Colonial Trauma: A Study of the Psychic and Political Consequences of Colonial Oppression in Algeria(Critical South)

Colonial Trauma is a path-breaking account of the psychosocial effects of colonial domination. Following the work of Frantz Fanon, Lazali draws on historical materials as well as her own clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to shed new light on the ways in which the history of colonization leaves its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves. Lazali found that many of her patients experienced difficulties that can only be explained as the effects of “colonial trauma” dating from the French colonization of Algeria and the postcolonial period. Many French feel weighed down by a colonial history that they are aware of but which they have not experienced directly. Many Algerians are traumatized by the way that the French colonial state imposed new names on people and the land, thereby severing the links with community, history, and genealogy and contributing to feelings of loss, abandonment, and injustice. Only by reconstructing this history and uncovering its consequences can we understand the impact of colonization and give individuals the tools to come to terms with their past. By demonstrating the power of psychoanalysis to illuminate the subjective dimension of colonial domination, this book will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the long-term consequences of colonization and its aftermath.

Table of Contents:
Foreword – Mariana Wikinski Introduction: The Trouble of Acknowledging Colonial Trauma The History of French Colonization in Algeria: A Blank Space in Memory and Politics A Much-Needed Interdisciplinary Approach 1. Psychoanalysis and Algerian Paradoxes Disarray of the Private and Public Spheres God’s Reinforcement of Failing Institutions  The Power of Religion and the Religion of Power  The Literary Text and the Invisible Staging of Power The Power of the “Language, Religion and Politics”(LRP) Bloc as Revealed by Clinical Psychoanalysis The Duplicity of Subjects Confronting Censorship from the LRP Abandoned Citizenship and Speech Acts 2. Colonial Rupture The Colony: The Rogue Child of the Enlightenment  Colonialism’s Destruction of Social Cohesion  A Colonial Republic Divided, or the “Duty to Civilize [the] Barbarians” 1945: A Literature of Refusal is Born Nedjma: An Esthetic of Colonial Destruction? Disrupting Genealogical Ties: The Effect of “Renaming” Algerians in the 1880s Subjective Catastrophes and the Disappearance of the Father as Symbolic Reference Writing against Anonymous Filiation Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche: A Broken Voice 3. Colonialism Consumed by War 1945-1954: The Necessity of War The Impossibility of Forgetting and Madness, a “Remedy” for Disappearance Silencing the Unforgettable Mutilation of Bodies  Toulouse, 2012: The Return of Murder Constructing the “Nation” The Writer’s Pressing Need: Transform Disappearance into Absence 4. Colonialism’s Devastating Effects on Post-Independence Algeria The Mutilated Body of the Colonized and the Hunger for Reparation Colonial Hogra and a Frantic Quest for Legitimacy The “Orphaning” Effect of Colonialism and its Impact  Further Distortion of Patronyms  Divested of a Name: A Form of Colonial Murder Manufacturing Erasure and Denial under Colonialism From Colonial Trauma to Social Trauma 5. Fratricide: The Dark Side of the Political Order The Emergence of Algerian Nationalist Movements in the 1930s The War of Liberation and an Impossible Fraternity From Parricide to Fratricide When the Murders between Brothers is Dismissed… Calling on the Father A Gap in Memory Sets Off an Endless Deadly Battle 6. The Internal War of the 90s Reconsidering the LRP Bloc (language, religion and politics) The Tyranny and Pleasure of Power The Shift of 1988 and the Experience of Political Plurality An Internal War of Unprecedented Violence  The Curse of Fratricide The War Comes Home  A Strange Reversal in Naming Do Freedom and Terror Go Hand in Hand? 7. State of Terror and State Terror A Clinical Understanding of Terror The Terrified Subject’s Self-Elimination Psychological Terror is always Political  Reconciliation: State Terror? When the State Tries to Make its Practice of Disappearance Disappear 8. Legitimacy, Fratricide and Power Jugurtha: A Fratricidal Hero Unpunished Crimes within the Republic The Legitimacy the French Conquest Claimed for Itself The Passion-filled Scene of Coloniality The Specter of Discord: el Fitna 9. Getting Out of the Colonial Pact After Liberation, the Indefatigable Reenactment of Coloniality within Subjectivities and the Political Order Trauma as Shelter and Alibi The Brutalization of the Living: the Disappearance of Children The “Bone Seekers”: from the Child to the Fathers Conclusion: Ending the Colonial Curse: Lessons from Fanon The “Colonial Pact”: Erasure of Memory, Disappearance of Bodies, Dispossession of Existence The Mystical Quality of the Colonized  For a Future Liberation Notes Index

About the Author :
Karima Lazali is a practising psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist

Review :
"This book adds an important layer to the psychoanalytic understanding of colonial trauma and its afterlife. Beginning with her bilingual clinical practice in France and Algeria, Lazali addresses how patients differ in their response to the technologies of a 'whiting out' of an erased past. She takes up the mantle of Fanon to study intergenerational trauma and how it manifests itself in her patients, in Francophone literary texts, in the bellicose and violent struggles around religion, language, and politics, in concepts of the social, and in the relationship between individuated subjects and the group." —Ranjana Khanna, Professor of Literature at Duke University "With Colonial Trauma, there is no going back to how we thought about colonialism before, just as it is now unclear how we go forward from here—theoretically, clinically, or politically." —European Journal of Psychoanalysis