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Department ofModern Languages and Literatures

Stories

Jimia Boutouba

Jimia Boutouba

Jimia Boutouba is Published in Expressions Maghrébines

Jimia Boutouba has published an article, “Screen Memories & Invisible Legacies” and an interview with Franco-Algerian filmmaker, Wahid Chaib, in Expressions Maghrébines, a top tier journal in the field of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. 

The article examines how contemporary documentary filmmaking restores immigrant memories and stories to French cultural history. Despite recent attempts to diversify cultural memory, the memory of migration to France remains largely sidelined and marginalized in official historiography. Unsurprisingly, the cultural history of migration from former colonies has yet to emerge in a truly inclusive fashion and space, hindered as it is by France’s reluctance to critically examine its colonial past and politically address its ever-lasting structural effects in present-day society. In particular, the article illustrates how performative and presentational (rather than representational) modes potentiate the construction of a postcolonial memory that stands in opposition to exclusionary and homogeneous narratives. While these documentary films can be read as being part of a larger political struggle against cultural violence as manifested in the politics of forgetting and historical erasure, they also point to the redeeming power of a transcultural French national history that includes minority voices and accounts for the complex dynamics of shared histories that have been shaped by power relations.

 

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