Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities by Mona El Khoury

Reviewed by: Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities by Mona El Khoury Benjamin Sparks El Khoury, Mona. Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities. Lexington, 2020. ISBN 978-1-7936-1769-9. Pp. 307. Archives and national histories often tend to tell the story of historical majorities, thereby creating an official narrative that leaves out minority memories. The colonial and postcolonial history of France and Algeria is full of ruptures in which the national memory omits minority experiences, creating a conflicted collective memory. In the colonial context, even encounters signify ruptures, such as the Algerian Jews who became French citizens after 1870, at the cost of legal and symbolic separation with their neighbors. Similarly, the Harkis, those Algerians enlisted in the French military, became traitors rejected by their communities. These ruptures leave remnants, which Mona El Khoury considers as an expression of memory that does not blend seamlessly into the official narrative. The postcolonial encounters are not free from rupture and remnants, particularly involving "mixed races" and the Pieds-Noirs. The author looks at these four categories (Jews, Harkis, mixed-race, and Pieds-Noirs) as historical minorities that defy national and cultural categorization in the colonial and post-colonial sphere, but nonetheless remain lasting markers of the past. The forgotten memories in the national narrative come to light in the literary works of minorities that exhume the past and create a type of minor(ity) archive. These works, through their dissonant memorial reconstructions, challenge the official history. El Khoury examines how writers confront fragmented and traumatic pasts by addressing the works of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal. The author follows the thematic elements of the novels chronologically, beginning with Cixous in colonial Algeria. El Khoury argues that Cixous's Les rêveries de la femme sauvage, regarding Algerian Jews, addresses other memories of colonization than those traditionally commemorated in France. The focus then moves to the Harkis through an analysis of Moze by Rahmani. The Harkis' complicated relationship with France affects future generations and their identity and memory, creating a "harkive," a counter-history, which is more accurate than the French state's official version. The author then examines the métis, who represent in the works of Bouraoui the conflicted relationship and historical tensions between France and Algeria that endure in the contemporary postcolonial realm. This work culminates with an analysis of the Pieds-Noirs, in Sansal's L'enfant fou de l'arbre [End Page 233] creux, during three different periods: colonial Algeria, the War of Independence, and the Algerian Civil War. El Khoury argues that this novel becomes a sort of archive of the future that re-envisions Pied-Noir identity. Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture offers an engaging sociohistorical study of the importance of minorities in the national archival process and of the role of literature in displaying a counter-archive. Benjamin Sparks University of Memphis (TN) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

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