Baussant, Michèle
Exiles and the Construction of Genealogical Memory: The Example of the Pieds-Noirs
- 2006.
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This text deals with the narrative uses and the construction of filiation among the Pieds-noirs of Algeria, also called repatriates of Algeria. I will explore how these narratives present a problematical relationship with the past, which can no longer be seen as a resource of identity. The resurgences of the exile, an event that is both individual and collective in its nature, highlight this relation, depicting the history of Pieds-noirs like a double rupture, provoked by the immigration of the ascendants to Algeria and the exile from Algeria in 1962. This allows us to grasp the categories on which the Pieds-noirs have build the internal representations of their past, unified and simplified by memories.