ABSTRACT
Efforts to portray and thereby oppose violence confront challenges in which ethical and political aims intersect with questions of form. Representing violence involves processes of selection and exclusion by means of which certain acts are censured while others are legitimized, and certain victims are sanctified while other lives are discounted. As Judith Butler observes in her essay Frames of War, representations of conflict often reinscribe the social and political relations that made violence possible in the first place. Before we commit our moral energy to protesting or defending violence, it is therefore important to subject this framing to a critical appraisal. Depictions of the violence that ravaged Algeria in the 1990s could certainly benefit from this kind of examination. This decadelong conflict that claimed as many as 200,000 lives has generally been portrayed as a civil war pitting Islamist militias intent on imposing a restrictive code of Islamic law against both the state and figures of secular modernity such as journalists, intellectuals, doctors, and teachers. While this account is not a pure fiction – Islamist guerrillas did take up arms against the state, targeting, in the process, writers and educators – it is a selective narrative that neglects crucial aspects of the conflict. With a growing number of novels and films now being devoted to the bloodshed of the ‘décennie noire’, or ‘Black Decade’, this chapter considers how works of literature and cinema have positioned themselves in relation to this painful past. It considers if and how they challenge official discourses, and on what terms they try to heal old traumas and repair fractures within the community.
