Re-remembering Third Worldism: An Affirmative Critique of National Liberation in Algeria

Abstract

This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a number of Algerian intellectuals. By taking Algeria as a privileged locus of investigation, the discussion zooms into a specific context of Third Worldism, the Algerian War and the decade after, therefore focusing on the period between the 1950s and the 1970s. Here I understand Third Worldism to mean more than the instantiation of the postcolonial state through anticolonial liberation struggles. Rather, I take into consideration (Algerian) voices that push against the rigid boundaries of methodological nationalism and postcolonial theory. By embracing the ethos of ‘affirmative critique,’ the analysis aims to bring to light those ‘forgotten, hidden or invisible acts of critique’ that expose under-currents of Third Worldism not usually discussed or engaged. Thus, I engage writings of rarely considered Third World intellectuals, such as Kateb Yacine, Jean Amrouche, Jean Senac. These are all Algerian intellectuals; the reason behind this focus is the following: their involvement in Algeria’s decolonization struggles translated into translocal solidarity with other decolonization projects, whether in Vietnam or in Palestine. Aside from gesturing toward a translocal spatiality, their writings also embody a more genuine retrieval of dignity by the colonized, and an alternative memory of a different Algerian nation, intrinsically plural and hospitable to difference. Put differently, these voices both attempt a kind of diagnosis (however partial and incomplete) for the reductionism into which the Third World liberation state (inevitably) fell, while suggesting an alternative political horizon that comes closer to Fanon’s idea of ‘national consciousness’, especially in its attention to the ‘international dimension.’¹

Key Words:

• Affirmative critique; Algeria
• National consciousness
• National liberation
• Third Worldism

Acknowledgments

Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in Atlanta (March 2016) and at the Annual Conference of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies at King’s College, London (June 2018). I was invited to present this paper in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph (October 2016) and at the Institute on Globalization and Human Condition at McMaster University (March 2017). I would like to thank the participants at these events for providing helpful feedback and for engaging with the paper so enthusiastically. I am greatly indebted to Naeem Inayatullah for his incisive and careful reading of earlier drafts. Many thanks also to Sara Salem and Roberto Roccu for inviting me to contribute to this special issue, and to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. I must also register my thanks to Eric Hooglund for his helpful suggestions.

Notes

1 Frantz Fanon (2004) Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press), p. 179.

2 Peter Worsley (1964) The Third World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Jean-Pierre Garnier & Roland Lew (1984) From the Wretched of The Earth to the Defence of the West: An Essay on Left Disenchantment in France, The Socialist Register, 21, pp. 299–323; Robert Malley (1996) The Call From Algeria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press); Brent Hayes Edwards (2003) The Shadow of Shadows, Positions, 11(1), pp. 11–49; Claude Liauzu (1982) Aux origines des tiers-mondismes. Colonisés et anticolonialistes en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan); C. Liauzu (2007) Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France. Du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin); Vijay Prashad (2007) The Darker Nations (New York and London: The New Press); Charlie Samuya Veric (2013) Third World Project, Or How Poco Failed, Social Text, 31(1), pp. 1–20; Ian Birchall (2013) Third World and After, New Left Review, 80 (March–April), pp. 151–160; and Michael Goebel (2015) Anti-Imperial Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

3 Malley, Call, p. 18. See also Eyal Weizman (2011) The Least of All Possible Evils (London: Verso).

4 Ruth Sonderegger (2012) Negative Versus Affirmative Critique: On Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière, in: Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 254.

5 Ibid. I thank Naeem Inayatullah for drawing my attention to the notion of ‘affirmative critique.’

6 See Olivia C. Harrison (2012) Staging Palestine in France-Algeria, Social Text, 30 (3), pp. 27–47; Robbie Shilliam (2015) The Black Pacific (London: Bloomsbury); R. Shilliam (2015) Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands, Constellations, 23(3), pp. 425–435; and Quynh N. Pham & Maria José Méndez (2015) Decolonial Designs: José Martí, Hô Chí Minh, and Global Entanglements, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 40(2), pp. 156–173.

7 Kateb Yacine (1959) Le Cadavre Encerclé, in: Le Cercle des Représailles (Paris: Seuil); K. Yacine (1970) L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (Paris: Seuil); K. Yacine (1994) Le poète comme un boxeur (Paris: Seuil).

8 Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche (1963 [1946]) ‘L’Éternel Jugurtha’ [The eternal Jugurtha], in: Études Méditerranéennes, 11, pp. 61–71; J. Amrouche (1983) Étoile secrète (Paris: L’Harmattan); and J. Amrouche (1994) Un Algérien s’adresse aux Français ou l’histoire d’Algérie par les textes (1943–1961) (Paris: Awal/L’Harmattan).

9 Jean Sénac (1971) Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie algérienne, essai et choix de Jean Sénac (Paris: Librairie Saint-Germain-des-Près); and J. Sénac (2010) Selected Poems (Riverdale-on-Hudson: The Sheep Meadow Press).

10 Yacine, L’Homme.

11 Jean Genet (1986) Un captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard).

12 Yacine, Le Poète.

13 Fanon, Wretched, p. 179.

14 Wilder, Freedom; see also Prasenjit Duara (1995) Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Shahid Amin (1995) Event, Metaphor, Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press); M. S. S. Pandian (2002) One Step Outside Modernity, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(18), pp. 1735–1741.

15 These are questions, which are part of a larger project that examines the limits of colonial modernity and pushes against methodological nationalism. I explored these questions elsewhere in the context of the Dutch East Indies (see Sajed (2015) Insurrectional Politics in Colonial Southeast Asia. In: Globalizations, 12(6), pp. 899–912; and Sajed (2017) Peripheral modernity and anti-colonial nationalism in Java, Third World Quarterly, 38(2), pp. 505–523).

16 See also Sajed, Insurrectional Politics.

17 Garnier and Lew, ‘Left Disenchantment’; Malley, Call; and Goebel, Anti-Imperial.

18 Shilliam, Black Pacific, pp. 4, 15.

19 Quoted in Kattel Jaffrès & Thomas J. Lax (2015) Bouchra Khalili (Berlin: SAM Art Projects), p. 39.

20 Malley, Call, p. 21.

21 See Elleke Boehmer (2005) Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and Goebel, Anti-Imperial.

22 Malley, Call, p. 18.

23 See I. Birchall (2016) Capital of Pariahs, New Left Review, 98 (March–April), pp. 155–160.

24 Garnier & Lew, ‘Left Disenchantment,’ p. 310.

25 See Kristin Ross (2002) May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

26 Goebel, Anti-Imperial, p. 3.

27 Ibid, pp. 5–6.

28 Ibid, p. 6.

29 Ibid.

30 Goebel, Anti-Imperial, p. 3.

31 Boehmer, Empire; Goebel, Anti-Imperial; Shilliam, Black Pacific; and Jeffrey J. Byrne (2016) Mecca of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

32 Frederick Cooper (2002) Decolonizing Situations, French Politics, Culture and Society, 20(2), pp. 64–65.

33 Quoted in Goebel, Anti-Imperial, p. 10.

34 See Goebel, Anti-Imperial, p. 15.

35 Fanon, Wretched, p. 69.

36 Ibid, p. 179.

37 ‘The Shadow,’ p. 14. Original emphasis.

38 Veric,‘Third World,’ p. 7.

39 Goebel, Anti-Imperial, p. 10.

40 Ibid.

41 Fanon, Wretched, p. 239.

42 Ibid.

43 See Jean-Paul Sartre (2004) [1961] Preface, in Fanon, Wretched; Michael Azar (1999) In the Name of Algeria, in: A. C. Alessandrini (ed.) Frantz Fanon (London and New York: Routledge); and James D. LeSueur (2005) Uncivil War (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press).

44 Fanon, Wretched, pp. 148–151.

45 Ibid, p. 147.

46 Ibid, pp. 158–159.

47 Ibid, p. 159.

48 Ibid.

49 Veric, ‘Third World,’ p. 5.

50 Fanon, Wretched, p. 142.

51 Ibid, p. 143.

52 Ibid.

53 Darker, p. 123.

54 Yacine, Le Poète, p. 14.

55 The May 8, 1945 anticolonial demonstrations in Sétif now are seen as a collective trauma that ushered in the anticolonial mobilization which would lead to the start of the Algerian War.

56 Yacine, Le Poète, p. 17. My translation. All quotations used here from the works of Yacine, Amrouche, and Sénac are my translations unless otherwise specified.

57 Ibid, p. 28.

58 Clare Finburgh (2005) The Tragedy of Optimism, Research in African Literatures, 36(4), p. 119.

59 Ibid, p. 116.

60 Yacine, Le Poète, p. 42.

61 Ibid, p. 52.

62 Ibid, p. 53.

63 Ibid, p. 56.

64 See, for example, Étienne Balibar (1999) Algeria, France: One Nation or Two?, in: Joan Copjec & Michael Sorkin (eds) Giving Ground (London: Verso); and Alek Toumi (2002) Maghreb Divers (New York: Peter Lang).

65 Le Poète, p. 70.

66 Ibid, p. 71.

67 Jean Genet (1991) L’Ennemi déclaré (Paris: Gallimard), p. 172.

68 Zebeida Chergui (1999) Note au lecteur, in Kateb Yacine, Boucherie de l'espérance (Paris: Seuil), p. 14.

69 K. Yacine ([1971] 1999) Mohamed prends ta valise, in Yacine, Boucherie (Paris: Seuil).

70 Yacine, Le Poète, p. 79.

71 Fanon, Wretched, p. 142.

72 Prashad, Darker.

73 For analyses on the museumization of revolutionary memory in the case of Algeria, see Malika Rahal (2012) Comment faire l’histoire de l’Algérie indépendante?, La Vie des Idées. Available at: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Comment-faire-l-histoire-de-l-Algerie-independante.html, accessed September 5, 2018; Malika Rahal (2012) Fused Together and Torn Apart, History & Memory, 24(1), pp. 118–151; and James McDougall (2006) Martyrdom and Destiny, in Ussama Makdissi & Paul A. Silverstein (eds) Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 50–72.

74 Darker, p. 123.

75 For a discussion of the ambiguity of the anticolonialism that founds the Algerian national liberation state, both as a purveyor of collective dignity, and as the new instrument of political repression, see Sajed (2019) How We Fight Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21(5), pp. 635–651.

76 Yacine, Le Poète, pp. 89–90.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 Darker, p. 129.

80 Rahul Rao (2010) Third World Protest (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

81 Yacine, Le Poète, p. 109.

82 Ibid, p. 107.

83 Édouard Glissant (1981) Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Seuil).

84 André Nouschi (1994) Préface, in: Amrouche, Un Algérien, p. 13.

85 J. Amrouche (1963) Poèmes Algériens/Espoir et Paroles (Paris: Éd. Seghers), pp. 19–22.

86 Tassadit Yacine (1994) Introduction, in: Amrouche, Un Algérien.

87 Un Algérien, p. 52.

88 Ibid, p. 21.

89 Ibid.

90 Amrouche, L’Éternel.

91 See Kamal Guerroua (2012) Jean Mouhoub Amrouche: l’Éternel Jugurtha, El Watan. Available at: http://lequotidienalgerie.org/2012/01/07/jean-mouhoub-amrouche-leternel-jugurtha, accessed August 7, 2016.

92 Amrouche, Un Algérien, p. 300.

93 See Katia Sainson (2010) Introduction, in Sénac, Poems, p. xv.

94 Quoted in Le Sueur, Uncivil, p. 126.

95 Quoted in Sainson, Introduction, p. xvii.

96 Ibid, p. xviii.

97 Ibid.

98 Sénac, Poems, pp. 84–85.

99 See Sainson, Introduction, p. xviii; and Malley, Call, pp. 135–139.

100 Sénac, Poems, pp. 80–81.

101 Fanon, Wretched, p. 239.

102 Sénac, Poems, pp. 82–83.

103 Fanon, Wretched, p. 142.

104 Ibid, pp. 143–144.

105 According to Wilder, Freedom.