"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving the contested, yet shared monumental heritage.
Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both countries and interviews with French and Algerian heritage actors and artists, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Monuments emerge here as objects with a soul, offering visual records of the colonized Algerian native, the European settler colonizer, and the contemporary efforts to engage with a dark colonial past. Richly illustrated with more than 100 color images, Monuments Decolonized offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate earlier settler colonial histories. Read the excerpted introductory chapter here.
About the Speaker
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Susan Slyomovics is a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her publications include The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance (1988), The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998), The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib (editor, 2001), The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2006), Clifford Geertz in Morocco (editor, 2010), How to Accept German Reparations (2014), and, most recently, Monuments Decolonized. Professor Slyomovics' research interests, focusing on the Middle East and North Africa, are concerned with reparations, truth commissions, economic anthropology, human rights, visual anthropology, preservation, and heritage.
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Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of Anthropology