L’Algérie coloniale, ou l’Andalousie heureuse

The Algerian civil war of the 1990s created the conditions of possibility for the development of an “Andalusian myth” of colonial Algeria among Algerian writers exiled in France. These Algerian-writers-cum-underground-historians, who in France discovered the pied noir community, recall—as intellectuals, Francophones and laypeople (or at least anti-Islamists)—the intellectual refinement, cultural mixity and religious tolerance of the past, particularly that of the French presence. But through the rehabilitation of the figure of the pied noir, what is at stake is less the cultural mixity of the colonial period than the denunciation of the current imposition of a strict Arab-Muslim identity in Algeria. The texts of the period, particularly La Gardienne des ombres by Waciny Laredj, depict a lost, pre-exile, plural Andalusia, which stands apart from the ruins