Colonial Algeria And The Politics Of Citizenship

This book explores citizenship politics in colonial Algeria, which became a key battlefield for struggles over participation of the body politic and the reach of universal promise in 1789. In examining these struggles, Avner Ofrath shows how colonialism dissolved the political community as a frame of participation and negotiation, first in the colonies and ultimately in the metropole. Revealing the racialization of citizenship from the late 19th century onwards, this book shows how lawmakers under the Third French Republic construed colonial subjugation around rigid ethnic-religious criteria in order to protect settler privileges and exclude Algerian Muslims. Portraying Islam as oppressive and unmodern, the exclusion and othering of Muslims led to a concept of citizenship that was deeply hostile to religious difference. Despite this, Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship shows how Algeria witnessed some of the most powerful contestations of racialized citizenship seen in a colony. From a successful Jewish campaign for full political rights in the 1860s, to Muslims' demand for reform in the 1930s, Algerians insisted on Maghribi languages, religions and history as indispensable dimensions of political life. Tracing intellectual and political networks throughout the Maghrib, the Mashriq, and across the Mediterranean, Avner Ofrath weaves Algeria into a global history of citizenship in the age of empire.

This book explores citizenship politics in colonial Algeria, which became a key battlefield for struggles over participation of the body politic and the reach of universal promise in 1789. In examining these struggles, Avner Ofrath shows how colonialism dissolved the political community as a frame of participation and negotiation, first in the colonies and ultimately in the metropole. Revealing the racialization of citizenship from the late 19th century onwards, this book shows how lawmakers under the Third French Republic construed colonial subjugation around rigid ethnic-religious criteria in order to protect settler privileges and exclude Algerian Muslims. Portraying Islam as oppressive and unmodern, the exclusion and othering of Muslims led to a concept of citizenship that was deeply hostile to religious difference. Despite this, Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship shows how Algeria witnessed some of the most powerful contestations of racialized citizenship seen in a colony. From a successful Jewish campaign for full political rights in the 1860s, to Muslims' demand for reform in the 1930s, Algerians insisted on Maghribi languages, religions and history as indispensable dimensions of political life. Tracing intellectual and political networks throughout the Maghrib, the Mashriq, and across the Mediterranean, Avner Ofrath weaves Algeria into a global history of citizenship in the age of empire.

Algeria's current politics are influenced by its colonial period under the French to an extent not seen in other North African and Middle Eastern states. Indeed, Malika Rebai Maamri argues that Algeria's postcolonial history and politics are, in fact, a series of attempts to come to terms with the dire consequences of this colonial past. With over half a century having passed since independence, the country is still struggling to create a unified Algerian identity, and any discussion on the concept highlights how, all too frequently, the concept of identity can serve as a form of exclusion. Exploring a wide range of issues in Algerian society, such as the political, cultural social, economic and gender relations, Rebai Maamri shows how belonging and citizenship are produced and perceived. In doing so, she offers in-depth analysis of a country which is often side-lined in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, and yet is a vital component in the search for a post-colonial identity and state in the region.

Examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context, focusing on experiences of Algerian Jews.

Professor Roberts examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context. She focuses on the experience of Algerian Jews and their evolving identity as citizens as they competed with the other populations in the colony, including newly naturalised non-French settlers and Algerian Muslims, for control over the scarce resources of the colonial state. The author argues that this resulted in antisemitic violence and hotly contested debates over the nature of French identity and rights of citizenship. Tracing the ambiguities and tensions that Algerian Jews faced, the book shows that antisemitism was not coherent or stable but changed in response to influences within Algeria, and from metropolitan France, Europe and the Middle East. Written for a wide audience, this title contributes to several fields including Jewish history, colonial and empire studies, antisemitism within municipal politics, and citizenship, and adds to current debates on transnationalism and globalization.

An examination of French citizenship and cultural identity in Algeria during the last quarter-century of colonial rule. In recent years, a multicultural society and changing conceptions of French identity have been the source of considerable debate in scholarship, literature and the media in France. This book examines equally contested definitionsof French identity from the past, but not those forged within the borders of the French 'Hexagon, ' as French geographic space is sometimes called. It is the study of French sentiment in colonial Algeria of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, during the last quarter century of colonial rule in North Africa. It seeks to uncover elements of French identity that were generated past the Pyrenees and the Alps, beyond the bordering Atlantic Ocean, English Channel and Mediterranean Sea, outside the physical space so central to "Frenchness." It asks whether far-reaching state institutions could transform indigenous and settler populations in colonial Algeria -- Europeans, Jews and Muslims -- intoFrench men and women. It examines what these individuals wrote of French sentiment in colonial Algeria. Did they articulate alternative definitions of French identity? The colonial "periphery" is clearly quite central to France'sevolving postcolonial sense of self. Colonial Algerian heterogeneity and the country's unique relationship to France make it an especially rich site in which to study French national and cultural identities. French military conquest and the occupation of the North African coast established one of the oldest and largest settler colonies within the French Empire. Unlike other colonies, Algeria lay relatively close to metropolitan France, a daylong journey by ship from Marseilles. No colony other than Algeria was granted French departmental status. No other land administered under the auspices of the French Empire had as numerous a European settler population, many of whom becamenaturalized French citizens. This study suggests that although Algeria had become officially French, "Algerie française", even at the pinnacle of its acceptance, was more diverse and more contested than its title suggests.

In this account of the Algerian War's effect on French political structures and notions of national identity, Todd Shepard asserts that the separation of Algeria from France was truly a revolutionary event with lasting consequences for French social and political life. For more than a century, Algeria had been legally and administratively part of France; after the bloody war that concluded in 1962, it was other--its eight million Algerian residents deprived of French citizenship while hundreds of thousands of French pieds noirs were forced to return to a country that was never home. This rupture violated the universalism that had been the essence of French republican theory since the late eighteenth century. Shepard contends that because the amputation of Algeria from the French body politic was accomplished illegally and without explanation, its repercussions are responsible for many of the racial and religious tensions that confront France today. In portraying decolonization as an essential step in the inexorable "tide of history," the French state absolved itself of responsibility for the revolutionary change it was effecting. It thereby turned its back not only on the French of Algeria--Muslims in particular--but also on its own republican principles and the 1958 Constitution. From that point onward, debates over assimilation, identity, and citizenship--once focused on the Algerian "province/colony"--have troubled France itself. In addition to grappling with questions of race, citizenship, national identity, state institutions, and political debate, Shepard also addresses debates in Jewish history, gender history, and queer theory.