The symbolic violence and the colonization of names

Abstract

This article explores the role of historians in confronting the multifaceted violence of French colonialism in Algeria, focusing particularly on symbolic violence enacted through the transformation of personal names. Moving beyond conventional accounts of colonialism centered on military force or physical domination, it examines how colonial authorities reshaped the symbolic and legal identity of Algerians through the imposition of French naming practices. The central objective of the research is to understand how naming became a tool of colonial power—disrupting kinship systems, obscuring lineage, and contributing to broader structures of dispossession and cultural domination. Methodologically, this study employs a critical historical approach that draws on archival research, psychoanalytic theory, and postcolonial theory. It engages both colonial administrative sources and reflections from Algerian writers, psychoanalysts, and historians to interrogate how identity was codified and fractured through legal documentation.

The theoretical framework is informed by the psychoanalytic work of Karima Lazali, the ethical interventions of Omnia El Shakry, and the writings of Assia Djebar and Frantz Fanon on colonial violence and identity. The corpus consists of colonial-era civil status records (état civil), petitions, decrees, and legal texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries, alongside historical studies. The analysis centers on how millions of Algerians were registered under newly assigned, French-style names composed of a prénom and a patronym. These names were not mere transliterations or transliterations of existing Algerian names but symbolic acts of rupture—severing individuals from their ancestral nasab (lineage) and reconfiguring them as isolated legal subjects within the colonial order.

 The study finds that this transformation of names operated as a form of symbolic violence with tangible effects: weakening family structures, enabling land dispossession under laws like the 1873 Warnier Law, and embedding Algerians into a coercive legal and symbolic regime. Although this naming process did not involve direct physical violence, it played a foundational role in the broader colonial project of domination. By critiquing positivist historiography that often neglects symbolic and psychological dimensions of colonial rule, this article calls for a psychoanalytically informed historical methodology that listens to silenced voices and engages with the archives of loss. It argues that historians bear ethical responsibility not only to written sources and professional norms but to the people and identities those records exclude or distort. Remembering the names of the dead becomes a political and ethical imperative—part of a broader project to decolonize memory and reconstruct historical subjectivities from the ruins of colonial violence.

Key words : symbolic violence, personal names, colonization, Algeria historiagraphy.