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We are no longer in France: communists in colonial Algeria

employed by some historians and former actors, as a way of describing what they see as the central leadership’s attempt to impose a monolithic Arab, Muslim identity (on this, see Abdennour Ali Yahia’s La crise berbère de 1949, published by Barzakh in 2014). For Hadjerès, this was a crisis of democracy, demonstrating the inability of the PPA–MTLD to manage differences of opinion. He and his fellow students were, first and foremost, democrats protesting against the authoritarianism of the PPA–MTLD. This crisis, Hadjerès promises, will be the subject of a future publication which will no doubt provoke much historiographical and political debate. Quand une nation s’éveille makes a major contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of Algerian nationalism, challenging long-established and still dominant frames and categories of analysis. Moreover, it invites us to reflect more deeply on the relationship between politics and culture, foregrounding the need to study culture within its political and social contexts, and at the same time not reducing ‘culture’ to simply the expedient expression of dominant political forces. For scholars interested in historiography, oral history and memory, the form of the volume is also fascinating. It is the result of a collaborative relationship between Hadjerès, and the editor and author of the afterword, Malika Rahal. Rahal, a specialist of political parties and their social contexts in Algeria between 1945 and 1954, has also carried out extensive oral history research on communists in post-independence Algeria, including extensively interviewing Hadjerès. One of the trickiest methodological and ethical issues which oral historians face is that of interpretive conflict: that is to say, how historians interpret, frame and make wider connections to informants’ narratives does not always correspond with the structure and meaning which interviewees give to their stories (as Katherine Borland explicates in her 1991 essay, ‘“That’s not what I said”: Interpretive conflict in oral narrative research’). Equally, when historical actors call upon historians to contextualise their personal trajectory, the experience can be fraught, as Henry Rousso observed (in L’Histoire, no. 384), not least because historians’ interest in multiple perspectives rather seeking out ‘THE truth’ can often be at odds with many historical actors’ aim to definitively ‘set the record straight’. Quand une nation s’éveille is a testament to both the author and the editor’s ability to critically – and openly – question, respectively, a lifetime’s work and thought as a political actor, and what it means to be a historian ‘of the present time’.