Making Algeria French relates the history of the pieds noirs and Algerians in colonial Bône, renamed Annaba in 1962. Located in eastern Algeria, this Mediterranean port city staked an early claim to world historical fame as the site of St. Augustine's Hippo. Long after the Romans, as well as the Arabs and Turks, the French tried their hand at settling Algeria. Not content with mere occupation, they constructed colonial cities along the Mediterranean littoral -Algiers, Oran, Bône - and populated them with twice as many European settlers - French, Spanish, Italians, and Maltese - as native Algerians. Using the history of Bône as a lens, David Prochaska looks at the nature of French colonialism in Algeria. His study is based on research in the former Bône municipal archives, generally barred to researchers since 1962. Prochaska concentrates on the formative decades of settler society and culture between 1870 and 1920. After an overview of Bône in 1830, and a survey of French rule from 1830 to 1870, he describes in turn the economic, social, political, and cultural history of Bône through the First World War. He argues that, in making Bône a European city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the settlers effectively blocked social evolution, attempted to contain history, and thereby precluded any genuine rapprochement with the Algerians in the twentieth century.

Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920

History

Prochaska, David

Africa

Cambridge University Press

Arts & Photography

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was the only Impressionist artist to paint Orientalist themes, yet little has been written about the two journeys he took to the French North African colony of Algeria in 1881 and 1882. There he created more than two dozen stunning works, depicting exotic scenes of ancient stone mosques, milling crowds at a festival in the Casbah, and spectacular palm fronds in the botanical garden. This text, published to accompany a travelling exhibition organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, assembles for all of Renoir's Algerian paintings as a coherent body of work. The volume situates Renoir's early studio Orientalism within the great tradition of French Orientalist painting. The landscapes and figure paintings Renoir completed in Algiers, several of which are previously unpublished, are discussed in the context of the topography of the city and of the ethnography of its people. Period photographs, engravings, maps and postcards, together with an essay exploring the Algeria beyond Renoir's canvases, provide historical and cultural background on the country and on the French presence there.

Renoir and Algeria

Benjamin, Roger

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

History & Criticism

Clark Art Inst

Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists features recent work by seven important contemporary artists who come from the region stretching from Egypt to Pakistan, but who have lived much of their lives in Europe or the United States. The artists, Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Mona Hatoum, Y.Z. Kami, Walid Raad, Michal Rovner, and Shahzia Sikander, draw on their experiences of displacement and knowledge of multiple cultures to offer alternative visions of the contemporary world. They have crossed or collapsed political, cultural, and religious borders, and disrupted conventional and stereotypical representations of time and place, and of history and geography. Their art offers new kinds of intercultural understanding. David O'Brien and David Prochaska write sensitively of how these artists address various experiences of travel, exile, diaspora, alienation, and integration, feelings of longing and belonging, memories of place and people, encounters with divergent views of sexuality and gender, alternate political understandings of the world, and cultural practices that both divide and unite us.

Beyond East And West: Seven Transnational Artists

O’Brien, David

Krannert Art Museum

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