News
Book Launch - 1 October @ 5pm
You are cordially invited to the launch of:
Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939, (Oxford University Press, 2019)
By Dónal Hassett
Staff Common Room, Tuesday October 1st, 17:00-18:00
The book will be launched by Prof. John Horne, Fellow Emeritus at Trinity College Dublin.
This will be followed by a wine reception
ALL ARE WELCOME
This event is supported by the French Department
Over the course of the Great War, a quarter of million settlers and subjects from Algeria served in French forces. Mobilising Memory is the first study to explore how the mass mobilisation of Algerian society during the First World War transformed politics in the colony. It asks how actors across the colony's racial, ideological, and class divides sought to legitimise their competing visions for Algeria's future by evoking their wartime service. Without diminishing the coercive power of the colonial state, it stresses the agency of the citizens and subjects of Algeria who sought to leverage their contribution to the war to enhance their positions within colonial society. In doing so, Mobilising Memory explores the consequences, often unintended, of framing political, social, and economic demands in a language rooted in the experience of the Great War. It argues that the predominance of this shared political language - grounded in notions of loyalty to and sacrifice for France - meant that most actors in interwar Algeria sought not to break with the Empire but rather to renegotiate their place within it. While these efforts rarely proved successful, the volume demonstrates how they radically reshaped the practice of politics in the colony.