13176b

SoSe 20: The Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Towards a Global History

Christoph Kalter

Information for students

This class will be taught online. Prepared in the midst of a pandemic, it cannot be anything other than an experiment. Its participants, including me, will for the most part have little solid experience with online teaching (or pandemics) to fall back on, and they might find themselves in challenging and for some of us even distressful circumstances. Over the course of the semester, I will make sure to create opportunities to exchange about how you and I feel these circumstances are affecting our class as a whole, as well as your individual learning experience. Furthermore, I will do my best to find pragmatic, flexible, and supportive solutions that will allow all participants, ideally, to get something meaningful out of this class—and/or, more pragmatically speaking, to successfully conclude the module. In order to have their active and regular participation validated (“presence grade”), all participants are required to do the following: 1) readings; 2) reading responses; 3) group discussions and presentations; 4) general discussions; 5) other minor tasks that might be necessary as we move forward. Please note: For all these requirements, there will be fixed time slots and deadlines, but no synchronous teaching, so you will be relatively flexible as to when exactly you do the assignments on Blackboard. The only synchronous teaching element will be short video conferences via Zoom or WebEx. These are meant to wrap up the teaching units and provide a space for digital socializing as well as immediate exchange on the ways the class is working out and what should be improved. They will probably take place every second or third week. Participation is highly recommended but not a requirement. All participants are required, however, to 6) meet me online over Zoom or WebEx individually for a short conversation (“office hours”) at least once before May 8. Finally, for those of you who want to do an exam, i.e. get a “module grade” in this class: In addition to 1) – 6), you will 7) write a seminar paper within the purview of the topics discussed in class. The (non-) availability of primary and secondary sources will of course be taken into account in designing the research question as well as in grading the paper. Note: Reading ability in French or Arabic is an asset, but not a requirement close

Comments

After several decades of relative oblivion, historians and the public developed a keen interest in the Algerian War of Independence between France and its most important colony (1954-1962) around the year 2000. In France itself, the new conversations around the war swiftly developed into a set of controversies over colonial history, violence, state crimes, migration, and guilt that were soon labelled as “memory wars.” In the midst of these passionate memory politics, historians in- and outside the French hexagon undertook path-breaking research on the conflict. They typically continued, however, to narrate the war as a Franco-Algerian drama that had left its indelible mark on both societies. Even as the violent entanglement produced by colonial history drove their stories, they hardly ever took off a national lens on the event and its afterlives. Twenty years later, the picture has begun to change. Under the impact of global history, the portrait of these final years of France’s empire in Africa is being recast in ways that make visible again what many contemporaries had known all along: The origins, contexts, and ramifications of the Algerian War of Independence were not restricted to the imperial endgame that entangled France and Algeria. Rather, sitting at the junction of decolonization and the Cold War, this war was, in significant ways, a transnational and global affair. It was fought not only in Algeria, but also beyond the colony’s territory; it generated multidirectional movements of trans-border mobility; it produced a diplomatic revolution on the world stage; it became a focal point of international debates about modernization and counter-insurgency, but also about welfare, healthcare, and humanitarianism; it became a key driver of South-South relations in the Non-Aligned Movement, pan-African, or pan-Arab movements; it sparked new practices of Third World-solidarity among non-state actors in the West; and it figured prominently in a language of connection and comparison that re-contextualized memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Our class will first provide a succinct overview of the event and its actors. It will then look at select works in the recent historiography in order to discuss the transnational aspects of the Algerian War. The result cannot be any sort of comprehensive Franco-Algerian history of these years. Instead, you are signing up for a consciously eclectic outlook on the global dimensions of the conflict. close