Postsocialist Algeria and the Politics of the Future

Abstract

The experience of colonialism and the war of independence (1954-1962) that followed have often been assumed by historians to be the only valid keys to understanding present-day Algeria. Over fifty years after independence, the war cannot be called on as the total meaning of history for much longer. Building on doctoral research on memories of nation-building during Algeria’s socialist experiment during the 1970s, based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the low-income Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued, this article aims to assess the possibility of using a postsocialist lens as a new framework of analysis, in conjunction with postcolonial approaches.