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Keywords

Marc Garanger, Kabyle women, jewelry, resistance, colonialism

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article examines the identity photographs taken by Marc Garanger as a site of Kabyle women’s resistance in the Algerian War. Over the course of 1960, Garanger moved between various wartime displacement camps across Kabylia, photographing indigenous people for the production of identity cards––a crucial from of colonial population control. Since its publication, Garanger’s Femmes algériennes has become an ambiguous symbol of resistance in the Algerian War, largely due to the subjects’ perceived antagonistic posture and gaze. This article takes a forensic approach to analyzing Kabyle women’s wartime adornment, uncovering a new framework for conceptualizing Algerian women’s agency grounded in indigenous culture and history. By unveiling the economic, cultural, and cosmological significance embedded in the motifs and materials of Kabyle jewelry, this article reconstructs the agency and personhood of Garanger’s otherwise unspecified photographic subjects. In doing so, it complicates prevailing narratives of Kabyle women as victims during the Algerian War by expanding definitions of anti-colonial resistance. Through their adornment and use of jewelry, Kabyle women resisted the violence of colonization, displacement, surveillance, and cultural oppression.

DOI

10.5642/jas.YNDR1120

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