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The settler colony in its memory: Jérémy Girardeau-Montaut, ‘Pied-Noir “Memory Without Territory” and the Trans-Mediterranean Politics of Colonial Reconstruction’, Oxford Middle East Review, 10, 1, 2026, pp. 69-90

07Sep26

Abstract: European settlers from Algeria (pieds-noirs) reconstructed Algeria after 1962 as a site of memory and imagined spatial continuity following the collapse of the French colonial project. Moving beyond narratives of repatriation and domestic integration, the article situates the pied-noir experience within MENA studies by treating Algeria as a postcolonial space whose afterlives continued to be shaped from outside its territorial boundaries. Drawing on memory studies and settler colonial theory, the article argues that the collapse of the French territorial sovereignty in Algeria displaced settler colonial subjectivity into memory instead of dissolving it. Through memoirs, association networks, commemorative practices, and claims of exile, pieds-noirs engaged after Algerian Independence in a process of reconstruction that recast their former political sovereignty into narrative authority. This “memory without territory” consisted in reimagining colonial Algeria as a lost homeland while bracketing indigenous experiences of colonial violence and operated as a post-territorial claim over Algerian history and space. The article foregrounds reconstruction as a form of post-imperial rearticulation and rejects the hypothesis of mere nostalgia. It shows how colonial identities adapted after decolonisation to produce narratives that blurred the boundaries between loss and responsibility, victimhood and privilege. Besides, it highlights the trans-Mediterranean dimension of this mnemonic sovereignty by analysing how Algeria continued to function as a symbolic reference point in French political and cultural debates long after independence.


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