Spaces of the Dispossessed in Algerian Cinema

This article considers the function of space—colonial space, space as disputed territory, gendered space, space and regional/cultural identity—as a fundamental aspect of filmic representations of Algeria. The European colonial project informed what Richard Dyer has called ‘a sense of white historical mastery over time and space’. After independence, the configuration and policing of space in the Algerian nationalist imaginary in many ways replicated French colonial power, and left little room for the representation of the dispossessed—Berbers, women and youth. Neo-colonial Algerian cinema celebrated heroic Arabic masculinity and left the discontents of the liberation myth at the margins. This article will consider the ways in which dispossessed groups found representation in the spaces of Algerian cinema, both before and after the watershed moment of October 1988. In so doing it will analyse a range of films and make use of the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Teshome Gabriel and Ranjana Khanna.