Representing October 17: Algeria, France and the writing of History

Lia Nicole Brozgal
French & Francophone Studies
UC Los Angeles

This project establishes and historicizes a corpus of cultural texts (literary, historical, filmic, and visual) that represent the massacre of Algerians by Parisian polices forces in October 1961. An event long repressed by state censorship, the massacre has nonetheless been a topic of cultural production in France since the 1980s. In dialogue with the fields of history, literature, postcolonial studies, Holocaust studies, and others, my project suggests that literature (understood broadly) has stepped in to fill a void in historiography. Moreover, my work moves beyond the fact of representation to plumb the depths of its function. Although varied in genre, all of the cultural texts under consideration produce aesthetic and historical discourse, and deploy representational strategies that constitute responses not only to the event itself, but to its subsequent erasure in both the popular consciousness and institutional discourse.