AUP's In-Depth French Algerian Race Talk
France's colonial presence in Algeria from 1830 to 1952 and Algeria's subsequent fight for independence in the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962 are sensitive topics in mainland France. The conflict represents the intersection of racism, religion, and nationalism, issues that still affect both France and Algeria today as well as their modern, post-colonial relationship.
Judith Surkis is a professor of history at Rutgers University. Her first book, Sexing the Citizen: Masculinity and Morality in France, 1870-1920, shows how masculine sexuality became central to the making of social order in republican France. Her new book, which she discusses with AUP in their fifth symposium, is Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria 1830-1930. Her book was published in 2019 and it won the Middle East Women's Studies 2020 book prize. It explores the politics of identity in France and colonial Algeria from the vantage point of legal and gender history.
In Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria 1830-1930, Professor Surkis traces how colonial authorities constructed Muslim legal difference, ultimately using it to deny Algerian Muslims full French citizenship. She provides a sweeping legal genealogy of French Algeria in the book, elucidating how "the Muslim question" in France became—and remains—a question of sex. During the talk, Professor Surkis explores the longstanding French legal fantasies of Muslim law, specifically the "Muslim question" in France and the legal embodiment of difference born out of French President Emmanuel Macron's bill targeting "Muslim" separatism. She also touches on the Centenary of 1930, citing sexual fears at the "highpoint" of French power and a reason for which sex is at the core of the "Muslim question." According to Surkis, Muslims, "give themselves the right to marry Europeans, but without reciprocating, because under no pretext can their daughters be given to Christians, to strangers... the tribe remains exceedingly jealous of its feminine element and keeps it entirely for itself."
Image credit: Unsplash/Rachid Oucharia
The colonial genealogy of a particularized conception of Muslim sex and the family as instituted in and by law illuminates enduring ideas of the embodied difference between secular French people and Muslims. Her paper explores how the very legal technologies deployed by the state to eliminate so-called Muslim separatism in fact reproduce difference, thus sustaining and legitimating discriminatory practices. Surkis concludes that these laws embody a racialization of Islam and increasingly corporeal, French colonization of government in a post-colonial society.
Joshua Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on the entangled colonial and post-colonial pasts of France and Algeria. His most recent book, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria, published in 2019, is a micro-history of a 1932 anti-Jewish pogrom in Constantine. His new book examines the relationship between the colonial past and contemporary relations between France and Algeria. Lethal Provocation won the Mimi S. Frank Award in Sephardic Culture (Jewish Book Council), the J. Russell Major Prize (American Historical Association), and the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize (French Colonial History Society).
Image credit: Flickr/The Israel Project
Part murder mystery, part social history of political violence, Lethal Provocation revisits the deadliest peacetime episode of anti-Jewish violence in modern French history. Professor Cole reconstructs the 1934 riots in Constantine, Algeria, in which tensions between Muslims and Jews were aggravated by the right-wing extremists, resulting in the deaths of 28 people. Animating unrest was Mohamed El Maadi, a soldier in the French army who later rallied to France's Vichy regime during the Second World War and finished his career in Waffen SS. Lethal Provocation lays bare El Maadi's motives as a provocateur and exposes official efforts to cover up his role as an instigator of this massacre. In the talk, Cole also cites and explains the "Appeal to the People of Constantine," which was a poster calling for, "a mass demonstration on April 6th, 1933 in Constantine by a local left-wing anti-fascist group," to fight oppressions in Germany and support the defense of all liberties. This ultimately represented a call for action by the people of Constantine to fight against the role of French right-wing nationalism in shaping ethnoreligious antagonisms in Algeria during the years preceding the anti-colonial war and independence.
Through their book presentations, both professors successfully tackle the complexities of Franco-Algerian relations over the course of a century. Their insightful, evidence-based perspectives provided AUP staff and students alike with food for thought given France's ongoing struggle to integrate Islam, Judaism, and other non-Eurocentric religions into the cultural frameworks of French society.
You can purchase Professor Surkis's new book here and Professor Cole's here.
