Epilogue
1. Ella Shohat, "Notes on the 'Post-Colonial,'" Social Text 31-32 (1992): 105; Masao Miyoshi, "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State," Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (summer 1993): 750, 728.
2. Said, Culture and Imperialism , xx.
3. Bourdieu, The Algerians , 187, 160.
4. Deluz, L'Urbanisme et l'architecture d'Alger , 123. Abderrahman Bouchema was the unique Algerian architect in the country. As an active opponent to the colonial regime, his career under the French remained limited to designing houses for Algerians. After 1963, his office became one of the most important in Algiers.
5. Leonard Kodjo quoted in Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans (Chicago, 1990), 102, note 71. Miller provides a short summary of Kodjo's unpublished paper titled "Noms de rues, nomes des maîtres" (1987), which focuses on street names in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. For an excellent analysis of street names in Annaba (formerly Bône) with reference to French colonization and Algerian decolonization, see Prochaska, Making Algeria French , 209-215.
6. A great deal has been written on bilinguality in Algeria. Consider, for example, Assia Djebar's thoughts on the topic:
French is my "stepmother" tongue. Which is my long-lost mother-tongue, that left me standing and disappeared? . . . Mother-tongue, either idealized or unloved, neglected and left to fairground barkers and jailers. . . . Burdened by my inherited taboos, I discover I have no memory of Arab love-songs. Is it because I was cut off from the impassioned speech that I find the French I use so flat and unprofitable? . . .
This language was formerly used to entomb my people; when I write it today I feel like the messenger of old, who bore a sealed missive which might sentence him to death or to dungeon. By laying myself bare in this language I start a fire which may consume me. For attempting an autobiography in the former enemy's language. (Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade , tr. Dorothy S. Blair [London, 1985], 214-215)
On the languages of Algeria today (written Arabic, Maghribi Arabic, dialects of Berber, and French), see Kenneth Brown, "Lost in Algiers: Ramadan 1993," Mediterraneans 4 (summer 1993): 15-16.
7. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth , 209-210.
8. Lesbet, La Casbah d'Alger , 1; Lacheraf, preface to Ravéreau, La Casbah d'Alger , 28-29.
9. Lacheraf, preface, 10.
10. "Sauvegarde de la Casbah d'Alger," Techniques et architecture 329 (March 1980): 82-85. For accounts of postindependence projects for the casbah, see also Deluz, L'Urbanisme et l'architecture d'Alger , 118-119, and Lesbet, La Casbah d'Alger .
11. Bernard Pagand, "Constantine et les grandes médinas nord-algériennes entre ruines et projets," in Maghreb: Architecture et urbanisme. Patrimonie, tradition et modernité (Paris, 1990), 95-96.
12. Lesbet, La Casbah d'Alger , 64. Similar conditions dominate other Algerian cities as well. In Tlemcen, for example, the medina is now only a "place of transit" for newcomers, a situation that makes the already vulnerable fabric of the old city even more fragile. See Daoud Brikci, "Mutations des médinas d'Algérie: le cas de Tlemcen," paper presented at the American Institute for Maghribi Studies Annual Conference, 1996.
13. I borrow this terminology from Barthes's analysis of the Eiffel Tower. See Barthes, "The Eiffel Tower," in Sontag, Barthes Reader , 237.
14. The incident is cited in Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence , 197.
15. Brown, "Lost in Algiers," 13-14.
16. Nadir Abdullah Benmatti, L'Habitat du tiers-monde (cas d'Algérie) (Algiers, 1982), 168. According to the 1987 census, 44 percent of the country's population is younger than fifteen, and 72 percent younger than thirty. See Recensement général de la population et de l'habitat du 20 mars 1987 (Algiers, 1989), 110.
17. Deluz, L'Urbanisme et l'architecture d'Alger , 111-113; Sgroi-Dufresne, Alger 1830-1984 , 118.
18. Sgroi-Dufresne, Alger 1830-1984 , 233.
19. Deluz, L'Urbanisme et l'architecture d'Alger , 114-115; Sgroi-Dufresne, Alger 1830-1984 , 213; Benmatti, L'Habitat du tiers-monde , 178.
20. Benmatti, L'Habitat du tiers-monde , 179-182; Sidi Boubekeur, L'Habitat en Algérie (Lyon, 1986), 22-24, 177.
21. See, for example, New York Times , 6 June 1995.
22. Lazreg offers to replace the term fundamentalism by religiosity . She uses the term religiose movement to "identify the groups involved in order to emphasize the manipulation of religion as a tool of justification and acquisition of political power." See Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence , 209.
23. Assia Djebar, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (Paris, 1979), 170-178. It is not Delacroix's "superficial Orient"--a popular subject in recent art historical discourse--that Djebar cares to dissect. She focuses instead on the subtler implications of the painting, especially the fact that the scene makes the observer conscious of his unwarranted presence in the intimacy of this room, which is enclosed on the women frozen in an act of waiting.
24. For a comparative discussion of various versions of Picasso's Femmes d'Alger , see L. Steinberg, "The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large," in Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York, 1972), 125-234.
25. Djebar, Femmes d'Alger , 186-189. Djebar establishes a metaphorical relationship between fragments of women's bodies and the explosives they carried under their clothes. She also provides a critique of women's condition in Algeria in the aftermath of the independence by arguing that the grenades women hid under their clothes "as if they were their own breasts" exploded against them.
26. Steinberg, Other Criteria , 130. Picasso's sympathy for the Algerian War is expressed most blatantly in his drawing of Djamila Boupasha, whose accounts of torture had made her a cause célèbre in France and thoughout the world. The portrait was published in 1962 on the cover of Djamila Boupasha , written by Gisèle Halimi, with an introduction by Simone de Beauvoir.
27. Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb , 84-85.
28. These figures are taken from John A. McKesson, "Concepts and Realities in a Multiethnic France," French Politics and Society 12, no. 1 (winter 1994): 20.
29. Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City," 160-161.
30. H. Adlai Murdoch, "Rewriting Writing: Identity, Exile, and Renewal in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia," Yale French Studies 83 (1993): 87-89.
31. Samia Mehrez, "Azouz Begag: Un di Zafas di Bidoufile (Azouz Begag: Un des enfants du bidonville) or the Beur Writer: A Question of Territory," Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 25-42.