Outside Views/Inside Stories: The Algerian Experience

The Indigenous People’s Reading Group presents
Outside Views/Inside Stories
Writing on Algeria: From Colony to Independence and Ongoing Liberation Movements
October 1 through December 17. We will not meet on October 22.

This fall we will read from four novels concerning Algeria. We start with Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World, concerning the war of liberation against French occupation. On October 8 we will read and discuss the first 4 chapters. We then step back to look at the influential The Stranger of Camus and the popular The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud and understand the occupation of the Algerian mind in Camus and look to see where Daoud is with that occupation today. We will complete our autumn look at North Africa as represented by Algeria with Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh, concerned with Algeria’s struggle against foreign domination as well as its post-independence struggle with itself and the fate of revolutionary ideals in a post-revolutionary society.

Throughout this study and later in the year we will refer to Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Said argues that, although the “age of empire” largely ended after World War II, when most colonies gained independence, imperialism continues to exert considerable cultural influence in the present. To be aware of this fact, it is necessary, according to Said, to look at how colonialists and imperialists employed “culture” to control distant land and peoples. We will be reviewing the first chapter entitled “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” of Culture and Imperialism on October 8

The Indigenous Peoples’s Reading Group, which has grown from the enthusiastic call for the need of greater understanding of the long history of the peoples of North America and other continents of the world who were of those continents before and remain after the European colonists came to settle and bring this capitalist relations to every corner of the globe. Our group began following a stirring presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz September of 2014 where she introduced An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.