Reconstructive Memory Work: Trauma, Witnessing and the Imagination in Writing by Female Descendants of Harkis

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. Among the many communities of memory associated with the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), the group perhaps most evocative of the complexity of this conflict and its aftermath are the harkis: Algerian men who served as auxiliary soldiers in the French army. Demobilized following Algerian independence, many of those who succeeded in reaching France found themselves and their families housed in ‘transit’ camps for several years. Presenting readings that consider works by prominent authors as well as self-published narratives in their specific generational, gendered and (post)colonial contexts, this book argues that writing by daughters and granddaughters of harkis challenges the notion that this community is locked in a static or competitive logic of memory. Instead, second- and third-generation memory work by female descendants of harkis demands forms of imaginative projection and reconstruction which call into question often universalizing or individualist configurations of identity, trauma and testimony. Reconstructive Memory Work demonstrates how these texts probe the complexities of belonging, inheritance and reparation, allowing their authors and narrators to gain knowledge of painful pasts, while also bringing transgenerational silences and sedimented affect into the open. Focusing in particular on these works’ complex interweaving of memory and imagination, this study explores how diverse and dynamic forms of memory work test the boundaries of individual and collective experience, of past and present, and of unspeakability and the necessity of bearing witness, creating unprecedented dialogues across and between subjectivities, memories and temporalities.