Fromentin, Algeria, And The Decolonial Politics Of Memory.

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, travel literature played a crucial role in shaping Western perceptions of the "Orient." While claiming to offer objective accounts, European travelers often perpetuated colonial stereotypes, portraying the East as an exotic, inferior, and vanishing “Other.” This article examines Eugène Fromentin’s Une Année dans le Sahel (1859) as a paradigmatic example of French colonial Orientalism, where aesthetic refinement serves to mask the violence of empire. Fromentin’s poetic vision of Algeria naturalizes displacement through what he called l’art pour l’art, a philosophy that transfigures colonial domination into melancholic spectacle. Drawing on postcolonial thinkers such as Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, and Malek Alloula, the study shows how Fromentin’s travelogue performs symbolic violence, what Djebar allegorizes as the “mutilated hand of Algeria” by transforming Indigenous loss into aesthetic pleasure. Extending this critique, the article situates Fromentin within contemporary decolonial frameworks, engaging Achille Mbembe’s notion of aestheticized necropolitics and Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of imperial debris to examine how Orientalist vision persists in modern archival and museological practices. It also incorporates Abdelkader Aoudjit’s reading of Algerian literature as a counter-discursive act of witnessing to a différend, a colonial silence that resists translation into imperial epistemology. By tracing Fromentin’s legacy from colonial nostalgia to present-day debates on restitution and memory, the article argues that Une Année dans le Sahel is not merely a historical text but a critical site in the ongoing struggle over how Algeria is remembered, represented, and reclaimed.