Postcolonial Film and Geopolitical Contestation

The Battle of Algiers (Channel 4, 1995)

Description

Maghrebi-French films such as Days of Glory (Indigenes, 2006), Outside the Law (Hors la Loi, 2010), Free Men (Les Hommes Libres, 2011), and The Battle of Algiers (La Bataille d'Alger, 1966) re-tell Algerian histories of resistance and anti-colonialism in the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence. My research in this field has found that the specific temporal and spatial narratives of (post)colonial France and Algeria are transformed and read geopolitically as allegories of more familiar conflicts, namely the War on Terror, the Arab Spring and the Israel-Palestine conflict. This playlist may serve to aid the teaching of popular geopolitics and postcolonial film. An in depth consideration of the ways in which audiences engage with ‘foreign language’ or postcolonial cinema and contemporary geopolitics can be found in my paper Postcolonial Geopolitics: Reading Contemporary Geopolitics in Maghrebi-French War Films.

Curator

By Dr Alex Hastie, Coventry University

Subject

• Film studies

Keywords

postcolonial, Maghrebi-French films, transnational, racism, memory, independence, masculinity, popular geopolitics

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