Ferial Massoud - 2nd year March 23rd, 2020
Sofia Krimizi
HTS Term 2
Colonial Synchronicity
A time based-reading of Algeria under occupation
In 1959, the French would refer to their presence in Algeria as necessary “pour éviter le pourrissement de l’Algérie.”2 By describing the time-based degradation of a territory, the French positioned themselves as regulators of its development, signalling their control of the evolution of Algeria as a whole. Not only does the notion of pourrissement (decay) point to an essentialising, Franco-centric temporal understanding of Algeria condemned to underdevelopment, it also imposes its own temporalityone to which all territories must be synchronised. French operations during the war of independence from 1954 to 1962 can therefore be read as a series of violent adjustments to the Algerian clock.
The following paper will examine a series of spatial interventions which aimed to accelerate the Algerian at different scales, from the territory to the intimacy of the body. Analysing these fragmented attempts to synchronise coloniser and colonised complicates our understanding of time, which in turn proves its own agency in configuring the occupation. It adds yet another layer to our understanding of strategies of control at play in French Algeria, where time, as a colonial tool, reorganises space to produce a legible population and territory. Yet reading time in this way might also help challenge the logic of occupation, whereby tactics of resistance are formulated as a landscape of counterpoints.