What genocide does the colonization of Algeria represent? The problem of writing the history of colonization in Algeria

Abstract

The colonization of Algeria, France's first colonization of a neighboring African and Muslim country, is notable for the destructive violence that characterized both its colonization and decolonization. Despite its historical significance, it remains understudied, particularly with regard to the role of invasive settlement, the land issue, and forms of racialization. A dominant Francocentric bias hinders research, ignoring international theoretical contributions on colonization, genocide, and systemic racism.

This article exposes the dominant Francocentric biases that currently guide historical research and set its frameworks and perspectives, preventing openness to other forms of knowledge, particularly those from countries and peoples that have had experiences similar to those of Algeria. This epistemological closure, deliberately maintained in France at the university and editorial levels, particularly with regard to the history of colonization, has made it virtually impossible since the late 1970s to take into account remarkable theoretical advances such as the Subaltern Studies movement, which brought together researchers around Ranajit Guha and promoted a non-elitist history, restoring to the subaltern their role as historical agents producing their own knowledge of liberation; Similarly, French historiography has remained oblivious to advances made by researchers across the Atlantic on the issue of settler colonialism (Settler Colonial Studies), a specific field of knowledge centred on the struggle for land, which engenders a logic of elimination as the central dynamic of the replacement of one people by another. These advances have brought the question of genocide back to the heart of the historical debate by reviving the thinking of Raphael Lemkin, while reinforcing the analytical power of the sub-concept of cultural genocide and broadening its scope of applicability to colonization.

For all these reasons, this study lays down the theoretical conditions and prerequisites for a genuine decoloniality of history, thus continuing the call made by the late Mohamed Cherif Sahli in 1964 for a "Copernican revolution in the field of historical studies. De-Frenchifying the history of colonization, putting Algerians back at the heart of their history, and mobilizing appropriate analytical frameworks derived from decolonial knowledge are the challenges facing Algerian historians of the colonial period.

Keywords: Colonization, Genocide, Settlement colonization, History, defrancization