Between Algeria and the world: anticolonial connectivity, aporias of national liberation and postcolonial blues

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the lateral connections between the Algerian anticolonial struggle and other similar struggles in the colonial world. Such connections linked up Algeria to Vietnam, Black Panthers in the U.S., and Palestine, among others. Not only were these anticolonial connections crucial to the FLN's strategy, but this strategy and the Algerian struggle more generally were crucial in generating the Third Worldist momentum as Algiers became the ‘Mecca of Revolution'. I examine how, although the goal of anticolonial struggles was national independence, the terrain whether logistic, ideological and even strategic was decidedly translocal. The focus on anticolonial connectivity in the Algerian War becomes a pretext for engaging with a political paradox: while the decolonization process seeks the recovery of dignity by the colonized, the nation-state becomes both the condition for the instantiation of this ideal, and the straightjacket that contains and limits its full realization. Here I re-focus the discussion from ‘alternatives to nation-state' to the idea of historical necessity. I thus treat the anticolonial narrative in more complicated ways, seeing it both as a necessary tragedy and as a narrative of ‘crushed hopes.’