Further research exploring the relationship between decolonization and language in the French and British imperial contexts, and making the case for thinking through historical iterations of black internationalism and Pan-Africanism in relation to space and place, is forthcoming in the Journal of Modern History and the Journal of the History of Ideas respectively. She has published articles on questions of French empire and race in the Journal of Contemporary History, Callaloo and the Australasian Journal of American Studies. Her first book, Race, Rights and Reform: Black Activism across the French Empire and the United States from World War 1 to Cold War, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in March 2021. Dunstan is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. We would also like to thank the Centre for Photography and Visual Culture at Sussex University and the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex University for their support in co-hosting this exhibition.Ĭurated by Dr. We would like to thank the Sussex Resistance Network for the financial support that made this exhibition possible. It poses complex questions about female agency, historical experience and role of memory within contemporary Algeria as well as the wider Middle East and North African region. Through a series of black and white diptychs, juxtaposing photographs of the women from the anti-colonial war period with contemporary portraits taken by Nadja Makhlouf, the project enacts a complex dynamic between the past and the present.

Nadja Makhlouf’s remarkable project, therefore, addresses this continuing lacunae.

These women not only participated as soldiers, nurses and doctors but they also provided the crucial infra-structures of resistance – food, shelter, intelligence – that underpinned Algerian military resistance in the mountains and countryside.Īlthough the role of women is a key dimension of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film Algerian-Italian film The Battle of Algiers, and although this role has been recovered in some measure by the recent brilliant work of Ryme Seferdjeli and Natalya Vince, much of this history remains hidden. This photographic exhibition explores the complex histories of the Algerian women who fought in the National Liberation Front (FLN) and Algerian Communist Party (PCA) during the Algerian War of Liberation 1954 – 1962. The Role and Memory of Women Anti-Colonial Resistance Fighters in Algeria’

Algeria by Martin Evans