"Imperial Identities" is a groundbreaking book that addresses identity formation in colonial Algeria of two predominant ethnicities and analyzes French attitudes in the context of nineteenth-century ideologies. Patricia M. E. Lorcin explores the process through which ethnic categories and cultural distinctions were developed and used as instruments of social control in colonial society. She examines the circumstances that gave rise to and the influences that shaped the colonial images of "good" Kabyle and "bad" Arab (usually referred to as the Kabyle myth) in Algeria.

In this new edition of Imperial Identities, Lorcin addresses the related scholarship that has appeared since the book's original publication, looks at postindependence issues relevant to the Arab/Berber question, and discusses the developments in Algeria and France connected to Arab/Berber politics, including the 1980 Berber Spring and the 1992-2002 civil war. The new edition also contains a full and updated bibliography.

The dissolution of the French Empire and the ensuing rush of immigration have led to the formation of diasporas and immigrant cultures that have transformed French society and the immigrants themselves. "Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World" examines the impact of this postcolonial immigration on identity in France and in the Francophone world, which has encompassed parts of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Immigrants bear cultural traditions within themselves, transform "host" communities, and are, in turn, transformed. These migrations necessarily complicate ideals of national literature, culture, and history, forcing a reexamination and a rearticulation of these ideals. Exploring a variety of texts informed by these transnational conceptions of identity and space, the contributors to this volume reveal the vitality of Francophone studies within a broad range of disciplines, periods, and settings. They remind us that the idea and reality of "Francophonie" is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon but something that grows out of long-term interactions between colonizer and colonized and between peoples of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. Truly interdisciplinary, this collection engages conceptions of identity with respect to their physical, geographic, ethnic, and imagined realities.

While the Mediterranean is often considered a distinct, unified space, recent scholarship on the early modern history of the sea has suggested that this perspective is essentially a Western one, devised from the vantage point of imperial power that historically patrolled the region’s seas and controlled its ports. By contrast, for the peoples of its southern shores, the Mediterranean was polymorphous, shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment. Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century the idea of a monolithic Mediterranean had either been absorbed by or imposed on the populations of the region. In French Mediterraneans editors Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard offer a collection of scholarship that reveals the important French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century creation of the singular Mediterranean. These essays provide a critical study of space and movement through new approaches to think about the maps, migrations, and margins of the sea in the French imperial and transnational context. By reconceptualizing the Mediterranean, this volume illuminates the diversity of connections between places and polities that rarely fit models of nation-state allegiances or preordained geographies.

This is a cohesive collection that brings together the most recent and innovative scholarship on the subject of memory and identity in the France-Algeria colonial and postcolonial relationship, exploring topics from history and photography to culture and religion. The relationship between Algeria and France that formed during the 132 years of colonial rule did not end in 1962 when Algeria gained its independence. This long period of occupation left an indelible mark on the social fabric of both societies, one that continues to influence their cultures, identities, and politics. Wide-ranging in scope yet complementary in focus, the essays deftly convey the extent to which the French colonial experience in Algeria resonates on both sides of the Mediterranean. Young and established scholars shed light on the linguistic, cultural, and social mechanisms of violence, remembrance, forgetting, fantasy, nostalgia, prejudice, mythmaking, and fractured identity. The book's three major sections center on particular aspects of identity, memory, or nostalgia: ""Identity Reconsidered,"" ""Memory or Forgetting,"" and ""Nostalgia."" Addressing the nature of Franco-Algerian relations through such topics as migration, displacement, settler colonialism, racism, and sexuality, these essays provide an important contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and North African history. With renewed public debate surrounding the two countries' shared past and their interwoven communities today, this volume will be indispensable for anyone with an interest in the relations between Algeria and France and the literature on memory and nostalgia.