Picturing Locales of Resistance: Photographic Representations of the French-Algerian War

This paper will address the boundary of recognized identity in the French-Algerian colonial relations. During the Algerian War of Independence, a challenge to the colonial system arose through breaking the racial segregation and spatial division within both the cities of Algiers and Paris. In the Battle of Algiers, several Algerian women Ì¢‰âÂ' dressed as European women Ì¢‰âÂ' crossed into a restricted portion of the city and thus sparked the battle that became a turning point in the war. By moving past the mythic ethnic boundary toward a full European identity, this assimilative performance of the Algerian women created a limbic space of resistance. Investigating this performative transformation of race, and further, looking at the space of the bidonvilles outside the cities of Algiers and Paris, and the protests of October 17, 1961 in Paris, will show how the colonized body crossed spatial boundaries within the cities of Algiers and Paris as well as its imposed racial boundaries. Identities framed by the colonial authority were both ideologically mediated and architecturally reinforced; identity barriers regulating the body and spatial divisions within the city collapsed into one. Each of these instances presented a challenge to these barriers.