Towards a postmodern national narrative? The Algerian war memorial and contemporary French landscapes of memory

Abstract

Based on the analysis of files from the Department of Defence, and drawing on interviews with veterans and on their associations’ press, the article focuses on the Algerian War National Memorial in Paris, its long gestation and particularly its double, paradoxical status: that it is at the same time new and old, post-ideological and hyper-ideological. Thanks to its palimpsest configuration, this ‘third millennium memorial’ – as it was described by its creator (the artist Gérard Collin-Thiébaut) – has demonstrated itself to be perfectly tuned to that peculiar mode of relationship to the past that we can define as ‘postmodern’, a mode that is characteristic of what historian François Hartog called the presentist ‘regime of historicity’.

Memorials as Healing Places: A Matrix for Bridging Material Design and Visitor Experience

“…Material design, collective memory and visitor profile all work together to shape experience on-site. Finally, future studies might consider the digitalization of memorial sites—from QR codes to provide information about the memorial to using LED technology to display its core message [ 57 ]—as another design dimension different from the material features considered here. This brings in a new set of questions (e.g., about the alleged durability of digital technology versus its extreme frailty and dependence on energy supply) as well as novel forms of experiencing memorials by increasingly digitally engaged visitors.…”

The monumentalization of the Portuguese Colonial War: Commemorating the soldier’s efforts amid the persistence of imperial imaginaries

“…4 Moreover, the scholarship on monuments and memorials has evolved, alongside the construction of monuments that memorialize recent events, as well as memorials or counter-memorials that present alternative forms of materiality, such as the survivor trees and memorial grove that were planted by civic authorities after the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid and Brussels (Heath-Kelly, 2018). These studies focus on monuments that remember the victims of terrorist attacks (Heath-Kelly, 2018), neo-nazi xenophobic attacks (Ben-Aroia and Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021) or include those built in recent decades to wars of decolonization (Buettner, 2016) fought by some European countries to prevent the independence of their colonies -, namely, the Algerian War (Brazzoduro, 2019). The scope of these studies has also been broadened from a focus on the remembrance of death to include the analysis of public memorials to lived experience of loss and trauma or voluntarism (Atkinson-Phillips, 2020) and temporary memorials (Doss, 2012).…”