Alice Cherki (born 1936 in Algiers, Algeria) is an Algerian psychoanalyst practising in Paris. She has written a number of books, including Frantz Fanon: A Portrait which is based on her personal recollections of working with Fanon in Algeria and in Tunisia. [1]
Cherki was born in 1936 into a Jewish family based in Algiers. Her father was a cereal merchant. [2] Her exclusion from the French School for being Jewish during World War II marked the beginning of her political awakening. During her medical studies, she campaigned for the independence of Algeria. [3] After attending one of his lectures, she joined, in the middle of Algeria's war, the team of the psychiatrist and thinker Frantz Fanon, then head doctor of one division of the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville. [2] [4] At the age of 20 she married Charles Géronimi, a close associate and friend of Fanon. They were later divorced. [5] In 1957, she began to study psychiatry in Paris before taking refuge in Tunis [6] She became a junior doctor in Manouba clinic and later received a grant from the temporary government of the Algerian Republic to finish her studies in East Germany. [6] She returned to Algeria on the eve of its independence in 1962.
In 1964, she established herself in Paris to finish her psychiatric training as well as starting in psychoanalysis, while regularly visiting Algeria. [6] In the course of her career, she published numerous papers and a number of books dealing with issues such as alterity, immigration, the transmission of trauma. [7] In 2007, she received the Œdipe price for her book "La Frontière invisible, violences de l’immigration (Editions Elema) in which she draws a link between her psychoanalytic practice and her political experience. [8] Her biography-testimony of Frantz Fanon, published in several languages, highlights the singular parcours of this West Indian psychiatrist, well known for having emphasized the psychologic effects of colonisation on colonists and colonized.
Frantz Omar Fanon was a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Blida is a city in Algeria. It is the capital of Blida Province, and it is located about 45 km south-west of Algiers, the national capital. The name Blida, i.e. bulaydah, is a diminutive of the Arabic word belda, city.
Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, known by her pen name Assia Djebar, was an Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker. Most of her works deal with obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. She is "frequently associated with women's writing movements, her novels are clearly focused on the creation of a genealogy of Algerian women, and her political stance is virulently anti-patriarchal as much as it is anti-colonial." Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa's pre-eminent and most influential writers. She was elected to the Académie française on 16 June 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition. For the entire body of her work she was awarded the 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was often named as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Black Skin, White Masks is a 1952 book by philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The book is written in the style of autoethnography, with Fanon sharing his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche.
Zohra Drif Bitat is a retired Algerian lawyer, moudjahid, and the vice-president of the Council of the Nation, the upper house of the Algerian Parliament. Drif was born in Tissemselt, Algeria, part of the province of Tiaret, where her grandfather was an imam and her father served as a lawyer and judge in Tiaret. She is best known for her activities on behalf of the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the Algerian War of Independence.
Francesc Tosquelles, also known as François Tosquelles due to having lived in France for many years, was a Catalan psychiatrist. During the Spanish Civil War, he fought on the Republican side for the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. During World War II, he was the doctor at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, Lozère, France. He is credited as one of the creators of institutional psychotherapy, an influential movement in the second half of the 20th century. His 1948 doctoral thesis for the University of Paris was titled 'The Psychopathology of Lived Experience' - "Part gestalt psychology, part phenomenology, part neurobiology, part psychoanalysis, it revived the Hippocratic notion of the medic–philosopher – iatros philosophos." After experiencing military occupations throughout his lifetime, he concluded that "occupation" was not simply a historical reality but created a psychic structure in the individual, and that to achieve freedom, one must proceed by "disoccupation".
A Dying Colonialism is a 1959 book by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in which the author provides an account of the Algerian War. The book details cultural and political changes that emerge due to the rejection of French colonial oppression by the Algerian. Issues discussed include the role of women in the liberation struggle, changes to family life, the role of the radio and medicine both as tools of oppression and complicity on one hand as well as tools of freedom and liberation, and Algeria's European minority and their role as potential allies in the conflict.
Pierre Chaulet was a French doctor who worked with the FLN during the Algerian War. He performed secret operations on FLN fighters and sheltered the FLN leader Ramdane Abane. Eventually his cover was blown and he was expelled to France. Chaulet and his wife, Claudine, rejoined the FLN in Tunisia where he continued to work as a doctor and to write for the FLN paper, El Moudjahid.
Jacques Chevallier was a liberal pied noir mayor of Algiers who governed the city at the head of a coalition of pied noir and Moslem representatives.
Éliane Amado Levy-Valensi was a French-Israeli psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher.
Antoinette Fouque was a French psychoanalyst who was involved in the French women's liberation movement. She was the leader of one of the groups that originally formed the French Women's Liberation (MLF), and she later registered the trademark MLF specifically under her name. She helped found the publishing house Éditions des Femmes as well as the first collection of audio-books in France, "Bibliothèque des voix". Her position in feminist theory was primarily essentialist, and heavily based in psychoanalysis. She helped author Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (2013), a biographical dictionary about creative women.
Antoine Porot was a French psychiatrist. He founded what was known as the Algiers School of psychiatry, which attempted to justify the inherent racism in the French colonial mission in Algiers on the basis that Algerians, i.e. the Muslim non-ethnically French inhabitants, were biologically inferior. Frantz Fanon discusses his theories and the impact on Algerian colonial society in his book, The Wretched of the Earth.
Women fulfilled a number of different functions during the Algerian War (1954–1962), Algeria's war for independence. The majority of Muslim women who became active participants did so on the side of the National Liberation Front (FLN). The French included some women, both Muslim and French, in their war effort, but they were not as fully integrated, nor were they charged with the same breadth of tasks as their Algerian sisters. The total number of women involved in the conflict, as determined by post-war veteran registration, is numbered at 11,000, but it is possible that this number was significantly higher due to underreporting.
Samira Negrouche, francophone Algerian writer and poet, born in Algiers, on September 13, 1980. Also a Medical Doctor, she lives and works in Algeria.
Abdelmalek Sayad, was a sociologist, first as an assistant to Pierre Bourdieu, then as a research director at the French CNRS and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. An expert of the North-African community in France, he was central to the introduction of the study of migration issues in French social sciences.
Samah Jabr is a Palestinian Jerusalemite psychiatrist, psychotherapist and writer. Since 2016, she has been Chair of the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and has written columns about the psychological consequences of the Israeli occupation in Palestine since the 2000s. Inspired by anticolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, her areas of interest include mental health, colonialism and universal human rights.
Toward the African Revolution is a collection of essays written by Frantz Fanon, which was published in 1964, after Fanon's death. The essays in the book were written from 1952 to 1961, between the publication of his two most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon expands on the themes of colonization, racism, decolonization, African unity, and the Algerian Revolution in the essays, most of which come from his time writing for El Moudjahid, the official newspaper of the FLN.
Elaine Mokhtefi is an American and Algerian activist, translator, and writer. Born in New York, Mokhtefi began working as a translator for anti-racist and anti-colonial activist movements after moving to Paris in her twenties. She supported Algerian independence efforts, then lived in Algeria from 1962 until she was forced to leave the country in 1974. Her memoir of her time there, Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers, was published by Verso Books in 2018.
Janine Puget was an Argentine psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She was known for her publications on group psychoanalysis.
Samia Henni is a writer, historian, educator, and curator. She teaches history of architecture and urban development at Cornell University. Her work focuses on the intersection of the built and destroyed environments with colonial practices and military operations from the early 19th century up to the present days.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
