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xxiiFOREWORDFOREWORDxxiiiThe originality of the French phenomenological approachto colonialism and decolonization lies in its awareness of theabiding instability of the system, however stable its institutionsmay appear. "If one chooses to understand the colonial system,"Albert Memmi writes in The Coloniser and the Colonized, "hemust admit that it is unstable and its equilibrium constantlythreatened."40 The civilizing mission is grounded in a profoundsense of instability-not a surmountable or sublatable "contradiction"-asthe French Republic gazes anxiously upon its ownmirror image as a world power. On the one hand, France is thesupreme bearer of universal Rights and Reason-"bearer even ofa new category of time for the indigenous populations";41 on theother, its various administrative avatars-assimilation, association,integration-deny those same populations the right to emerge as"French citizens" in a public sphere of their own ethical andcultural making. The principle of citizenship is held out; thepoesis of free cultural choice and communal participation iswithheld.The fear of instability and disequilibrium between freedomand fealty, as I have described it, is evident in the history of colonialAlgeria. Citizenship becomes the unstable, unsustainablepsycho-affective site in the conflict between political and legalassimilation, and the respect for, and recognition of, Muslimethical and cultural affiliations. Between 1865 and 1936, fewerthan three thousand Algerian Muslims had availed themselvesof Napoleon's senatus consulte, which extended French citizenshipto those Muslims who agreed to divest themselves of civilstahlS under Islamic law. 42 Again, the Algerian statute of 194740 Albert Memmi, The Coloniser and the Colonised (Boston: Beacon Press,1967) 120.41 James D. LeSueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics Duringthe Decoloni:zation of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2001), 22.42 Ibid., 20. I am indebted to this excellent work for historical informationon the civilizing mission.made a "grand" gesture, which was no more than a sleight ofhand. The electoral system was divided into two colleges: onefor Europeans and a small number of Muslims who were grantedfull political rights, the other for the majority of the Muslim population.Fearful of the increase in the Muslim vote, the statuteallotted half the seats in the Algerian assembly to the first college,and in 1948 and subsequent years, the colonial administration43rigged the ballots to prevent further Muslim participation. Such. widespread disenfranchisement bred a deep distrust in the Muslimpopulation, leading a number of dissident groups to amalgamatein 1954 to form the Front de Liberation Nationale (FiN).Hussein Bulhan describes the process: "Gradually those who fordecades sought assimilation into French society and the traditionalnationalists joined forces in the FLN."44 When "integration"was proposed by the last governor-general, JacquesSoustelle (after the Algerian War of Independence began in1954), the "Algerian fact" of diverse regional cultures, languages,and ethnicities was recognized, so long as these "provincial"-provisional?-French citizens could be kept "secure"under the surveillant eye ofthe paternalistic colonial power that45deeply distrusted what it saw as the regressive zealotry oflslam.Such a threatened equilibrium leads to a phenomenologicalcondition of nervous adjustment, narcissistic justification, andvain, even vainglorious, proclamations of progressive principleson the part of the colonial state; and it is these very psychoaffectivesymptoms that reveal the injustices and disequilibrium, that haunts the colonial historical record. Fanon was quick tograsp the psycho-affective implications of a subtly punishing anddisabling paternalistic power:43 Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 60.44 Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, "Revolutionary Psychiatry of Fanon," in RethinkingFanon: The Continuing Dialogue, ed. Nigel Gibson (Amherst, NY:Humanity Books, 1999), 155.45 LeSueur, 23-27.