Dr. Patrick Crowley - IRCHSS Award

IRCHSS Senior Research Fellowship Project

Algeria: Nation and Transnationalism 1988-2010

The overall aim of this project is to analyse the narrative dynamics of national allegory in Algerian narratives and film since 1988 and by this means to reassess representations of nation from a transnational perspective. In examining, and historicizing, the ways in which allegory is used to figure and interpret historical experience the project is constructed around a number of objectives. It begins with an analytical review of national allegories in texts and film produced prior to 1988. This will provide the background for an analysis of cultural forms of production from the period 1988 to 2010 in which a number of competing forces are in play: nationalist disenchantment, Islamism and globalization. The objectives focus on the impact of such forces across a range of cultural forms. What is the contemporary function of allegory in the political and cultural articulation of Algeria? What are the limits of allegory as a trope of the nation? How does national allegory, as a form of cultural interpretation, come to offer a privileged insight into a view of Algeria? To what extent does it decentre the Franco-Algerian relationship and re-situate Algeria within a broader Mediterranean and trans-Maghrebian perspective?