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This chapter extends the argument about colonial crisis and epidemicity into the war-time writings of Frantz Fanon and Algerian revolutionary Djamila Boupacha, illuminating an understudied anti-enlightenment scientism in the work of the former and an anti-colonial poetics of the body in the latter. It focuses particularly on the relationship between epidemicity and the gendered morphology of the medicalized colonial subject from the anti and decolonial perspectives, and advances an argument about the centrality of the Algerian precedent to the American War on Terror by way of a reading of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, famously screened at the Pentagon in 2003.

This chapter explores how the Muslim Third World influenced and informed Black radical politics and culture within the Muslim International. It examines how the anticolonial struggles in the Muslim Third World of Algeria and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s not only shaped ideas about tactics and strategy, solidarity and political possibility, but they also informed ideas about film, literature, and cultural criticism within the Black Power imagination. By examining the influence of Frantz Fanon on the Algerian War of Independence and on the novel The Battle of Algiers, and Sam Greenlee and his novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door, this chapter explores how the national liberation struggles in Algeria and Iraq became the literal and ideological backdrop for the redefinition of Black cultural practice, aesthetic developments, thematic concerns, and political orientations during the Black Power era.

This chapter analyzes the 1965 feature film The Battle of Algiers, which dramatized an episode in the Algerian War during which torture was systematically used in the dismantling of an urban guerilla network operating out of the Casbah, the old city. More specifically, it explores the uncertainties and silences surrounding the filmic treatment of torture, as well as its garbled or ambiguous meanings as conveyed in The Battle of Algiers and the documentaries Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side. It argues that The Battle of Algiers failed to capture the centrality of torture in the French counterinsurgency effort in Algeria, while Standard Operating Procedure minimizes the effects of torture on the Abu Ghraib detainees and does not represent the victims’ suffering or experience. Taxi to the Dark Side discloses the extent of America’s torture program, elucidates the decisions that made torture a key element in the country’s counterinsurgency program in Iraq and Afghanistan, and gives the torture victims a voice.

This chapter examines how torture is often misrepresented in classic and contemporary film by focusing on Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), suggesting that directors and actors tend to choose the accepted iconography of torture that won’t challenge filmgoers’ preconceived notions. It first considers how convenient truths circulate, and how movies convey this thoughtlessness. It then analyzes two theses about torture: one is that torture works, the other is the belief that a single universal distributor (Evil Devices R Us) is the source of all modern tortures. Each thesis leans heavily on convenient truths, and often that is why people cite these theses thoughtlessly. The chapter argues that, in The Battle of Algiers, torture didn’t have the effectiveness in the “short run” that Pontecorvo gave it. It also contends that torture is the least efficient way of obtaining necessary information, and that using informants—as the French did in Algeria—is far more reliable.

This chapter discusses Cixous' letter to Zohra Drif. Here she narrates the Algerian birth war and the fight for independence. Cixous explains that while her letter to Zohra Drif has not been written, it still exists in the form of prayers and thoughts. The last part of the chapter lists several important names and dates, including the start of ‘The Battle of Algiers’ and Zohra Drif, who she describes as a great resistance fighter.