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Algeria’s history is dotted with bloodshed. Hundreds of thousands of people have been massacred in the decade long civil war between Islamic militants and the Algerian Army. Even now unrest, militancy and kidnapping characterize the country. It’s still more or less a no-go area for western journalists. But why is Algeria so troubled? This documentary is a beautifully filmed production getting to the root of Algeria’s problems. We look back through forty years of violence to place modern day Algeria in its proper context. A high-quality look at one of the world’s forgotten conflicts.
Objectives:
Identify and apply the sociological elements of culture. Apply the elements of culture to a contemporary understanding of North Africa. Utilize scholarly research sources in order to create a reliable product.
Given current U.S. military interventions in the Arab and Muslim worlds, there are important lessons to be gained by delving into questions of women and gender in the French Empire in North Africa. First and foremost, pervasive, monolithic, and very negative portrayals of Arab or Muslim women as inherently oppressed, powerless, voiceless—as lacking any agency—are immediately challenged by the region’s recent history. In addition, the wide variations in women’s responses to imperialism—from militant action, to peaceful resistance, to obtaining a modern, French education in order to oppose the colonial order—demonstrates clearly that North African women were not passive bystanders. Moreover, students begin to perceive at the same time that invoking a monolithic, unchanging “Islam” for explaining women’s lives and social status fails to explain much, if anything. It also becomes clear how much politics, violence, and militarism in various guises dramatically influence women and gender relations not only in colonial states but also in post-colonial states. All of these lessons and insights drawn from the North African case study have wide, nearly universal applicability to other empires, whether modern European empires, or the American Empire. Finally, by choosing to narrate individual women’s life stories, and employing this strategy as the principal frame for the module, I hope to show the immense power of biography to take us into the past where we question received wisdom or unexamined assumptions—invariably about ourselves and the social universe we inhabit.
Algeria Work Book including lesson plans and ideas.
