French Forum

Memory, Empire, and Poscolonialism edited by Alec Hargreaves, is about France and its increasingly imaginary—but no less powerfully symbolic—empire. This collection draws on trauma studies, postcolonial criticism, cultural historiography, and various currents of literary criticism. This range reminds us of Francophone scholarship's heterogeneity of critical practices. It also shows that the field's current critics are aggressively challenging those still touting hexagonal claims to exclusive relevance.

Several essays are noteworthy. Among these, Nick Nesbitt's stunning "A Singular Revolution" makes the provocative claim that Haiti is the lone democratic republic to incarnate the claims of the French revolution as "the explosive appearance of the new within the continuity of human experience"(39). Catherine Reinhardt's opening piece ("Slavery and Commemoration"), traces contemporary Martinique's rejection of French attempts to celebrate the benevolence of emancipation through memorials and artistic depictions of slave resistance.

The bulk of the second section covers Algeria. The first ("Marie-Pierre Ulloa's "Memory and Continuity") looks at the idea of "résistance" (recuperated from French resistance to Nazism) as a rallying cry both for and against France's colonial imperative, during the [End Page 286] Algerian war. Joshua Cole's "Remembering Torture and the War for Algerian Independence" and Sylvie Darmelat's "Revisiting Ghosts" examine the role of torture during the war. Cole's immensely intriguing analysis draws on historical studies of violence and trauma. Sylvie Durmelat instead focuses on the textual approaches that were taken in parsing torture victim Louisette Ighilariz' famous testimony and "how Ighilariz [made] . . . her voice heard in a highly politicized context."(145)

This section ends with analysis of literary works, most notably Mireille Rosello's "A literature without a name." Here Rosello examines how pied-noir novelist René-Nicolas' Algérie roman, "ambitiously yet humbly proposes to experiment with a genre of fictive history [. . .] seeking to remember the Algerian war."(175) Unasked perhaps, is how we are to react when narrator and writer have so much biographically in common, and the narrator confesses a crime. Rosello's discussions of the "rape of the mother as child," and the murder of Aïssa as paramyth seem oddly misplaced at times, but her reading is, true to form, brilliantly rendered.

The third section suggests it will turn to the Francophone world's penetration of the Hexagon. Instead, we stay with the Algerian war. The first essay (of three), Dayna Oscherwitz's "Decolonizing the past," is the (relative) exception. The author examines the intersection of nostalgia and memory, and conceptions of pure Frenchness or francité as they relate to assimilationist models of cultural integration. Susan Ireland's "The Algerian War Revisited" focuses on immigration as the return of the repressed, and "emphasizes the importance of engaging in a dialogue about the war, however difficult that may be."(208)

To conclude, these essays are generally strong and those working on the Maghreb (in the French imaginary) will be appreciative. Those expecting equal coverage of France's vast empire should look elsewhere. This volume is about North Africa with a few extras (on the Caribbean) thrown in for good measure. There are nine articles on the Maghreb and one (vaguely) on Sub-Saharan Africa, which is a bit of a problem.

On a different topic, while these essays demonstrate varied and rich approaches, one does wonder when Francophone studies will open itself to the groundbreaking work and theoretical legacy of the British [End Page 287] cultural studies movement. While this series of essays represents significant work, it also graphically demonstrates the critical discourses that remain to be seriously tested in a Francophone context. With these reservations noted, this is a collection well worth your attention.