Kunapipi XXV:2

LINDSEY MOORE

The Veil of Nationalism: Frantz Fanon's 'Algeria Unveiled' and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers

Women's relationship to anti-colonial nationalism has been a problematic one, in that nationalist movements have tended to employ both women and feminist discourses strategically.¹ This phenomenon is far from limited to the Muslim or Arab worlds.² Nor is nationalism the only ideology to intersect uneasily with women's interests in the region. However, work produced by feminist scholars grounded experientially in the region suggests that contestation between nationalisms and feminisms in North Africa and the Middle East has been extreme (see Hatem, Kandiyoti, Lasreg 1994 ch7, Moghadam and Moallem).

Here I revisit Fanon's oft-discussed essay 'L'Algérie se dévoile', first published in his 1959 text L'An V de la révolution algérienne and translated as 'Algeria Unveiled' in A Dying Colonialism (Fanon 1959, 1980).³ My objective here is twofold. I first reassess the emancipatory import of Fanon's essay and then use it to contextualise an analysis of Gillo Pontecorvo's acclaimed film The Battle of Algiers (1966). I take up a point made by a rare dissenting voice about the film's

strong sense of inevitability culminating in 'completeness'. It achieves the characteristic of a complete statement confirming itself as a concluded representation of history about which no further questions are to be asked, and presenting an episodic view of history quite alien to the possibility of understanding it [history] as an open horizon of possibilities and alternative realities. (Sainsbury 7)

This is a fair assessment of the politico-epistemological limits of Pontecorvo's film. So if, as critics assume, The Battle of Algiers functions uncritically as Fanonian gloss (Shohat and Stam 251­52), does Fanon's essay present a similarly overdetermined picture of the decolonising Algerian nation? My contention is that the film deflects the most useful complexities and ambiguities of Fanon's discourse, particularly in relation to the subject of Algerian women. I support analyses which read Fanon's text as attempting to locate revolutionary women's participation within a double temporal frame, in which postcolonial implication exceeds anti-colonial effect. The dissemination of the signs of veiling and unveiling, in particular, has consequences beyond the field of the colonising other's comprehension.⁴