The Colonization Of Names Symbolic Violence And Frances Occupation Of Algeria Benjamin Claude Brower by Benjamin Claude Brower 9780231216012, 9780231216029, 9780231561099, 0231216017, 0231216025, 0231561091 instant download after payment.

This groundbreaking history of personal names in nineteenth-century Algeria sheds new light on the symbolic violence of renaming and the relationship between language and colonialism. Benjamin Claude Brower traces the changes Algerians’ personal names suffered during the colonial era and the consequences for individuals and society. France’s imposition of new names, he argues, destabilized Algerians’ sense of self and place in the community, distorted local identities, and compromised institutions such as the family. Drawing on previously unstudied records, Brower examines different northwestern African naming traditions and how colonialism changed them. With the aid of literary and critical theory, he develops new insights into the name and its relationship to power and subjectivity. A rigorous theoretical and historical account of symbolic violence, The Colonization of Names unveils many unseen forms of harm under colonial rule.

Benjamin Claude Brower is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (Columbia, 2009).