Negotiating Algerian Postcolonial and Transcolonial Identities through Imagining Palestine, 1962-1978

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My project will investigate the social, emotional and representiative roles of solidarity with the Palestinian cause in the immediate postcolonial era in Algeria. As Palestinian-American postcolonial scholar Edward Said outlined in 1979, the situation of the Palestinian struggle within an era of decolonisation ascribes it a representative quality, becoming a deterritorialised 'symbol' for 'the struggle against social injustice'. Despite clear allegorical comparisons between Algeria's violent rejection of settler colonial society and self-conceptualisations of the Palestinian cause - evidenced by the PLO's ideological identification with Fanonian anticolonial nationalism, and its use of the FLN as a case study of a successful guerrilla resistance movement - little historiographical focus has been dedicated to the social functions of Palestinian solidarity within early postcolonial Algerian society. Evans and Phillips' influential work on the networks of solidarity in the non-Aligned movement under the Ben Bella and Boumédiène regimes (1962-78) highlights the contemporary optimism of 'Third World', or global South-South cooperation as a veritable solution to the postcolonial question - supported by an ordinary populace conditioned by 'memories of exclusion under colonialism' that fostered a commitment to social justice. Olivia Harrison's literary analysis of North African intellectual imaginings of Palestine has begun to situate Palestinian solidarity within this milieu, challenging the prevailing assumption that Maghrebi criticism of Israel was predicated on colonial notions of Arab and Jewish ethnic incompatibility, highlighting the porosity of this supposed binary. However, little explicit attention has been paid to how Algerian imaginings of Palestine intersect with social memory of Jewish communities, having largely migrated to France following decolonisation. Taking influence from local North African Jewish histories, such as Boum Aoumar's Memories of Absence and Joëlle Bahloul's Architecture of Memory, I will investigate through oral interviews how Muslim Algerians rearticulated colonial-era conceptions of Jewishness as elevated from Algerian 'indigeneity' through imagining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly in regions with significant historical Jewish presence. In focussing on local narratives, I would hope to elicit how the broader global and transnational influences of pan-Arabism, Zionism and anticolonial ideologies were used to negotiate local social, cultural and religious identities. Marguerite Rollinde's exploration of intellectual and artistic representations of Palestine during Morocco's repressive 'Lead Years' (1956-1999) highlights how narratives of forced disappearances and political repression in Palestine took on a life of their own as a covert expression of dissent and opposition to the Moroccan regime. Taking influence from Jankowski and McDougall in questioning the emancipatory and unifying promises of the postcolonial Arabo-Muslim nationalist model, I would similarly seek to nuance Algerian responses to events such as the Six-Day War (1967), exploring the resonance of narratives of displacement and disposession beyond presuming a natural pan-Arab political affiliation. To what extent were the particularities of Algeria's history of settler colonialism responsible for identification with Palestinian narratives of dispossession? Furthermore, how did this identification shape Algerian conceptions of postcolonial space, mobility, ethnic binaries, and historical memory of colonial life? Ultimately, this project would contribute to the field by highlighting an as-yet unexplored avenue of postcolonial social identification in Algeria, whilst also historicising contemporary political dynamics - particularly the significance of Algerian popular opposition to normalisation with Israel.