Postcolonial Geopolitics

Reading Contemporary Geopolitics in Maghrebi-French War Films

Bibliographic Data

ID3948337
AuthorsAlex Hastie (0000-0002-1298-142X, Coventry University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume28
Issue1
Pages239-256
Publication date2023-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2021.1882426
OpenAlexW3093212160
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited39

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

Art · Art history · Colonialism · Foreign policy · Geopolitics · Hollywood · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · War of independence · African history and culture studies · History · Law · North African History and Literature · Travel Writing and Literature