Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria

Patricia Lorcin's Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria is an interesting study of how colonialism shapes constructs of race in a North African context. Examining French colonial sources from 1830 onwards, Lorcin traces the rise and fall of the "Kabyle Myth" that divided the population of Algeria into two "racial" groups: savage and irredeemable Arabs and Kabyle Berbers who were seen as "white," more civilized because of their sedentary lifestyle, allegedly less devout Islamic practices, fewer restrictions on women, lower incidence of polygamy, and presumed origins among "white" peoples. This binary division of "good Kabyle" versus "bad Arab" collapsed with the rise of settler colonialism in Algeria, which, as Lorcin elucidates, led to a general stereotype and racial discrimination against all "native" Algerians by the end of the 19th century.

Anti-Islamic sentiment among the French, the shift from military to civil administration, and white supremacist pseudoscience of the 19th century all contributed to the "Kabyle Myth." Kabyles, imagined by the French as "noble savages" and compared to Germanic tribes of the distant past, were assumed to be capable of elevation under French law and tutelage, ignored their Islamic devotion, and even applied Saint-Simonianism as the intellectual bedrock, according to Lorcin.

Even physicians contributed to the racialization of Algerians, dividing Algerians into Kabyles and Arabs. Arabs, as pauperization under colonial rule progressed (including disastrous famine), were racialized as thieves, rapists, savages, lazy, stupid and considered unreliable. Racial discourse from the French even linked "beauty" to advanced civilizations, thereby labeling Arabs as physically unattractive while praising the alleged racial "purity" of the Berbers.

Lorcin's analysis also traces a colonial sentiment of France as a "New Rome" in North Africa and the Mediterranean. This form of neoclassical colonial development facilitated the rise of European settlers, who, as Europeans from lands once held by Rome, could be seen in a new light as proper heirs to the Roman Empire in North Africa. Orientalism and Arabophiles among the colonial intellectuals and administrations also shaped discourse on race, albeit always within the pro-colonial framework.

The French association of the Kabyle Berbers with "whites" also played into this, and contributed to the problems and ethnic conflict in contemporary Algeria given the strong forms of Berber nationalism and violence in the Kabylie region. Although one might suppose its obvious, the importance of European colonialism in shaping local constructs of race or even creating and separating identities is quite powerful in the Algerian case, with drastic consequences here and other African nations after decolonisation.