The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781478029069)

On the night of October 17, 1961, thousands of Algerians peacefully demonstrated in the streets of Paris, protesting an illegal curfew imposed upon them by the French colonial government. The Paris police responded with deadly violence, by some accounts killing over two hundred people and wounding countless others. One of the victims was Abdelkader Bennahar, who was seriously beaten in Nanterre, a commune just west of Paris. Jewish-French photographer Élie Kagan took a number of photographs of Bennahar as he lay bleeding in the street. Bennahar was brought to a Nanterre hospital and reportedly died the next night. In The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar, Robert Desjarlais analyzes Kagan's photographs and their affective force and political significance from the moment they first circulated through the decades that followed. By drawing on Kagan's photographs and archival records to consider the trace remnants of Bennahar's life and the fate of his body in death, Desjarlais offers a compelling account of one person's "life death" through complicated strands of time and memory.

Author: Robert Desjarlais
ISBN-10: 1478029064
ISBN-13: 9781478029069
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/28/2025
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 9.06h x 5.83w x 1.02d