What is at stake in writing about wartime experiences many decades after they occurred? Why and how are such events remembered in a very different social and political context and from a subject position altered by the passage of time, the aging process and perhaps the failure of memory? In the context of the Algerian War, there is a substantial corpus of memorial writing in different genres by authors, both well-known and obscure, who have returned in their later years to the events of their revolutionary youth. Adjacent to these belated testimonies or— to borrow from the psychoanalyst and former militant Alice Cherki, “anachronistic memories”—are works in which the child of a former militant speaks in the voice of their parent. Sometimes aligning with but often complicating theories of memory ranging from trauma and amnesia to multidirectional and post-memory, these works raise epistemological, narrative and ethical questions about memory and memorialization.
Madeleine Dobie teaches French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She works primarily on eighteenth & twentieth/twenty-first century francophone/postcolonial literatures of France & the Maghreb. She is the author of Foreign Bodies. Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford, ’01, ’03), Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Cornell, 2010) and co-author, with Myriam Cottias, of Relire Mayotte Capécia. Une femme des Antilles dans l’espace colonial français (Armand-Colin, 2012). She is coeditor, with Rebecca Saunders, of ‘France in Africa/Africa(ns) in France,’ a special issue of Comparative Studies of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, and with Kaiama L. Glover of ‘Maryse Condé: a Writer for our Times,’ a special issue of Yale French Studies. She has also edited the first volume of A Comparative Literary History of Slavery: ‘Slavery & Affect’ (forthcoming with John Benjamins), & a special cluster of Romanic Review titled ‘Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance.’ She is currently working on a book about late/belated testimonies of the Algerian Revolution.
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 018 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260305T213000Z DTEND:20260305T213000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR