In its second edition, Naylor’s France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation continues to prove invaluable for those seeking to understand the historical, political, and cultural relationship between the two nations. Beyond this laudable feat, the work presents this relationship in all its thorny complexities, confronting decolonization as more than a singular moment of rupture. That decolonization is complex is a simple enough proposition to accept. But there is added value in Naylor’s description of the process as recursive, the dyad transforming one another as the relationship evolves. Naylor shows how historicism—“examining, situating, and remembering bilateral history”—emerges as a site of postcolonial struggle (128). Each side “condemned to cooperate” (135) thereby “engaging anamnesis (memory) and confronting amnesia” (128).
The ten substantive chapters detail the mutual transformation from the colonial period (1830–1958), to the intricate diplomacy of repeated “relancements” signposting the flux between decolonization and reimagination of each other as a reflected peer. Exploring the nebulous line between domestic and foreign policy, bilateral political maneuvering around accelerating decolonization while deepening cooperation (economic and strategic), and the existential mission to situate the Algerian nation, the book is admittedly wide-ranging. Yet Naylor’s lens of recurrent bilateralism grounds the analysis and the second edition includes valuable updates and revisions that capture this continuing relationship of “mirrors and mirages.” Throughout, Naylor breaks decolonization free from a binary process and projects it as a continually evolving encounter that feels almost epigenetic.
The revised introduction reveals that the established relationship of Algeria’s existentialism and France’s essentialism continues through the recent events of the 2010–20 Arab Uprisings. The Algerian hirak was stifled by the coronavirus pandemic, but the spirit of the Arab Uprisings offered a chance to reactivate Algerians’ penchant for “a veritable existential ‘transformation of consciousness’ and the creation of a new civic ‘humanism’” (260). Naylor’s bilateral lens retains its utility as applied to the spread of Islamist movements in North Africa, and the balance of Algerian sovereignty versus neighboring instability, particularly Morocco and the Sahel.
In situating “critical, contesting discourses” Naylor’s work adds vital depth to the experience of colonialism for both colonized and colonizer. Even in the densest substantive chapters—on hydrocarbons or Algeria as part of French nuclear deterrence—Algerian and French officials are juxtaposed but intertwined. Likewise, beyond the superficiality of formal decolonization, that we can appreciate the mutual response to pacifying and being pacified, transforming and being transformed is pivotal. We see equally the dominating chauvinism of colonial France and the dignity of Algeria in a way less often acknowledged: as inherently discursive rather than a hierarchical dictation of terms. Algeria’s demand for an apology for colonial trauma—even as France’s parliament moved to downplay colonialism in school curricula—reveals three intertwined realities: the enduring aims of the Algerian revolution, France’s vision of its own future, and the inescapable bonds between these two nations.
The leveling power of French colonialism at once “offered protective myths and mentalities to its colonialists" while it “expropriated properties and alienated personalities of the colonized Muslim natives (indigènes)” (7) and exerted itself on them “by ordering and regulating power, perception, and, especially, identity” (7). By “mirrors and mirages,” Naylor illustrates how decolonization must include reflecting those initial myths and mentalities which once softened the sins of colonialism, back onto the colonizing power. Here, as much as “the bloody assaults at Philippeville (Skikda) and the Battle of Algiers” is the front on which Fanon thought that violence “force[s] the colonialists to recognize the colonized” (15). Yet while France committed that essentializing colonial error of assuming that because sociocultural structures are unfamiliar, there is consequently neither state nor nation to be found, Algeria’s existential project equally involves (re)discovering or (re)developing “a consensual imagination of an Algerian nation” (7). Naylor thus seems to demonstrate, perhaps unlike Fanon, that there is as much from which Algerians may draw such an “authentic national consciousness” after as there is prior to colonization.
In the final substantive Chapter Ten, “French-Algerian Mirrors and Mirages,” Fanon’s political philosophy on decolonization as a process of individuation and uncoupling is given concrete application as a frame for understanding the complex psychological and national processes at work in this case. Applying Fanon alongside Camus and Bourdieu, Naylor explores elusive cultural elements that outlast—even resist—the severing of the tie forged arrogantly by colonialism, tracing them through the many communities involved: the harkis (Algerian soldiers loyal to France), the pieds noirs (French settlers in Algeria), the Coopérants/pieds rouges (French civil servants and other volunteers), and Algerian immigrant workers in France. Naylor’s work attests that decolonization (and its study) demands a comprehensive process. Beyond traditional loci of the political and historical bureaus of statistics and formal treaties, through to the cultural and psychological, the work reveals this process at the “new” sites of novels and graphic novels, sport (football/soccer), and music (e.g., the hybridity of Algerian Raï).
France and Algeria will interest students and scholars of African, Middle East, and Francophone studies equally. Its ability to traverse wide swaths of thorny history while maintaining the humanizing focus is to be applauded and demonstrates how difficult and interminable a process decolonization or, rather, “continuing ‘postcolonial decolonization’” is.
