Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Art History
Advisor
Maria Antonella Pelizzari
Committee Members
Emilie Boone
Anthony Alessandrini
Natalya Benkhaled-Vince
Subject Categories
Arts and Humanities
Keywords
Algerian War, Photography, Gender, Archive, Moudjahida, Colonialism, Nationalism
Abstract
This dissertation traces a photographic and gendered history of the Algerian War of Independence from France by asking what becomes visible when photographs are treated not as fixed illustrations of a known conflict but as unstable, circulatory objects that move across propaganda, domestic space, activist networks, and private archives. Beginning with the figure of the “flag weaver” and a carbon print of the twenty-one-year-old moudjahida Zohra Slimi sewing Algerian flags, the study argues that women’s political participation has been persistently marginalized by both colonial archives and post-independence nationalist historiography. Against this silence, it proposes photography as a privileged medium for historical recovery. Its reproducibility, mobility, and chaotic archival survival allow images to be gathered into alternative narratives that exceed the classificatory and state centered logics through which war history is typically stabilized.
Combining close visual analysis with archival research across North America, Europe, and Algeria, the dissertation draws on military holdings, print media, photobooks, personal papers, and fragile family collections. It attends to the institutional procedures that render photographs legible through cataloguing, captioning, and restriction regimes while also tracking how women acted as witnesses, image makers, custodians, and interpretive agents who preserved, recoded, and reactivated photographs against erasure. Methodologically, the project places feminist historiography in dialogue with Black Studies frameworks to engage the absences and interiorities that structure the visual archive of the war.
Across five chapters, the dissertation moves from overt propaganda to intimate photographic worlds and their afterlives. Chapter 1 analyzes French and American illustrated media that repeatedly staged Algerian women as victims, terrorists, or heroines within what the dissertation names the colonial media enterprise, while showing how nationalist counter images often inherit the same symbolic grammar. Chapters 2 and 3 examine transnational women photographers and interlocutors shaped by World War II and Cold War politics, revealing the gendered labor of witnessing within and against colonial institutions. Chapter 4 reframes photographs of the moudjahidate through gender networks, kinship, and interior life, treating the archive as a site of narrative possibility rather than evidentiary closure. Chapter 5 turns to contemporary women, including widows, descendants, and artists, who rehabilitate wartime photographs against amnesia, demonstrating how photographic memory persists as an ethical and political practice of return. Together, these chapters demonstrate that gender is an organizing principle of the photographic archival history of the Algerian War of Independence. By attending to women as photographic subjects and image-makers, and to the custodial labor underlying photographic archives, the dissertation fundamentally reshapes how the history of this war is remembered.
Recommended Citation
McCreight, Maura E., "A Photographic Gendered History of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62)" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6620
