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This volume explores the relationship between place, traumatic
memory, and narrative. Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, Europe,
Oceania, and North and South America, the book provides a uniquely
cross-cultural and global approach. Covering a wide range of
cultural and linguistic contexts, the volume is divided into three
parts: memorial spaces, sites of trauma, and traumatic
representations. The contributions explore how acknowledgement of
past suffering is key to the complex inter-relationship between the
politics of memory, expressions of victimhood, and collective
memory. Contributors take note of differing aspects of memorial
culture, such as those embedded in war memorials, mass grave sites,
and exhibitions, as well as journalistic, literary and visual forms
of commemorations, to investigate how narratives of memory can give
meaning and form to places of trauma.
Hoarding Memory looks at the ways the stories of the Algerian War
(1954-62) have proliferated among the former French citizens of
Algeria. By engaging hoarding as a model, Amy L. Hubbell
demonstrates the simultaneously productive and destructive nature
of clinging to memory. These memories present massive amounts of
material, akin to the stored objects in a hoarder's house. Through
analysis of fiction, autobiography, art, and history that
extensively use collecting, layering, and repetition to address
painful war memories, Hubbell shows trauma can be hidden within its
own representation. Hoarding Memory dedicates chapters to specific
authors and artists who use this hoarding technique: Marie
Cardinal, Leila Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora in writing and Nicole
Guiraud and Patrick Altes in art. All were born in Algeria during
colonial French rule but in vastly different contexts; each
suffered personal or inherited trauma from racism, physical or
psychological abuse, terrorist or other violent acts of war, and
exile in France. Zineb Sedira's artwork is also included as an
example of traumatic memory inherited from her parents. Ultimately
this book shows how traumatic experience can be conveyed in a
seemingly open account that is compounded and compacted by the
volume of words, images, and other memorial debris that testify to
the pain.
Autobiography in France has taken a decidedly visual turn in recent
years: photographs, shown or withheld, become evidence of what was,
might have been, or cannot be said; photographers, filmmakers, and
cartoonists undertake projects that explore issues of identity.
"Textual and Visual Selves" investigates, from a variety of
theoretical perspectives, the ways in which the textual and the
visual combine in certain French works to reconfigure ideas--and
images--of self-representation.
Surprisingly, what these accounts reveal is that photography or
film does not necessarily serve to shore up the referentiality of
the autobiographical account: on the contrary, the inclusion of
visual material can even increase indeterminacy and ambiguity. Far
from offering documentary evidence of an extratextual self
coincident with the "I" of the text, these images testify only to
absence, loss, evasiveness, and the desire to avoid
objectification. However, where Roland Barthes famously saw the
photograph as a prefiguration of death, in this volume we see how
the textual strategies deployed by these writers and artists result
in work that is ultimately life-affirming.
Colonized by the French in 1830, Algeria was an important French
settler colony that, unlike its neighbors, endured a lengthy and
brutal war for independence from 1954 to 1962. The nearly one
million Pieds-Noirs (literally "black-feet") were former French
citizens of Algeria who suffered a traumatic departure from their
homes and discrimination upon arrival in France. In response, the
once heterogeneous group unified as a community as it struggled to
maintain an identity and keep the memory of colonial Algeria alive.
Remembering French Algeria examines the written and visual
re-creation of Algeria by the former French citizens of Algeria
from 1962 to the present. By detailing the preservation and
transmission of memory prompted by this traumatic experience, Amy
L. Hubbell demonstrates how colonial identity is encountered,
reworked, and sustained in Pied-Noir literature and film, with the
device of repetition functioning in these literary and visual texts
to create a unified and nostalgic version of the past. At the same
time, however, the Pieds-Noirs' compulsion to return compromises
these efforts. Taking Albert Camus's Le Mythe de Sisyphe and his
subsequent essays on ruins as a metaphor for Pied-Noir identity,
this book studies autobiographical accounts by Marie Cardinal,
Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, and Leila Sebbar, as well as
lesser-known Algerian-born French citizens, to analyze movement as
a destabilizing and productive approach to the past.
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