Rebuilding the colony: Elizabeth Geiser, Return to the Métropole: Spatial Trauma Responses in Pied-Noir Built Environments, MA dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Rebuilding the colony: Elizabeth Geiser, Return to the Métropole: Spatial Trauma Responses in Pied-Noir Built Environments, MA dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2026

23Sep26

Abstract: Focusing on the built environment of France, this thesis seeks to analyze how the architecture of an empire at home perpetuates colonial ideals throughout a postcolonial landscape. This paper argues that the trauma of decolonization and the resulting response created a contested historical record, leading to the contemporary landscape of the postimperial French Métropole. The analysis of a particular set of French sites demonstrates that the built environment acts as a narrative device with both subconscious and overt effects on the generational transmission and production of collective memories. These physical locations perpetuate colonial amnesia and nostalgia. The Pied-Noir are people of European descent who were born or lived in Algeria during its French colonial rule. Most departed for mainland France around Algerian independence in 1962 due to violence, but also because many couldn’t imagine their place in an independent Algeria. The repatriation of the Pieds-Noirs brought the settler colonial dynamic back to Métropole France, causing clashes of identity with the mainland French. Just as the Pied-Noir feared for their personal safety, they also feared for the physical environment they built within Algeria. The Pieds-Noirs’ actions in response to the violence they experienced, carried out on their built environment, can be characterized into four spatial trauma responses: repatriation, revision, replication, and ritualization. These spatial trauma responses— reactive, self-protective alterations of an environment—helped give them control over their narrative and are the lenses through which this thesis examines the built environment that the Pied-Noir created in France. An analysis of the Sanctuaire Notre Dame de Santa-Cruz Mas de Mingue explores these responses in situ.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed