From colonisers to refugees: narratives and representations of the French settlers of Algeria.

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The project examines the intersection of refugee migration and colonial history, both contentious issues within contemporary French public life. Focusing primarily on the French colonial settlers from Algeria repatriated en masse to France as refugees in 1962, it will expose the roots of France's most urgent current social issues, demonstrating how the settlers are part of a longer, connected history of the Mediterranean, in which questions of culture define the experience of refugees and the response of host societies. This is the first systematic study in English of representations of and by the French settlers of Algeria in a relational framework joining the fields of settler colonialism, and refugee and diaspora studies. Furthermore, it will bring together academics, artists and professionals to analyse comparatively the experiences of Algeria's settlers together with refugees fleeing former settler colonies and post-war situations in Germany, Angola, ex-Yugoslavia, and those having recently crossed the Mediterranean from Syria. Evidence-based academic analysis of the experiences of forced migration presented in an accessible form is now urgently needed to foster public understanding, and the findings will be widely disseminated in a broad range of accessible media.The community of settler origin repatriated in 1962 has been a powerful political lobby in calling for a positive assessment of the nation's colonial past, a sensitive subject in France even today. To fully grasp the impact of the colonial past on present-day society, this population must also be understood relationally, as they cannot be not easily categorised. They were French citizens but many had non-French origins and had never visited France; they were regarded as exploitative colonisers, but most were primarily working-class who became refugees; they were white Catholics but spoke a North African patois and were regarded with suspicion by French mainlanders. The project will address this paradoxical dimension by examining the community through the prism of two distinct fields of study: 1) settler colonialism, a burgeoning field of primarily Anglophone study which has been little applied to French colonial history; and 2) refugee and forced migration studies, which emphasise that the post-displacement identity of a community is shaped by the experience of host country reception, and exile. This will also be explored in a broader timeframe from the colonization of Algeria by pioneers from across Europe, through the forced migrations of twentieth-century Europe, to the current Mediterranean migrant crisis. The project will 1) map and evaluate the traces of Algerian settler colonial culture within mainstream French culture; 2) identify the contextual and relational factors which shape the experience of migration for both settler refugees and the host society and 3) set the repatriation of Algerian settlers within a wider context of Mediterranean migration. These will be achieved through interdisciplinary analysis of a range of cultural representations including witness testimony, literature, film, graphic novels, autobiography, print media, documentary, campaigning websites and music in order to examine how this community make sense of their own experiences, and the host country's response. The project leads the development of the emerging field of settler colonial studies, and also provides new directions in studies of refugees and forced migrants, contributing to scholarship on questions of national identity, memory, diaspora, nostalgia, state authority and political violence, trauma, melancholy, terrorism, religion, and intergenerational transmission of memory. Working with a range of museum, artistic, local government and academic partners and practitioners, the outputs will communicate the contextualised testimonies of former settlers and refugees to the public, with the aim of fostering understanding of the experiences of migration and integration.