Algerians’ Awkward Embrace of France

1. This is a summary of the article "Algerians awkward embrace of france" written by carroll, j. which tells us that Arabic is the first language of People in Algeria but they are forced to study French; because their country was once colonized by France and they cant work in their own country without knowing French because of the effects of Frances colonial legacy.


2. The cultural taboo against France have loosened since the days when strict Arab nationalism dominated politics, france is a big trading partner with Algeria and is a destination of a lot of immigrants.


3. People aren’t happy by the French ruling but trying to build their own identity away from the French. There are two perspectives of identity emerging in society as shown, people are arguing on whether people are more interested in French or Algerian, also debate on what does being an Algerian mean. Some of them say that they are more interested in French t.v because the arab channels don’t reflect the Algerian culture, so they are more closer to the French language but feel different from the French people, so that shows that making a national identity is hard.


4. After indepandance, the arab and muslim identity of Algerians have loosened ; using French has lessened as the pan-arabism had a great effect in promoting arab nationalism and rejecting foreign influences. Now a lot of Algerian thinkers and leaders are being discovred after being dismissed of their ties to france and its language.


5. Historians say that Algeria isn’t yet fully recovered from colonization which had a big impact on it, where even France thought of it as a part of itself. While Algeria was struggling to get its independence, a lot of French people settled in Algeria and people where trying to keep their traditional language and religion alive, but it was hard because of having France forcing them to go into French schools.


6. People didn’t have a clear sense of what being an Algerian was because of the cultural disfunctionality implanted by colonialism. Furthermore, a lot of the problems the country facing today is because of the french’s attempts to replace the algerians social, relegious and educational networks that defined algerians with french institutions, it’s a very hard thing for algerians to bring their countrys identity back because they don’t really know what it it. “If there’s one thing that is shared in the Algerian consciousness it's the civil war between government forces and militant Islamists of the 1990s, called the Black Decade. “