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The latest book fromAndrea Smith, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology, offers an intimate look at settler culture in France. This unique society was transplanted from Algeria when it ceased to be a French colony some 40 years ago and has been treated like a people in exile to this day.
Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France was released in July by Indiana University Press.
As France’s premier colony, Algeria took back its independence following the violent French-Algerian War in 1962. This war, which was memorialized by the acclaimed 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, put over a century of colonization to a dramatic end. In its immediate aftermath, nearly a million French settlers fled from the colony to France in an unplanned frenzy, enflaming considerable anti-settler tensions and violence on the part of wider French society.
Unable to return to Algeria out of fear of reprisals, former settlers have created hundreds of social clubs across the nation to provide a place for both political mobilization and to meet their social needs. Many settlers still feel like pariahs, excluded from complete acceptance by wider French society.
Smith, who began this research in 1995, explored a unique type of social club: that for settlers of Maltese ethnicity in France.
“No other settler group in France has united by ethnicity in quite the same way. My research was carried out to determine the reasons for this Maltese enigma,” Smith says.
She found her answer in the colony’s past. Algeria was a colony that attracted migrants from across Europe, especially Spain, Italy, and Malta, as well as France. Once naturalized, the non-French colonists were treated as a subaltern, or a marginalized, lower class French citizen. The Maltese, the poorest of the arrivals and a previously colonized people under British rule, were placed at the bottom of this settler hierarchy. They were targeted by terrible anti-Maltese sentiments as early as the 1840s, and these have lasted in some circles to this day in France.
Through her research, Smith immersed herself in Franco-Maltese culture.
“I spent a year and a half with this club in France, attended their meetings, field trips, dinners and parties, and even went on their tour of Malta, to better learn what Malta meant to them,” she says.
Smith’s research involved archival research in many locations: Malta, Tunisia, France, and the United Kingdom.
“I feel that this book helps elucidate how the settlers feel in relationship to wider French society, and why they tend to vote right-wing, why so many of them are supporters of politician Jean-Marie Le Pen,” Smith explains.
As with many of her other projects, Smith has enlisted student help in the production of Colonial Memory. Nangula Shejavali ’06,who graduated with an A.B. with majors in international affairs and Africana studies, performed research for background information and proofread and fact-checked the manuscript.
Smith is also editor of Europe’s Invisible Migrants: Consequences of the Colonists’ Return, a book on a related topic published in 2003 by Amsterdam University Press. Through essays by prominent sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, the volume highlights the experiences of colonists returning to France, Portugal, and the Netherlands; the intersections of race, citizenship, and colonial ideologies; and the ways in which these migrations have reflected the return of the “colonial” to Europe. Jennifer Bennett ’03, who graduated with an A.B. with majors in anthropology and sociology, helped Smith create a bibliography for Invisible Migrants, as well as proofread the manuscript.
Smith is a recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Social Science Research Council, American Institute for Maghrebi Studies, and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Her articles and papers have won top prizes from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, University of Arizona, and ColumbiaUniversity’s Institute on Western Europe.