Transcript of a conversation conducted on on May 29, 2011 between Marion von Osten, Todd Shepard, and Mica Gherghescu at the Laboratoires d’ Aubervilliers Paris in the frame of the Architectures of Decolonization project.
Marion von Osten (MvO): The idea of this exchange and of the Architectures of Decolonization project in general is to turn the perspective around from a gaze at non-European territories where conflicts and concepts appear in the Short Century of liberation struggles, to the question of whether the decline of the Empires and the anticolonial movement changed as well the work of intellectuals and aesthetic practices in Europe: So, how did theoretical, political and artistic concepts and practices radicalize in Europe and/or why not. To pose the question to Europe, and specifically to the territory of Paris, is because the city can be understood as a meeting point as well as a detour as Glissant has called it, where very different people crossed, actors of the Anticolonial met with the Pan-African and the Tricontinentale movement, with actors of the civil rights and new social movements. The world-wide struggles to end colonial occupation did not just happen elsewhere, it happened here, in Europe, just because it France was the “Empire” and Paris was a polyphonic location and partially the refuge and base of anticolonial and Pan-African thinkers. When you reflect your work on Algeria, how do were French intellectuals relate to the war and the independence ?
Todd Shepard (TS): When I was doing my research for the book, I held on to an idea of making a choice that was explicitly disciplinary in terms of historians’ presumptions about primary sources and archives, and in part doing so to show, expose and also highlight the limits of that. Claiming that everything isn’t possible, one optic lens alone can’t give us access to everything. But primary sources give access to certain points in history that people totally obfuscate, such as not taking seriously that Algeria was part of France in some limited ways—though not juridically or institutionally, therefore not in the practice of civil service, in the ways the laws functioned, or when claiming for example nationality. But in researching the scources you could see things that we know might be false in the political reality. But, if you take institutions, the civil service, bureaucracy, laws etc., seriously then you see how under the presumption that the Algerians were French they later were as well erased as citizens.
MvO: So, there is a kind of revision that Algeria would not have been part of “Greater France”?
TS: Yes, as an example, let’s take the most flagrant misuse of this: the first archival study of the Paris massacre of October 17, 1961 by French officials claims that there were only 37 Algerians who died in the massacre. The first line of the book, in the first footnote actually, says “it’s all these complicated terms but in respect for the Algerian people, I will call them Algerians…” and then the premises were, that France was in war with Algeria and therefore there were only 37 enemy combatants killed. Now, 37 is at the very low end but it’s also the largest number of French citizens killed in a French city in the whole twentieth century from 1870s to the present. So if you pretend that they were not French citizens then you suddenly pretend that it is a war between two nationalities that exist, two governments that exist and you thus raise that possibility. The same thing is done with the book Chère Algérie: La France et sa colonie (1930-1962) [Dear Algeria: France and its colony (1930-1962) (Daniel Lefeuvre, 2005)] that claims that Algeria was incredibly expensive for France. This book just rips out the fact that it was legally part of France and that France spent much less money on Algeria per capita then in any other part of France. So there are lots of historical anachronisms that are used and do ideological work. But at the same time, people are committed to it—there is a whole set of studies on the “harkis” which performs an institutional history of the exclusion from nationality and French citizenship and the limits that were placed. The studies stop in 1958, because in 1958 full citizenship is granted to Algerians and they get all the same political rights. So if we skip that period it saves the republic and you can hold on to this idea that “if only the Republic had done what it promised to do”—there is nothing paradoxical or contradictory in the republican project it’s simply that we, the French, the republicans, those against the reaction, didn’t do it. And therefore it was reactionary, fascist, right-wing limits that stopped this. But in fact the republicans did it: They gave Algerians citizenship in 1944 and then full rights in 1958. At that time there was 10% of representatives in the National Assembly who were Algerians, so it is a much more complicated story that is difficult to grapple with. When you see it in other fields outside state matters, I’m intrigued. For example in the case of housing, and the massive influence of the way the HLM [Habitation à loyer modéré (low-income housing)] were constructed and how architecture has been involved.
MvO: So if I understand correctly, French intellectuals couldn’t accept on the one hand, the war against Algerians but in the meantime they also couldn’t accept its independence and the loss of the “Greater France”?
TS: Yes, it wasn’t a contradictory, problematic thing, it was simply that “we were wrong.” This is a whole deviation, a detour school of the French history around colonialism. We ignored the fact that every republic had an empire, and that the vast majority of the republicans were for the empire. The vast majority of the anticolonialists weren’t republicans, many of them were reactionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And the key declaration of the republican principle of the Second Republic was ending slavery and incorporating Algeria territorially into the Republic in 1870, giving Jews in Algeria citizenship—this was a key gesture. And the Fourth and Fifth Republic did that too and we pretend that is not republican.
MvO: And it is quite interesting to see how this amnesia creates other actions.
TS: Particularly for other fields, like urbanism, anthropology and ethnology, with the notion that that Algeria was never France, it was never really republican. But there was also another kind of “trauma theory” with the types of violence that accommpany the decolonization and particularly the Algerian revolution. That’s what impedes people from talking about it seriously, when in fact it is this active obfuscation. So it’s not just the trauma of the violence and the shock of torture and of hundreds of thousands of people killed, who is absolutely central to the story, there is also this other active notion “that it wasn’t true.” So let’s take Germaine Tillion for example: She was a major, critical figure, she had other points of view, she was in touch with the FLN [Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front (Algeria)], but she’s also in this complicated story where she deeply believes that the Algerians would be better off staying French. How do we then tell those stories together? Doing a psychoanalytical study on trauma and a whole range of meditations on how trauma and violence are central to the way this story has been distorted or not sidelined into certain types of narratives.
MvO: You did a lot of research in the archives, on state bureaucracy and documents. Did you find this imaginary frame about the “Greater France” and its loss in the documents?
TS: That’s the side I was most excited about, because I was trying to do this discursive work, and to find discussions and representations that were anchored institutionally, in a very governmental way. The major problems in state practices, is that the bureaucrats suddenly had to break with the rules completely and what they were doing at that point was joining certainties that emerged in public space—e.g. “Algeria is France” or the opposite, “Algeria is not France”—and making that accord with the rules which are very strict in following. Let’s take someone like the French civil servant Maurice Papon. What’s stunning about him is how exceptional he is: he stands out, he makes his decisions. People say that every prefect of the police in Paris at that time asks “can we just put a curfew on Algerians?” and everyone says it’s illegal, they are French citizens, you can’t do that. And in a note to Papon, he says that “we’re going to tell the Algerians they should just stay at home,” it cannot be a law, it not with a legal effect, so this curfew has no legal force that leads to October 17, 1961. But he just does it.
I was in the Algerian archives and Papon says the same here too, that they were trying to hire civil servants who were Algerians – citoyen français musulman d’Algérie [French Muslim citizen of Algeria]. All these claims for decentralization, all these different prefects writing like “we have all the great candidates here, locally—you are sending us people, you are hiring people in Algiers and sending them out, we already have here all these great Muslims that we can hire for jobs.” He has the same tactic, Papon says “let’s deconcentrate,” but he wants the policy of hiring Europeans back in place.
That is racial thinking, which he is immediately ready to apply. But he stands out and it’s no surprise that he’s the one who succeeds and becomes later a minister of the State. He is the only one of the prefects that we’ve heard of—though he completely breaks with the common democratic practice again and again and still he is the one who is picked! Most of the prefects are reticent in terms of thinking racially, ethnically, religiously about identities and about who is not French, but at a certain point it becomes so clear in a larger public discussion that Algerians finally are not French—so how do you make it appear that they are? I’m really intrigued by these jumps, how the prefects redefine rules, how they break rules and how do they come up with explanations. And they don’t always, they can’t explain certain things, they align with common understanding and not necessarily with institutional interpretation. That’s what we constantly have to think about.
MvO: There is a genealogy of this kind of practices. In relation to housing for the colonized, the colonial rulers applied categorizations of Muslims and Jews in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia on a juridical level and were putting the categories into aesthetic forms of modernist housing, but through division and spatial segregation of this groups. This somehow matches with your quota example, when they start to measure a number of Algerians and are not clear anymore if and when they might be called citizens of the Republic or not.
TS: During the revolution the French authorities come up with this practice and they look at international social science to address the question of racism in the context of the existence of French racism. They come up with the idea that they have to measure actual quotas and places—sanatoriums, hospitals, housing centers, industrial sites, state owned or even private institutions—and if they actively had a quota in mind, what’s the percentage of Algerians we want? And people actually do want a number, which they give them, and in conjunction with this they come up with a policy to propose explicit quotas in terms of promotion, because we can then prove, given the fact that there already exists a quota and given the fact that “an X number Algerians work here,” that there is a measurable discrimination taking place. There is a whole interplay of numbers, of fixed numbers. What are the fixed numbers that organizations, industries, hospitals, are actually working on now? And then how can we propose fixed numbers in places that would address the effects of this discrimination. In the early ’70s, on which I’m working now, you get the same discussion about the seuil de tolérance [tolerance threshold] and the quotas. Seuil de tolérance generates all these internal governmental debates that would cite 20% [Algerians] for schools, 30% for hospitals, etc. They then would have seminars where they’d explain to municipal elected officials these exact same figures, and then this was further circulated in public speeches, such as in the case of Michel Massenet who was the main person in charge with French efforts during the revolution in France for the promotion exceptionnelle [exceptional promotion] policies, who would then go before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and cite a local elected official a mayor, “who told me that the ideal number [of Algerians] is 30% in hospitals, 20% in schools…,” but there they then refer to figures that they’ve been talking about during the revolution. Then in the early ’70s, in the face of the immigration problem, they’re sending these figures out and citing experts, and then publicly announcing that it’s local, underground officials that had given them these citations. There is an incredible circulation of the seuil de tolerance and a complete disappearance of the original reference, of the explanation, etc. At the beginning of the ’70s they are extremely explicit about it. The seuil de tolerance created such an immense scandal. It was the main basis of government policies then used when they worked on how to deal with and help overcome the problem of racism which is seen then entirely produced by the public actions of people.
Mica Gherghescu (MG): It’s very interesting that these issues magnetize the whole debate on housing and hygienic discourse, and this is starting with the 1958 De Gaulle’s discourse on “clean spaces” in the peripheral Paris.
TS: It’s amazing to see what they are saying about parenting and noise in the late 1950s, and you can also see a break in 1951-52 in their initial effort to hold on to it, to the idea of various French racisms. And it is supposedly the frame in which they deal with this kind of problems. A kind of insistence on the assimilation model of their resistance to it and their actions and the actual focus on these particular problems. In the late ’60s and beginning ’70s it just explodes. And they talk about how these spaces are used or misused.
MvO: The filmmaker and activist Mogniss Abdallah argues that the first inhabitants of the HLM haven’t been at all Maghrebians, as they were housed in so-called transit cities, bidonvilles or overprized and too small flats. In Godard’s Deux ou Trois Choise Que Je Sait D’ Elle [1967], we see the first inhabitants of the Grand Ensembles—French working or lower middle-class people, “average french.” This large-scale modernizations were not addressed to the colonial subject, but to the post-war French population.
TS: Except the fact that the immigrants were paying for it, the F.A.S [Fonds d’Action Sociale].
MvO: They were paying for the housing complexes and many of them were also building them. The people living in bidonvilles like Nanterre were actually the construction workers of the Grand Ensembles.
TS: That’s insane. When you see the regrouping camps in Algeria then for the Kabyle you have interior plumbing, for the Arabs not, because they want them to leave their houses. The discussions are explicit. It is also linked with and around families, a constant back-and-forth of what to do with families. Till 1962 there is the insistent idea that we have to drain Algeria, that there are too many people there and we have to get families to come to France, which will allow immigration. And in the late ’60s and beginning ’70s there is then a problem of too many Algerian families, which is due to the demographic model for France, the demographic obsession of “we need more people.” The whole immigration model is premised on that. It’s striking, I think, that in 1974, when they finally legalize abortion, which has been antidemographic, and 1974 is also the year of the stop of immigration.
MvO: Ok, so it had biopolitical implications on divers levels..
TS: And explicit discussions about the antidemographic thinking. Between 1974 and 1975 there is an explosion of sexual fear around Arab immigrants, particularly in France. It is the fear of too many Algerian families. There is also the INED [French National Institute for Demographic Studies] who does these giant studies on the relation that Maghrebians have to urban space in the early ’70s. And I think the studies were never released, they are in the archives but you can’t get access to them—I myself applied for access to them, which I was denied. I also found these other great studies from 1976, of when the Prime Minister office hires a public relations firm to do focus groups where they bring in thirty people to talk about relationships, immigrants, French relationships. All proposed in the end to impose an Arab journalist in the evening news to show that they [the Arabs] have to occupy the public space to remind people that Arabs exist and that they have a culture. So we need something that is Arab that will change people’s perception of what they do. These are all propositions from the mid ’70s. But the relationship to the space and what they think about Arab or Algerian criminality is about actions and not money, it’s about the way people act in public, it’s particularly sexualized, its particular types of violence. You can see how the discussion turns into questions of public space, and of trouble between people that is produced by a series of actions that come from the immigrants themselves. The way that they always remind people, how they bring in the war to explain something particular about the Algerians. It’s very particular, but people are particularly annoyed as well.
MvO: Yes, I agree. And there is also the resistance and disobedience in the everyday. And in the media the culturalization discourse mixes with racism: that People from across the Mediterranean would be too lazy, too expressive, too sexual, etc.
TS: There is also a question of the countryside versus the city. This whole discourse in the French public discourse who Algerians can’t manage space,when dealing with the urban versus the rural.
MvO: In another research I found a similar turn: In a case where specific housing projects, the so-called modernist patio houses, travelled from Morocco to Israel. As during the time of anticolonial uprising also anti-Semitism rises even in Morocco, as an effect of the segregation that was superimposed by the colonial rulers. Jewish families then left Morocco and they actually also live in these patio houses in so called development towns or desert cities, in Israel. In Israel they are suddenly addressed in a similar way as misbehaving, uneducated, etc. The Moroccan Jews are turned into “Arab” Jews. This Arabization seem to happen just at the moment of decolonization. It happens when countries detach, when people detach from the former governmental rules. And it’s not history, but we are really in the middle of that new form of ethnocracy. When the colonial subject cannot be governed anymore by the Empire, it seems that multicultural racism appears.
TS: Yes, that’s what I’m also intrigued by, the necessity of moving outside the nations, thinking in these larger political structures that will allow a more coherent and accurate grappling with that multiplicity of connections, with the need for larger spaces, but also to overcome the ideological fallacy of a nation-state that was driven by fascist, this extreme pushed-up nationalism that’s limited and that needs to be thought beyond.
How it is reduced to that the only thing that remains is Europe. In 1962 for example, people who are welcomed in France legally and juridically are the so-called Europeans, which include Jews from Algeria—Jews who are polygamous, who live in the desert and who have no patronymics, who had the least contact with the French city and anyone in Algeria, but who are classified as Europeans because they are not Muslims. There exists this definition that Europeans are French, France then itself shrinks to Europe, and Europe becomes the space where you can imagine a larger context for France. And you see the same thing with the FLN, the GPRA [Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic] has the same federalist imaginary about the Maghreb, but they think about the Muslim world, the Third World or the Non-Aligned Movement and the Arab world with its other spaces. They are particularly aggressive with the Maghreb and counter with enormous acuity the French arguments about the creation of larger spaces, that you need larger spaces to confront the modern world. What they want to do is to widen Algeria through a larger internal federalism not reduced to ethnicity. The French policies of giving up Algeria on the basis of the Kabyle, the Chaoui and all these groups, needs to be countered and we need to have a larger perspective on the Maghreb. But that collapses with decolonization. In part in proposing a critique of Morocco and Tunisia as new Western reactionary governments. But it also collapses at the very idea that it has to be thought beyond ethnicity.
For the Algerians it shrinks into Islam, a religious definition, they think of Jews during the revolution so both are thinking at the same time in larger ways, confronting each other in dramatic different proposals on how to think larger and then in the end, what emerges is a deeply identity fixed way of thinking about the nation-state again, and defining that spatially. The Algerians think about what to do with these French projects, these cities that they grapple with. Both sides try to interpret the issue differently.
MvO: If you go in the museums bookstores of the Institut du Monde Arab or Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and you search for any kind of postcolonial studies then they might only have maximum two books… And the rest is on Exoticism and Orientalism, and the Orientalism book section is actually growing. I was wondering where is the position of the French intellectual in this?
TS: I see the crisis. One of the things is that in the ’70s you get the emergence of the right to be different, what we’ve been calling the multicultural. In France you get this vision of multiple culturalism but it is directly linked to the government policies that take up multiculturalism with a “go back to theirs” angle. So if we are to break the demographics—that immigrants come to remain a part of France and become assimilated—we need to celebrate multiculturalism so that they remember where they come from, so they’ll “go back there.”
MvO: Multiculturalism thus functions like an imaginary passport.
TS: Exactly. It’s not the anchor of most intellectual or far-left critiques or celebrations of the potentials of difference—the way that thinking of a particular space creates possibilities of thinking in revolutionary ways and of larger systems that allow people to make decisions, coalition politics in a Foucaultian-Deleuzian sense. What happens in the ’80s in France, and around the complete breakdown of the Front National, is that you start seeing people working on October 17, 1961, remembering and doing great things to show the collapse of a set of radical critiques of how the Republic is not the frame that people are using but they’re using another type of analysis of the need to move outside the simple right-left schism, to understand how capitalism and the development of the West, in the narratives of progress, have created spaces and types of people that are victimized and dominated, even oppressed. In the mid ’80s, the touche pas à mon pote [don’t touch my friend (slogan by the association SOS Racisme)], and the embrace of the Republic, based on this idea that the Republic just needed to get fully established. It’s like [Alfred] Dreyfus would have put it, “there are other voices strong enough, nothing particular to do with anti-Semitism.” Or according to the Vichy [regime], “the Republic was not strong enough so it’s not particularly about the situation of Jews or the situation of other larger sets of crises, it’s just that the Republic was not strong enough.” It’s a sidelining of this whole story of thinking multiplicity, to think particular situations, not just celebrations. People are different, but as a celebration, a fixation on why particular types of groups are denied opportunities in other ways. That disappears, I think, the reemergence of the republican is a success, and inspiring I have to say, but in a limited way of how can you think radically by criticizing elements and pointing out contradictions.There was a return to universalism without asking questions around postcolonialism and it’s going to link it all back. Postcolonial theory is part of the things we were disappointed with. It was an end point rather than a starting point.
MG: Because it also seems that inaccuracy founded the discourse of intellectuals in the ’60s. If you look at debates between Pierre Nora and Jacques Derrida for example, the Sartrian discourse, or that of the Situationists who constructed their own imaginary on Algiers. Inaccuracy infiltrates the intellectual discourse.
TS: Think about [Frantz] Fanon for example. He is, for the Algerians, the person who describes on the ground what happens, being able to turn that in a political analysis around, to reveal things that you’ve never thought about. But when treating this discussion on Algiers as being an accurate description then problems and complications appear.
MvO: For me this is also a central question, because I find so many odd things in the discourse of architects and their crisis in planning. I don’t know if it is due to inaccuracy or what it actually is. Is it amnesia? I don’t really understand. The ’50s and ’60s is the phase of High-Modernism, but in fact it’s full of crisis. Many architects started to look at the vernacular, at how people do things, [Michel] De Certeau starts to think about everyday strategies and tactics and it’s also the beginning of cultural studies, practices of the everyday are highlighted. This is a epistemological rupture. It already happens in the ’50s. So why does it happen then? For sure it is after the war, societies start anew, they have many things to overwork and to undone, but there is something that they don’t get—they get it only in 1953 with the war in Asia, it affects them, it also affects their budget. The question is when the critical mass starts to exist, when does awareness start? Today also (and since long ago), we are in war—there is a war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, we are constantly in war—but we don’t feel it, we don’t understand it. We understand maybe that the Algerians are French when we live nearby, otherwise we hear only political discourses. I think that it is not only about whether they can or should be acknowledged as French, but it is also related on a spatial and discursive level. It is so separated in our societies. We don’t see or hear the bombs in Iraq, we just see them on TV on the internet, we don’t know how to relate to it. But I deeply believe that some of the intellectuals tried to get a new world view. Did this cause postmodernism, but didn’t cause radical political transitions or transnational visions creating a crisis in the very conception of the West?
TS: Yes, in putting things in conjunction with each other without thinking it through. And where I think that Fanon is incredibly inspiring is in how we can use this optic, this analysis that comes from a particular tension and really meaningful situation, important for a lot of people, to speak in universal terms, that will allow us to overcome and critique giant problems that are far larger than simply legal statuses.
The post-story, the story after independence, after colonialism is completely different. It’s about separate states and separate groups of people. The reality is then of constant crossing and mixing, and here the question of inaccuracy is also intriguing. This is where I love [Étienne] Balibar’s words on how to pretend that it was simply a lie; to pretend it was simply two at this point is more problematic. You have friends in Algeria who were never one, but two, at least in the modern period. To pretend this is to deny the complications. What we have to do now is thinking how they were more one in two.
MvO: I think that the idea of thinking through this is also what the project [Architectures of Decolonization] tries to do; but it’s actually quite hard, extremely hard. We also try to question the radical practices within art. But not all radical practices, if you look at them from today, does not seem to be radical practices. But Situationism is still regarded as a radical practice, the last avant-garde so to say. In the meantime there was also the Abstract Expressionism, accused to be conservative, where the “genius” appeared again. But it was actually a transnational platform as well where many people were able to express worldwide a new vsion of the art and not just in America or Paris. It was a transnational movement.
MG: And a kind of confirmation. You had to pass through Abstract Expressionism to be acknowledged, to be recognized. And it becomes something like a universal practice in the ’50s and ’60s that you have to accomplish before moving on to other aesthetics. Abstract Expressionist and radical practices reunite in works of Asger Jorn for example, or even in the works of some Situationists. It is also a very polarized milieu, where, in Europe, the Abstract Expressionism has to confront the American one.
MvO: And this is actually being investigated—[the British art historian] Kobena Mercer is working on all this kind of questions.
TS: Have you met Nadira Laggoune who work in Algiers? She works on the evolution of the arts since 1960s and says that all these people were getting the Beaux-Arts training, based on notions of it being “purely practice” and “mastery,” which the Orientalists claimed that the Arabs couldn’t possibly master, as they supposedly don’t have any connection with the art world, are unable to participate, get funding, that Arab students are completely cut off from the international discussion and so on.
MvO: But this is also a discussion on when this happens. When does this closure happen? I think that if we think about the ’50s and ’60s, there was an opening on various levels. There was also a kind of promise that something could really change in this regard. In the modernist project there is something that talks about something very specific, it talks about something that is to be highly criticized, universalism maybe, but we all have access too. It’s still there, there is a possibility that we can design and that we all have access. It’s an interesting promise. You can in the photographs of the time see that there is this kind of promise. The “colonial modern” can turn into the “de-colonial modern.” It’s an interesting shift, that I didn’t understand at first. How can something colonial, which is embedded in the people suddenly be turned to something which is the promise for a future? I don’t know if you have found something in you research about that?
TS: The thing I’m most troubled by is that all these French government policies seem so nice compared to what we have today and the fact that all these radical things that are going on now. The reactionary racist people that ran those policies in 1974-76, their actual policy plans and object, they talked about it in terms that sound great—to give security to immigrants, about their status, rights, access to housing and jobs. The fact that the government will give them full social rights, access to syndicalism and then we’ll master migration and make sure that we, the government, can control it, they cannot cross borders without governmental control. It always remains this obsession of failed attempts to control boundaries. In the interior, they have this generosity, vaguely accompanied with ideas to give them the French models of how to think about they’re Arabs, and that they are part of a larger French family. It seems great today.
MvO: I think that you can see it in this moment [1960s] that there is a global promise. Look at the people organizing the Tricontinentale conference and the Non-Aligned Movement. In retrospect, for us the ’50s and ’60s can seem as this conservative gender, heterosexual regime. But there is something untold. There is a loss of promise, we don’t have another idea of promise today, other than capitalism.
TS: In the ’70s you get this clearly modernist, structural thinking in relations to individuals of the family, of women and men, multiple forms of relationships, the imaginary roles children or the nuclear family played in the French perception of the immigrants. So, they [the authorities] were thinking of multiple family structures and the intersections between individuals. They were extremely directive and incredibly controlling. But the challenges were taken into account.
MvO: They had to change. Today you have a quota, on a governmental level, of how many “we will take care of.” The “former West” societies have a big problem with what they call globalization and they don’t find answers. They are stuck in an Orientalist model.
MG: And Orientalism still seems to be appealing, even Neo-Orientalism sells very good, so why abandon a model that works?
TS: Yes, exactly. In the [official] studies it is all about the Arabs. The starting point being “we talk about immigration, but actually what we need to talk about is what people are troubled by”—Arabs and particularly Algerians. Other French studies on immigration problems talk about “immigrants” as such. But even in [Maurice] Gastaud’s study, which is great, the word “Algerian” only appears twice. There’s nothing specific about Algerians or North Africans, you get this complete whitewashing—also because in the French Republican it was thought that these categories were false, to talk about it was reactionary and problematic, and they were constructions that we shouldn’t instantiate into our work. But on an international level, this intense issue of Arabs and Muslims is being thought within the government.
MvO: When I was researching for [the earlier project] In the Desert of Modernity we also went to the Abdelmalek Sayad archive, which is now in the cellar of the National Center of the History of Immigration [Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (Paris)], which earlier on was the African and as you know beforehand the Colonial Museum. When we came up from the cellar we were being trapped in the museum, because a group of Sans-Papiers [movement started in Paris (1996) fighting to stop deportations and claiming “papers for all”] were coming in to occupy the place in that very moment. I thought that was a very precise action!
But, I still have one last question: The anticolonial movement was a transnational movement, maybe you could say some word about the involved actors, movements and encounters?
TS: I’m intrigued, from an American point of view, by the efforts of breaking connection about the Black Freedom Movement and through anticommunism and McCarthyism, all the connections they saw not just with the Carribeans, the heritage of du Bois, the American continental discussion, but around the Third World. Richard Wright is this kind of emblematic, axial figure. In the period we are looking at, the ’50s and ’60s, at the heart of the anticolonialism, the GPRA of the FLN was really conscious about the central role of making connections and working not just with the Arab world but thinking in particular about United States, and also European points of view. Tt was a multiple approach, not reduced to military action but also to having students trained in these places, because of their anticommunism and relation with the communist party since the ’30s they don’t want to have their students going to Eastern Germany, Hungary or the Soviet Union. They are concerned with the West, with Belgium specifically. They want to be in France but they can’t—people are on strike and are getting targeted. There are discussions on how to do connections on a transnational level, which is in part governmental—in part they limiting their discussions on having connections with the governments—but in part also, and particularly in the Arab and Muslim world, is about public relations. They [the GPRA] are working on this with the people from Western Europe as well. They’re in contact with French figures, as well as with Belgium, Germany, and to a certain extent with Northern governments like the Swedish, you can see it in the archives. It is attempted to develop an international opinion, which they can see in conjunction with both states, but also with local actors, NGO’s, political movements. Their ambition is definitely transnational, thinking outside the governments as well as working with governments. What I’m intrigued by is how this transnationalism, this way of making broader connections such as networks of people thinking together, that a different sets of problems can be thought together and breaks down. It doesn’t break down ideologically—the late ’60s is an amazing period where all these separatist movements for the most part, in France were particularly right wing transformed into left wing critique, the Basques, the Bretons were all deeply reactionary and become really powerful. Look for example at how the Basque movement moves from being a kind of critique of centralism to embracing a revolutionary project.
Also, think about the sexual revolution, though it is not primarily a transatlantic discussion, and how it is heavily influenced by the way the Algerian revolution and those who supported it are able to really target, not in a queer, antinormative sense but as an anticivilizing mission, how gender structures are being used to anchor colonialism. And this is the real problem, this is what affects how women for example are acting in public. They foreground this question of gender and sexuality around rape to a certain extent, although part of it is about denial, about violence against women and gender roles. But then this troubling, messy concerns become central on how it makes it possible to establish radical political practices. Particularly in political situations like in communist dominated France where these concerns are totally marginalized. The radical revolutionary nationalisms proposed by anticolonial movements like the Algerian are particularly important because their success in these gender arguments that the West has always used to explain why colonialism has continued and it’s taken up in these queer, radical studies – sex radicalism in the 70s, the feminist movement. You get these real direct connections about how the anti-colonial movement is in a way the motor to the radicalization of Civil Right Movement in the U.S., the transformation of all sorts of political struggles, the revolutionary optics 60s-70s, in Germany, the relationship with the Palestinians, with people traveling around the world.
MvO: Thank you very much for this exiting conversation and all the insights.
P.S. We know, in general terms, about the move to structuralism, even if Claude Lévi-Strauss most explicitly denied his political activism and engagement—during the late ’40s and early ’50s in his UNESCO participation and again insisting after 1954-55 when the first articles came out that there would be a structural anthropology claiming that he has no politics and that structuralism is something much more larger. The Mediterranean as a space that emerges at this time when it’s breaking apart and that structuralism is different. But in ethnography and anthropology in general this massive participation of the new wave, the Boasian antievolutionist and Maussian anthropologists to keep Algeria French is erased—in the fact they produced [Abdelmalek] Sayad and [Pierre] Bourdieu, and there are also great people like [Germaine] Tillion. This erasure was so intensively French and allowed people to escape the implications.
