Selected contributions from the conference will be published in a 2018 special issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies. The aim of this issue is to investigate the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence in the present whilst considering how the War and its subsequent memorialisations force us to reconceptualise historical temporality itself (the ‘legacy’ being but one mode of historical temporality)? Which figures of relation between past and present are appropriate: rupture, repression, repetition? Recent scholarship (e.g., Vince 2015; Hiddleston 2016) has shown that the aesthetic and political stakes of figuring the Algerian War of Independence in the present remain high. By foregrounding the very notion of historical temporality and the ‘present’ as conceptual, aesthetic and historical problems, and by framing these problems in a transnational context, we hope to broaden and challenge contemporary understandings of the ongoing legacies of the Algerian War of Independence in the present.
Rupture Repression Repetition 