Description
Book SynopsisAbsent the Archive is the first cultural history in English that is devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. Covered up by the state and hidden from history, the events of October 17 have nonetheless never been fully erased. Indeed, as early as 1962, stories about the massacre began to find their way their way into novels, poetry, songs, film, visual art, and performance. This book is about these stories, the way they have been told, and their function as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Identified here for the first time as a corpus—an anarchive—the works in question produce knowledge about October 17 by narrativizing and contextualizing the massacre, registering its existence, its scale, and its erasure, while also providing access to the subjective experiences of violence and trauma.
Absent the Archive is invested in exploring how literature and culture represent history by complicating it, whether by functioning as first responders and persistent witnesses; reverberating against reality but also speculating on what might have been; activating networks of signs and meaning; or by showing us things that otherwise cannot be seen, while at the same time provoking important questions about the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of representation.
Trade Review“This is a ground-breaking volume that makes visible to readers the entangled histories and legacies of 17 October 1961 in the French cultural imaginary. It is an outstanding work of ethical scholarship, offering a creative analysis of ‘rogue’ cultural texts that been produced in response to a massacre in central Paris that continues to live in the shadows of French history."
Claire Gorrara, Cardiff University
'Impressive in scope and meticulous in detail,
Absent the Archive will no doubt set the bar for future critical studies of the cultural afterlives of October 17.'
Patrick Lyons,
L'Esprit Créateur‘This compelling book is a sustained, scholarly, and deeply nuanced engagement with the cultural representations of the massacre and its afterlife… [Absent the Archive] speaks to its object and reminds us of the excitement of research and its ethical possibilities. When Jim House and Neil MacMaster published Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory in 2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), it was immediately recognized as a landmark achievement. Brozgal’s book is its complement within cultural studies.’ Patrick Crowley, French Studies
‘Absent the Archive constitutes a brilliant contribution to the historiography of French colonialism, Algerian struggle for independence, and the attendant French colonial crimes… This book brushes away the myth of the French mission civilisatrice [civilizing mission] and provides new perspectives on the Algerian liberation struggle and French colonial violence.’ Mohamed Chamekh, Contemporary Review of the Middle East
‘Groundbreaking’ Alex Tan, Asymptote
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: The Scene of the Crime, The Crime of the Seen
Chapter 1: Excavating the Anarchive. An Archeaology of the Corpus
Chapter 2: Archive Stories, From Politics to Romances
Chapter 3: Non-lieux de mémoire: Maps and Graffiti in the Scriptable City
Chapter 4: The Seine’s Exceptional Bodies
Chapter 5: “How Lucky Were the Blond Kabyles”: Reading Race in the Anarchive
Chapter 6: The Entangled Stories of October 17, Vichy, the Jews, and the Holocaust
Epilogue: The Ends of the Anarchive
Bibliography:
The Anarchive – Primary sources
Selected Secondary Sources
