Recent Work on Colonial Violence in French Algeria

The primary texts under discussion include Benjamin Claude Brower’s A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (2009); Jennifer E. Sessions’s By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (2011); Judith Surkis’s Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in Algeria, 1830-1930 (2019); and Joshua Cole’s Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (2019). Taken together, these texts provide insight about four typologies of violence and violent behaviors in the French Algerian colonial field: physical violence (including structural violence), ideological violence (including symbolic violence), juridico-discursive violence, and inter-communal violence (by way of) provocation.