Generation independence: a people's history

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How do you make space in public history for a period which is historically important, but not institutionally valued? How do you transmit stories about the past between generations who have been educated in different languages of instruction? These were two key questions which emerged from an AHRC Early Career Fellowship on 'Rewriting the veteran: gender, geography, generation and the Algerian War'. In this previous project, the Principal Investigator (Natalya Vince) wrote about the difficulties of writing post-independence history and analysed intergenerational (non-)transmission. She critiqued the squashing down of Algerian history in academic and popular history into two juxtaposed periods - the War of Independence (1954-62) and the civil conflict of the 1990s - as feeding into a caricature of Algeria as locked in an inescapable cycle of violence. She analysed how younger generations of Algerians understood the wartime and post-war roles of women, revealing the ways in which young people reimagined women who were often socially unconventional as more conservative figures, using a dominant language of sacrifice, martyrdom and religious piety. This Follow on Funding project provides an opportunity to go beyond analysis. It will develop and test out creative solutions to these issues, which are societal risks even more than they are academic challenges. It thus significantly enhances the value and wider benefit of the original research project.The project will produce 18 new 20-minute documentary portraits in which Algerian women and men talk about the 1960s and 1970s. This was a key period in Algerian history: after eight years of a devastating anti-colonial war and 132 years of colonial rule, the emphasis was on rebuilding Algerian infrastructure, tackling massive illiteracy, freeing the Algerian economy, society and culture from (neo-)colonial domination and positioning Algeria as a world leader amongst newly liberated nations. The documentaries seek to convey this story on a human scale, going beyond the usual handful of iconic political figures. The intersections of ordinary lives with processes of state- and nation-building will emerge through interviews with teachers, doctors, air traffic controllers and power plant managers, amongst others. Documentaries will be edited, subtitled in Arabic, French and English, uploaded onto a specially-created project website, and connected into social media. Intergenerational exchange is embedded in the production process as well as generated through the outputs: the PI will be working with an Algeria-based film company funded via a scheme to support unemployed youth, and two young Algerian artists will produce artwork to express the stories told in new creative forms, further engaging new audiences. Subtitling the films and using Facebook autotranslation features for posts and comments will enable those who are more Arabophone and those who are more Francophone to exchange views and testimony around the same artefact, bridging a linguistic divide which is hyperpoliticised, but in everyday life can be as much a practical barrier as anything else. Audience feedback on a first round of films will shape who is interviewed in the next round and the themes to be addressed, reinforcing the co-production of knowledge and shared ownership of the project.By the end of the award, the project will have produced a substantial body of original, creative, open-access material and aims to have generated a cross-generational online conversation amongst new audiences about the 1960s and 1970s. This will serve as a springboard to engage with more 'top down' outlets for public history (print press, TV, radio, art galleries, museums) to encourage them to integrate this period into their activities. If successful, this model of how to bring new chronologies and stories into public history 'from below' has the potential to be applied to a wide range of contexts and chronological periods.