Saintly grandmothers: youth reception and reinterpretation of the national past in contemporary Algeria

Abstract

It is well documented that contemporary debates about political legitimacy in Algeria are often structured through the juxtaposition of conflicting narratives of the past, and in particular, the War of Independence (1954–62) and its aftermath. Alternative versions of what happened to female combatants (mujahidat) after the war are a case in point: in the glorified official discourse, the revolution liberated women though the emancipation of the Algerian people; in feminist oppositional narratives, female combatants were betrayed by a patriarchal post-colonial regime composed of men of dubious wartime credentials. How these discourses are received and reinterpreted by young Algerians today has received little academic attention. This article presents new empirical research: a case study carried out in 2007 of 95 trainee teachers in History, Arabic Literature, Philosophy, French and English at the Ecole normale supérieure in Bouzaréah, Algiers. It explores what image students have of...