Hadj-Moussa 287history that viewers seek diversion. They long to turn away from that his-
tory because it neither represents “the truth” nor does it represent what
participants refer to as “Algerian culture”:
Before then [1988], it was the government’s newspaper, it
was the newspaper that worked for the ruling power, El
Moudjahid. Television was the FLN television and it was
indoctrination, from sun-up to sundown. [But] they didn’t
succeed! (Mourad, 46 years old)
There is too much censoring on our [national] television,
which is itself too pro-FLN... I’m telling you the truth; I
myself do not watch it not even for newscasts. We have had
enough. We know they will begin with the president and his
entourage, his smala. Twenty-five minutes of that! (Hayet, 36
years old)Monumental history, ossified history, no longer seems to have a grip on
the public imagination. Emerging and parallel histories are giving every-
one the right to examine history. “There is a nationalist sentiment. It is
innate. It is not the FLN that fostered it. It is a sentiment that is ingrained
in every Algerian. No matter how very, very happy they (emigrants) are in
France, when summer comes, they know that it [Algeria] is their country”
(Kamel, 44 years old).
What is the basis of belonging to “Algerian culture”? In a country
where the history of the quotidian does not weigh to the same extent
as the grandiose past and present of the FLN, “Algerian culture” is pro-
vided in the examples national television offers of the “daily life of the
people,” with “their dress, their songs, their art”; this identification is with
a reality that is tied to a given territory. This is not to say that it is no
longer a “kaleidoscope of unstable identities and transpositions” 47 ; but
there is a correlation to place and territory. However, this correlation, as
many authors have indicated, should not be essentialized. If, as Massey
maintains, “the definition of the specificity of the local place cannot be
made through counterposition against what lies outside; rather it must
be precisely made through the particularity of the interrelations with the
outside,” then the relationship between identity and territory should be