation, whose inclusion in the franchise could foster great politics. This comparison enables us to draw modest lessons for interpreting political grandeur in the present day.

The succession of political regimes in post-1848 France was experienced in similar ways in post-conquest Algeria. The political, social and cultural ideologies that emerged during this period were mirrored in the North African départements, and therefore it is perhaps not surprising that connected events happened simultaneously in the métropole and Algeria. It was not only through its common events and political principles that the Algerian territories became French, but undoubtedly also as a result of the emergence of new cultural media and cultural political attitudes. Taking and viewing photographs were aligned with the new French paradigm of the modern Nation, its identity construction, and interconnection with Algeria. Up to the beginning of World War I there were two moments that connected the photographic visual imagery of Algeria as part of the creation of lieux de mémoire within the Second Empire and Third Republic regimes; the 1850s with its ‘cataloguing’ of the newly established French Algeria and the 1880s-1900s with its portraiture of ‘consumptions and ideologies’ of a French Republican Algeria.

The conclusion highlights that contemporary women’s writing has continued the questioning of societal norms that was first instigated by the second-wave feminists. Indeed, these contemporary texts contest attitudes towards the female fertility cycle that are promulgated within their fictional spaces, either through exposing their harmful impact on women or by creating rebellious characters. As the conclusion highlights, these fictionalised bodies are caught in a complex web of different discourses and beliefs. In stark contrast to the essentialism of second-wave feminist works, contemporary women’s writing considers how differences between women such as their ethnicity, socio-economic status, familial relationships, and religious beliefs, define their experiences. Overall, the Algerian novels contextualise women’s experiences within an Islamic patriarchal society, the Mauritian texts illustrate how Hindu doctrine or a woman’s ethnicity can influence female bodily experience, and the novels set in France primarily focus on the medicalisation of the body. The conclusion also underlines yet another new direction taken by contemporary women’s writing that sets it apart from earlier second-wave feminist writings: an exploration of how women’s bodily experiences can be shaped by violence and trauma. It also outlines avenues for future research.