The Colonization of Names

Brower powerfully rethinks colonial violence as ontological violence through the issues of naming. Beyond the Algerian case, this book opens a powerful theoretical and historical perspective on onomastic power. -- Jocelyne Dakhlia, author of <i>Harems et Sultans: Genre et Politique au Maroc et ailleurs XIVe-XXe siècle</i> The Colonization of Names offers important new insight into how the eradication of Algerian place names and personal names was integral to the violent material, social, and psychic dispossession enacted by French colonialism. Brower effectively demonstrates how language was a terrain of colonial power and struggle. Drawing on concrete and archivally grounded personal and political histories, this book makes the operation of this symbolic violence, as well as shifting Algerian strategies of deflecting it, palpable and resonant in the present. -- Judith Surkis, author of <i>Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930</i> This original and erudite book shows that in regulating the names of individuals and families, France’s violation of Algerian sovereignty went well beyond territorial conquest. Brower’s research brilliantly demonstrates that a French bureaucratic convenience represented for Algerians a form of colonial violence that entailed the emergence of new subjectivities. -- Owen White, author of <i>The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria</i>