The Colonization of Names - by Benjamin Brower

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

French colonization dismantled Algerian names. Under the occupation that began in 1830, not only were Algerian towns and streets renamed in honor of French figures, but personal names were forced to follow French conventions and norms. Colonial authorities simplified and transformed Algerian names to suit their administrative and legal purposes, crudely transcribing and transliterating Arabic and Berber. They imposed a two-part name and surname model that stripped away the extended family ties and social context inherent to precolonial naming practices.

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.

Review Quotes

The Colonization of Names offers important new insight into how the eradication of Algerian place names and personal names was integral to the violent material, social, and psychic dispossession enacted by French colonialism. Brower effectively demonstrates how language was a terrain of colonial power and struggle. Drawing on concrete and archivally grounded personal and political histories, this book makes the operation of this symbolic violence, as well as shifting Algerian strategies of deflecting it, palpable and resonant in the present.--Judith Surkis, author of Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930

Brower powerfully rethinks colonial violence as ontological violence through the issues of naming. Beyond the Algerian case, this book opens a powerful theoretical and historical perspective on onomastic power.--Jocelyne Dakhlia, author of Harems et Sultans: Genre et Politique au Maroc et ailleurs XIVe-XXe siècle

This original and erudite book shows that in regulating the names of individuals and families, France's violation of Algerian sovereignty went well beyond territorial conquest. Brower's research brilliantly demonstrates that a French bureaucratic convenience represented for Algerians a form of colonial violence that entailed the emergence of new subjectivities.--Owen White, author of The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria

About the Author

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).