States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum

States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum navigates the states of emergencies linking three distinct French colonial space-times: the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the Kanak Insurrection (1984–1988), and France’s banlieues uprisings (2005–2020). Attending to the most recent state of emergency imposed in 2015, the book traces the mechanics of this counterrevolutionary legal framework across multiple geographies in order to draw out and fortify key anticolonial solidarities across space and time. From regroupment camps in Algeria, to the colonial stronghold that is Nouméa, and from the Casbah of Algiers and tribes across Kanaky, to the police stations of France’s banlieues and the bidonvilles of Nanterre, the French state of emergency is here spatialized through a narration of the very protocols that continue to enable and underwrite the far-reaching violence of this legal measure. In so doing, the book makes the colonial continuum legible: one traversed by the many military actors, agents, immigrants, and revolutionaries working both for and against the shared project of liberation.

Léopold Lambert is editor-in-chief of The Funambulist. He is a trained architect, as well as the author of four books that examine the inherent violence of architecture on bodies, and its political instrumentalization at various scales and in various geographical contexts, in particular Palestine. His titles include Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012); Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum, 2016); La politique du Bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (B2, 2016); and États d’urgence: Une histoire spatiale du continuum colonial français (Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021).

Lara Vergnaud is a translator of prose, creative nonfiction, and scholarly works from the French. She has translated over twenty books, including novels by Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and Zahia Rahmani. She is the recipient of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and the French Voices Grand Prize, and has been nominated for the National Translation Award. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States, and currently lives in southern France.

Zoé Samudzi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in African American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University. She holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is also a Global Blackness Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg and a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution. Her work contends with genocide memory, political mythologies of the nation-state, visuality, and the spatial politics of dispossession. She is an art writer and an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, as well as a co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018).