bibliography on pieds-noirs

No, I haven't been blogging much about the Pieds-Noirs, but I am indeed writing and editing to tidy up my manuscript over our "summer" holiday in Australia. To help those of you interested in my writing on Pied-Noir literature, I'm including a few references here. Please email me if I can provide you with any further resources.

Book in progress:

Rewriting Home: How the Pieds-Noirs Remember Algeria. This book examines the written recreation of Algeria in the literature from the Pied-Noir community from 1962 to present. Through an examination of nostalgic returns, both real and imagined, I demonstrate colonial identity as being worked through and sustained in the motion of return and in the act of repetition.

  

Book Chapters:

“Viewing the Past through a ‘Nostalgeric’ Lens: Pied-Noir Photo-documentaries” in Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography. Ed. Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell and Ann Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

“Dual, Divided, and Doubled Selves: Three Women Writing between France and Algeria.” This “Self” which is not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French. Ed. Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 35-46.

“Returning to the Baobab fou: (Dis)integrating Roots in Ken Bugul’s and Marie Cardinal’s Autobiographies.” Emergent Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices. Ed. Jeanne-Sarah De Larquier and Ada Uzoamaka Azodo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009. 81-99.

“Slipping Home in Marie Cardinal’s Écoutez la mer.” Gender and Displacement: Home in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography. Ed. Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 34-45.

Essays:

“Separation and Return in the Intellectual Work of the Pieds-Noirs.” International Journal of Francophone Studies. Special Issue: The African Intellectual. Guest Ed. Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth. Forthcoming 2012.

“L’Algérie recurrente et l’Algérie errante dans l’écriture des Françaises d’Algérie.” L’écriture migrante au féminin: entre temporalités et spatialités multiples. Ed. Névine El-Nossery and Anna Rocca. Forthcoming.

“The Past is Present: Pied-Noir Returns to Algeria.” Ed. Jacqueline Dutton. Nottingham French Studies. Forthcoming 2012.

“(Re)turning to Ruins: Pied-Noir Visual Returns to Algeria.” Ed. Joseph McGonagle and Edward Welch. Special issue, “Visualizing the Franco-Algerian Relationship since 1954” in Modern and Contemporary France 19.2 (May 2011): 147-61.

  

 “« La valise ou le cercueil » : un aller-retour dans la mémoire des Pieds-Noirs.” Revue Diasporas: histoire et sociétés 12 (October 2008): 199-207.

“The Wounds of Algeria in Pied-Noir Autobiography.” Dalhousie French Studies 81 (Winter 2007): 59-68.

“An Amputated Elsewhere: Sustaining and Relieving the Phantom Limb of Algeria.” Life Writing 4.2 (October 2007): 247-62.

“Looking Back: Deconstructing Postcolonial Blindness in Nostalgérie.” Revue CELAAN Review 3.1-2 (Fall 2004): 85-95.

In the world of Pied-Noir Research...

Because of this blog, in the last two weeks students from two different countries have contacted me regarding research projects on the Pieds-Noirs. Poor abandoned blog. I have not quit writing about the Pieds-Noirs, and much is happening in the community as they prepare for the 50th anniversary of their exodus from Algeria. I have just been consumed with finishing my book manuscript and other projects since moving to The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. My apologies for not doing a better job of keeping the blog up to date.

For the handful of readers who need English language research on the Pieds-Noirs, I intend to put up links to scholarly articles in the upcoming months. For those of you who also read French, most of the recent correspondence I've received is related to Charly Cassan's film La Valise ou le cercueil which I have not yet seen. You can follow the promotion on Facebook through multiple groups as the producers try to get the film onto France's national television stations. Video clips are available here (photo and link sent to me by Reportage 34).

I have been actively blogging elsewhere on the much more personal but somewhat related subject of hoarding at http://hoardingmemory.wordpress.com but my research on the Pieds-Noirs is ongoing. If you have questions, comments, or research ideas, please feel free to contact me.

Repatriating Remains from Algeria

According to Ennahar Online today, 135 small French cemeteries in Algeria will be regrouped into 22 cemeteries in Algerian cities. There were 523 cemeteries and 210,000 graves gradually abandoned after Algerian Independence.

The Pieds-Noirs who make pilgrimages back to their hometowns often go to the cemeteries to find ancestral graves. The graves that are now in ruins evoke extreme emotion from the Pieds-Noirs who feel helpless to stop the desecration of the abandoned sites. For many who have revisited Algeria, the cemeteries are the penultimate sites of return (see Marie Cardinal's Les Pieds-Noirs and Au pays de mes racines, Hélène Cixous's Si près, and Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy's Tourner les mots).

The decree to regroup the graves apparently also gives French citizens the option of repatriating the remains of their loved ones at their own expense. An interesting choice: let the loved one remain "abandoned" in their homeland, or have them join their families in exile so they can be looked after. Of course, cemeteries are not as much for the dead as for the living.

Pèlerinage recap

Indeed, I was in Nîmes for Ascension again this year, but under the rain and grey skies, the event took on a different tone. I apologize to those I was supposed to meet. I looked, asked around, and texted, but did not find them. Instead, I met a few new characters in the street and at their booths, and I believe they provided me with enough material in just a few minutes of conversation to help me find my way to the end of my book.

I can't tell if it's apparent here, but I'm struggling with my experience in Nîmes this year. I predict that next year's gathering which will mark the 50th year of exile will be a different sort of celebration, but somehow seeing all these aging people, some crippled, make their way up the long path to the sanctuary under the rain -- it troubled me this year. In 2007 my experience was joyful and I was treated to open strangers who happily shared their pasts with me. This year I felt distant ... what was I doing there by myself? People still openly talked with me when I approached them. I was still led around by my elbow and introduced to relevant figures in the community, but this year I was approaching a community that is slowly becoming a part of my own past. My research interests are shifting and maybe revisiting Nîmes was suddenly a personal effort to return to my own past.