افاق للعلوم
Volume 11, Numéro 4, Pages 349-373
2026-09-10
Identity From Rootedness To Becoming: Algeria And The Impact Of French Colonialism
Authors : Benlaib Messaoud .
Abstract
This article examines the question of Algerian identity as it was shaped, dismantled, and reassembled under the weight of French colonial rule (1830–1962). The central argument is straightforward, even if its implications are not: colonial policies designed to dissolve Algerian identity produced, through their very violence, the conditions for that identity to be reimagined in more deliberate and politically organized forms. The article refuses two familiar positions in the literature. It rejects the essentialist view that Algerian identity is an immutable essence, untouched by colonialism; and it rejects the constructivist reading that treats it as a free-floating signifier assembled from colonial debris. In their place, I propose the concept of “dynamic identity” — a mode of belonging that holds rootedness and becoming in tension without collapsing one into the other. The argument draws on four theorists whose work is rarely brought into sustained conversation in this context: Paul Ricoeur on narrative identity, Pierre Bourdieu on habitus and symbolic violence, Homi Bhabha on the third space, and Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory. Read together, these frameworks illuminate why the French project of cultural engineering failed, and why Algerian identity emerged from colonization not as a scarred remnant but as a rearticulated formation. The article closes by suggesting that the Algerian case offers something larger than itself: a theoretical model for understanding postcolonial identities as ongoing negotiations between inheritance and invention.
Keywords
dynamic identity; French colonialism; Algeria; postcolonial theory; symbolic violence; narrative identity; collective memory.
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