Rupture, repression, repetition: The Algerian War of Independence in the present

Abstract

What are the legacies of the Algerian War of Independence in the present? More specifically, how do the Algerian War of Independence and its subsequent memorializations force us to reconceptualize historical temporality itself (of which the ‘legacy’ is but one variation)? The following introduction to this special issue provides an overarching framework for multiple answers to these questions. The first half of the introduction focuses on the philosophical and conceptual afterlives of the Algerian War in contemporary French critical thought. In doing so, it attempts to delineate the significant political import of historical temporality as such, setting out a basic problematic to which the articles that follow can be seen variously to respond. In the second part of the introduction, the general cultural and historical legacies of the Algerian War of Independence, and the ‘mnemonic forms’ (Erll 2011) of rupture, repression and repetition that mediate them, come into focus: the ‘rupture’ from a colonial past, the Freudian ‘repression’ of traumatic history, and the ostensible ‘repetition’ of violence in the present. In general, the introduction hopes to open a dialogue with works conducted on these ‘forms’, scrutinizing the effects they have had on the various re-imaginings of the war and its transnational legacies, yet without foreclosing other forms this history may take.