Comrades, Sisters, Servants: Gender, race, and subjectivity in Algerian communist female sociabilities, 1944 - 1968

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Through the life stories of Algerian women communists, my DPhil project explores the transnational possibilities and limits of sociability and solidarity across a racialised divide throughout the longue durée of Algerian decolonisation. In the decades leading up to independence, European members of the Algerian Communist Party (PCA) were uniquely committed to the anti-colonial struggle relative to the wider settler population. The party, while inextricably rooted in French colonial rule, facilitated radical cross-community politics. Its European members, structurally privileged as they were, worked to escape the constraints of the society in which they lived. After 1962, however, they found themselves increasingly excluded from the new Algerian nation, whose national identity was founded on community identification in Arabic and Islam. My project considers the extent to which Algerian communism, its social milieu, and its imagined future - of an independent, pluralistic, and multi-confessional Algeria - transcended the racialised confines of the colonial and post-colonial situation and, crucially, how both gender and class functioned to expand and contract this landscape of possibility. Most recently, I have been especially interested in how female and familial transnational networks shaped this socio-political landscape and how the prison and other carceral systems functioned as both productive and prohibitive sites of cross-community politicisation and sociability. In examining the PCA as a site of radical cross-community sociability, I move beyond established historical scholarship that has understood such spaces as mondes du contact or 'contact worlds' between racialised communities, which are taken to represent the possibility of a reformed colonial alternative to independence. My work is instead aligned with historians who, by looking beyond political reform to the quotidian experiences of domination and systemic inequality, recognise that opportunities for such reform were fleeting, if not altogether illusory. I thus approach the PCA milieu as an example of 'worlds in contact' (McDougall): a radical aperture in colonial society, taken on its own terms and devoid of teleological charge, that complicates our understanding of social and political possibilities within a racialised colonial hierarchy. Where previous scholarship has primarily focused on how such possibilities were contested in the public sphere, my work focuses on subjectivities and intimate relationships between communist women in the domestic sphere as both an under-examined space of cross-ethnic sociability and the most 'intimate' site of colonial domination (Stoler). In so doing, I also highlight the women whose political engagement has typically been underplayed in more conventionally political treatments of Algerian communism.Moreover, by shifting focus from party meetings to domestic spaces of daily interaction, I offer a new analytical frame for understanding the Algerian communist milieu through the micro-level subjectivities of the women who participated in it. In so doing, I draw inspiration from cultural historians, such as Toby Ditz, for whom subjectivities and the ego-documents that reveal them are deeply embedded in the 'matrix of social relationships' from which they emerge. Through a corpus of life-writings gathered from women involved in Algerian communist politics - who occupied positions of varying status, were of differing racialised identities, and followed different trajectories after independence - I aim to comprehend the qualitative character such relations matrices, the emotions they invoked, and the contradictions they represented in Algerian communist sociabilities and political life more broadly.Archival fragmentariness and marginality are primary considerations in my work. In focusing on life-writings and family archives, I contribute to ongoing efforts to write (post)colonial histories beyond the official