Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Journalist : M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people? Ben M'Hidi :  And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets. — The Battle of Algiers ,  a 1966 movie   Related The Rebel’s Clinic

Monuments Decolonized

A collection from the Transnational Institute (TNI)

How much of the war in Ukraine or the one on Gaza will be known in the future? Looking at the example of ‘ Algeria in the Archives ’ or the British empire, can inform us that information and records could be buried for decades. What we know now is just some of what is happening. The article is behind a paywall unless one has an institution subscription, for example, with NLR.

A review of Class War: A Literary History

“At the heart of Peterson’s book is a counterargument to traditional narratives of postwar social reform. The very same rhetoric that justified the construction of a supposed top-down progressive modernity after 1945 was simultaneously used to justify the entrenchment of colonial rule in North Africa .”

En Français , Arabe and English Good news for many: ‘there is no hope for Arab countries; it is in their culture.’ Full Speed Ahead … to Nowhere

 But why a British actor as Fanon? Related A review of Concerning Violence

Algeria: Primary schools to teach English in 'overdue' move away from 'colonial' French French is on the verge of disappearing in Morocco “Algerian children will be left unable to academically master a single language due to the lack of provisions for this transition into English in schools.”  Moving from French to English won't resolve the country's problems

The energy transition in North Africa: neocolonialism again! التصدي للاستعمار الجديد في الانتقال الطاقي بشمال أفريقيا

“A survey for French television found that almost six out of 10 people thought those living in France without permission should be put in administrative detention.” No surprise here . Related Le Pen consistently received her best scores  [in  la France périphérique small towns, rural municipalities and declining former industrial belts, the ‘France of the Gilets Jaunes’],  precisely because she offered a discourse that resonated with the demands for security and protection found in parts of France that have most suffered from the consequences of market-led globalization. Having accepted the mantra of There Is No Alternative, the forces of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ have been signally unable to speak to these demands, instead viewing them as obstacles to modernization. This laid the terrain for the Front National to frame them in nationalist-xenophobic terms, and present itself as the ‘voice of the people’. Us and them

Systematic delays, economic opportunities and the risk of green colonialism

Enduring entanglements

 From citrus production to historical memory

“ In this perverse upending of the very meaning of decolonization, to decolonize France is to rid the nation of the immigrants who are “colonizing” it . Paradoxically, the most vocal advocates of decolonization today are not formerly colonized subjects, but the nativist guardians of the borders of France against the purported invasion of immigrants.”

on wikipedia

Union activist jailed for fabricated terrorism charges

Then immortalised it on film

“Many of Fanon’s recent academic critics, and even some of his sympathizers, continued to distort and misconstrue Wretched. They inflated the significance of one element in the book over all others: violence. And they underplayed Fanon’s socialist commitment and class analysis of capitalism, which are two essential components of his anti-imperialist arsenal. Nowhere is this truer than in recent postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonial theory has come to posit violence as the theoretical core of Wretched. Homi K. Bhabha, for example, has turned Fanon’s work into a site of “deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation” that “speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical change.”1 In his recent preface to Wretched, Bhabha reads colonial violence as a manifestation of the colonized’s subjective crisis of psychic identification “where rejected guilt begins to feel like shame.” Colonial oppression generates “psycho-affective” guilt at being colonized, and Bhabha’...

“[Frantz]  Fanon urged us to invent and make new discoveries and not blindly imitate Europe. The struggle of decolonisation, Fanon tells us, must challenge the dominance of European culture and its claims of universalism without being trapped in a romanticized and fixed past. It is these two alienations that colonised people must overcome in their cultural struggle. Decolonising the mind also means deconstructing Western notions of ‘development’, ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’, ‘universalism’ and ‘modernity’. Such concepts represent what is called a  coloniality of power and knowledge , which means that ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ were conceived in Europe and North America and then implanted in our continents (Africa, Asia and Latin America) in a context of coloniality (Mignolo, 2012). These Eurocentric ideas and culture have reinforced the colonial heritage of land confiscations, resource plunder, as well as domination of ‘other’ peoples in order to ‘civilise’ them.” Gene...