« Amère patrie. » : Une note sur le retour des pieds-noirs en Algérie

Résumé 0

“Bitter Homeland”: A Note on the Return of the Pieds-Noirs to Algeria By simultaneously examining “literatures of exile” and material collected in interviews, it can be shown that the return to Algeria does not concern all pieds-noirs in the same way. Indeed, their sociological profiles – like their positions in the space of receptions of colonial history – are very diverse. The act of returning can be considered a form of “roots tourism” only when the work of mourning has been carried out independently of heroic accounts in which Algeria is identified as a French creation. Conversely, the skepticism of some pieds-noirs underscores the insurmountable incongruity (in the framework of an affective economy) between an Algeria that has been reconstructed a posteriori and the reality of a transformed country. With their remoteness from family tombs remaining one cause of the suffering of the pieds-noirs, the voyage can also be motivated by the project of collectively caring for the land of the dead. Thus the diversity of the meaning and uses of return, a phenomenon that spans the fugitive experience of re-socialization within a lost Algeria, the transmission of genealogical memory, the shared upkeep of family tombs and the shock of deracination tied to the search for the lost Algeria of an earlier generation. ■