POLS 360 Human Rights

The French Army's war in Algeria has always aroused passions. This book does not whitewash the atrocities committed by both sides; rather it focuses on the conflict itself, a perspective assisted by the French republic's official admission in 1999 that what happened in Algeria was indeed a war.

Initially, when the government in Paris responded with force to the November 1, 1954 insurrection of Algerian nationalists, French public opinion offered all but unanimous support. Then it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of Muslims were herded into resettlement camps in Algeria; that Algerians suspected of nationalist sympathies were imprisoned in France; that conscientious objectors were denied their rights; and that a resolution to the conflict, either by force or by peaceful methods, was not forthcoming. When it was proven that the army was guilty of abuses, members of the Protestant minority protested and then laboured to educate their own communities as well as the public at large to the moral and spiritual perils of these actions. Based on painstaking research and solid scholarship, The Call of Conscience: French Protestant Responses to the Algeria War, 1954-1962 reveals a rich portrait of the protest.

Hoarding Memory looks at the ways the stories of the Algerian War (1954-62) have proliferated among the former French citizens of Algeria. By engaging hoarding as a model, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates the simultaneously productive and destructive nature of clinging to memory. These memories present massive amounts of material, akin to the stored objects in a hoarder's house. Through analysis of fiction, autobiography, art, and history that extensively use collecting, layering, and repetition to address painful war memories, Hubbell shows trauma can be hidden within its own representation. Hoarding Memory dedicates chapters to specific authors and artists who use this hoarding technique: Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora in writing and Nicole Guiraud and Patrick Altes in art. All were born in Algeria during colonial French rule but in vastly different contexts; each suffered personal or inherited trauma from racism, physical or psychological abuse, terrorist or other violent acts of war, and exile in France. Zineb Sedira's artwork is also included as an example of traumatic memory inherited from her parents. Ultimately this book shows how traumatic experience can be conveyed in a seemingly open account that is compounded and compacted by the volume of words, images, and other memorial debris that testify to the pain.  

Based on previously inaccessible material from international archives, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence examines the relationship between emerging human rights concepts after 1945 and repressive British and French actions against anticolonial movements in Africa.