Postcolonial Geopolitics: Reading Contemporary Geopolitics in Maghrebi-French War Films

Alex Hastie

doi:10.1080/14650045.2021.1882426

Postcolonial Geopolitics: Reading Contemporary Geopolitics in Maghrebi-French War Films

Alex Hastie

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

273 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This article examines geopolitical responses to postcolonial films on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Maghrebi-French films Days of Glory (French: Indigenes) (2006), Outside the Law (French: Hors la loi) (2010) and Free Men (French: Les hommes libres) (2011) collectively re-tell Algerian histories of resistance and anti-colonialism in the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence, using Hollywood combat and gangster genre to do so. This paper finds that the specific temporal and spatial narratives of (post)colonial France and Algeria are transformed and read geopolitically as allegories of more familiar conflict, namely the War on Terror, the Arab Spring and Israel-Palestine. Drawing on the fields of postcolonial theory and popular geopolitics, this article extends the scope of popular geopolitics to consider postcolonial film and its reception as a site of geopolitical contestation. In doing so, this article highlights how the reception of ‘foreign-language’ postcolonial stories in the Anglosphere is mediated by popular geopolitical frames of reference, and is dependent on the context of reception and (post)colonial power relations.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	239-256
Number of pages	18
Journal	Geopolitics
Volume	28
Issue number	1
Early online date	26 Feb 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1882426
Publication status	Published - Jan 2023

Bibliographical note

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.

Funder

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J500215/1].

Funding

Funders	Funder number
UK Research and Innovation
Economic and Social Research Council	ES/J500215/1

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Keywords

postcolonial
popular geopolitics
cinema
maghrebi-french

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Geography, Planning and Development
Political Science and International Relations

Access to Document

10.1080/14650045.2021.1882426Licence: CC BY

Postcolonial GeopoliticsAccepted author manuscript, 71.1 KBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND
Hastie_Postcolonial GeopoliticsFinal published version, 395 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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abstract = "This article examines geopolitical responses to postcolonial films on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Maghrebi-French films Days of Glory (French: Indigenes) (2006), Outside the Law (French: Hors la loi) (2010) and Free Men (French: Les hommes libres) (2011) collectively re-tell Algerian histories of resistance and anti-colonialism in the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence, using Hollywood combat and gangster genre to do so. This paper finds that the specific temporal and spatial narratives of (post)colonial France and Algeria are transformed and read geopolitically as allegories of more familiar conflict, namely the War on Terror, the Arab Spring and Israel-Palestine. Drawing on the fields of postcolonial theory and popular geopolitics, this article extends the scope of popular geopolitics to consider postcolonial film and its reception as a site of geopolitical contestation. In doing so, this article highlights how the reception of {\textquoteleft}foreign-language{\textquoteright} postcolonial stories in the Anglosphere is mediated by popular geopolitical frames of reference, and is dependent on the context of reception and (post)colonial power relations.",

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Postcolonial Geopolitics: Reading Contemporary Geopolitics in Maghrebi-French War Films

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funder

Funding

UN SDGs

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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