In Britain, conservative culture warriors venerate imperial public statuary erected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as sacrosanct. Attempts to reshape public space in the present and move beyond the commemorative culture of colonialism, especially when they involve taking so-called great men off their pedestals, are denounced as attempts to ‘rewrite’ or even ‘falsify’ history. In France and Algeria, in contrast, and as Susan Slyomovics’ eclectic and thoughtful ethnography vividly illustrates, both ex-colonizers and anticolonial activists have frequently removed, reconfigured, reappropriated and reimagined material heritage as part of an ongoing engagement with their shared-and-contested past that began during the crisis of colonialism in the 1950s and that continues today. While rooted in histories of dispossession and conflict, and often couched (on both sides) in terms of victimization and trauma, such engagement has often been surprisingly creative, even co-operative. The political and aesthetic afterlives of colonial heritage, both in the ex-colony and the former metropole, have been anything but monolithic. In investigating how state and local authorities, civic associations and lobby groups, communities and individual artists have all interacted with the monumental heritage of French Algeria, Slyomovics’ study gets behind all the usual tropes (often rearticulated in the discourses she examines) of violence, resentment and psychopathology to show that, if decolonization is in some ways an ongoing and always unfinished process, it is about much more than simply celebrating the past or ‘cancelling’ it.

Slyomovics’ work as an anthropologist has ranged from Egypt and Israel/Palestine to Morocco, and from oral storytelling and visual culture to restorative justice and human rights. She takes a more personal turn in this, her fifth book, the fieldwork for which began when she was living in Algeria in the early 1990s, before the outbreak of the civil war, and in the region of Oran, in western Algeria, which was home to her late husband’s family. The book, which ranges across Algeria from west to east with occasional diversions to suburban France, reads a little like the engaging diary of a road trip, the interviews as conversations with friends (some indeed are). The ‘Dark Decade’ of the 1990s hovers frequently in the background: some of its more symbolic violence was visited on some of the monuments that Slyomovics discusses. The case studies, each of which locates a particular monument, or complex of sites, within a specific urban area, each with its own social, cultural and commemorative history, are quite loosely tied together: rather than driving a single argument, Slyomovics follows a very open investigative agenda, seeking to explore how the remnants of colonialism’s own memorialization have lived on in social space, whether in Algeria or after their removal to France, and what French and Algerian people who lived through the end of colonialism and inherited its contradictory histories have sought to do with them.

This particularly concerns the most numerous examples of public monuments erected during the colonial period, namely memorials to the dead of the First World War, which were set up across Algeria, as across metropolitan France, in large numbers, and sometimes on a grand scale, in the interwar years. The study opens with a prominent example, the war memorial set up in 1927 in Oran. Originally situated on the seafront boulevard, its tall plinth remains today, faced with glazed tiles and calligraphy, as a memorial to the 1954–62 War of Independence, while the figures of 1914–18 soldiers who once stood atop it now stand in a suburb of Lyon, built in the early 1960s and rapidly settled after 1962 by ‘repatriated’ French settler-citizens (‘pieds noirs’) from Algeria. From this striking juxtaposition, which sets a pattern repeatedly encountered in other cases, the book’s introduction moves on to consider the history of the large-scale removal of heritage items from Algeria by the French army at Independence. Four chapters follow. Chapter 1 looks at colonial-era postcards both as visual sources of colonial ideology (and, today, of the particular colonial nostalgia often termed nostalgérie) in themselves and as evidence for the shaping of colonial public space, juxtaposed with the often-reconfigured remains of monuments that can be found in situ today. Chapter 2 returns to the Oran war memorial, and situates its story alongside those of other war memorials from the Oran region, where colonial settlement was at its most dense, and where colonial agricultural villages durably shaped the landscape and urban environment.

Chapter 3 zooms in on the Oranais town of Sidi Bel Abbès, which from the 1840s to 1962 was home to the French Foreign Legion. Here, Slyomovics looks at both commemorative and social history. As a garrison town, Sidi Bel Abbès had its own (highly selective) heroic pioneer history as a city supposedly created ‘out of nowhere’ by French soldiers who thought of themselves as direct inheritors of the Roman Empire; and at the same time, it was a particularly stark example of the spatial and social segregation, historic erasure, impoverishment, symbolic and often physical violence, and coercive sex work that military occupation produced. Chapter 4 moves east, to examine a series of monuments from the city of Constantine and its surrounding region, and the work over several decades of Algerian sculptor Ahmed Benyahia, whose work has involved rescuing colonial-era heritage from destruction, repurposing it or its sites for new forms of public commemoration and education, and creating his own public sculpture in honour of Algeria’s anticolonial history.

Across these different sites and spaces, the author traces what she calls ‘moments in the biography of an artifact’ (33) whose variety is striking. On the one hand, we have a set of perhaps more predictable stories, in which elements of the French state (often the military) scrambled at Independence in 1962 to prise their history out of the ground and carry it off with them as they departed: this is most paradigmatically the case of the Legion’s monuments (most famously its bronze globe) that were lifted away and reinstalled in the new headquarters (and museum) of the Legion at Aubagne, east of Marseille. But in many other cases, it was individual initiative and co-operation between French and Algerian municipal authorities, in the years after Independence, that led to monuments being ‘repatriated’ to France: Oran’s war memorial was moved to Lyon only in 1968, by agreement between the two cities’ councillors, and at the prompting of a lone war veteran, Pierre Padovani, who in 1964 was still living in Oran, and who noticed how alone he was in still placing a wreath on the monument on Armistice Day (given the tendency in right-wing French colonial memory politics today to claim that Algeria’s Europeans were forcibly expelled en masse by the Algerian revolution, such details are important).

The fates of other colonial-era monuments are equally varied and often touching: Slyomovics’ tour takes in the European cemeteries of western Algeria, from which some settler remains were disinterred and ‘repatriated’ after Independence, but where most remain in place. She visits the Oranais town of Misserghin, where both the colonial war memorial and a statue of the Virgin Mary from the Europeans’ church have been preserved and protected in the grounds of the town hall, and nearby El Maleh (ex-Rio Salado), where, as in many towns, a memorial to the martyrs of the revolution has replaced the colonial statue of a helmeted Marianne, but where she is warmly welcomed by the mayor (who mistakes the anthropologist for a returning pied noir) and told how to find the war memorial, which has been kept in the European cemetery. In Sidi Bel Abbès, despite the town’s association with the Legion (which would make itself notorious for atrocities committed during the War of Independence) she meets the curator of a local agricultural museum, created in a colonial-era wine cellar, who has preserved the records and artefacts of the town’s agricultural college, including its own memorial to its war dead. On the way to Constantine, she takes us to the naiad sculpture at the public fountain in Sétif, set up in 1899, that remains a much-loved local landmark: several times restored, today it is ‘a place to celebrate weddings, take selfies, or, it is said, ask for fertility’ (56), and when a tram system was installed in 2018, the tracks were diverted around it. Vandalism of the statue (which represents a female nude) during the 1990s, and most recently in 2025, has consistently been met with anger and consternation among locals, who attribute the attacks to ‘deranged’ Islamists, and have repeatedly demanded better protection for the town’s heritage. In Arzew, near Oran, in contrast, a more prosaic monument erected in 1958 to the French navy’s war dead – a brick wall with an anchor affixed to it, supporting a concrete slab with a mermaid in relief and an inscription ‘aux marins morts pour la France’ – also remains in place, but the concrete slab and inscription have been painted over in blue and white, with the (wryly humorous?) addition of painted-in seaweed, a shark and fish to keep the mermaid company in an aquatic fantasy scene; the monument has lost its commemorative purpose and is known locally simply as la sirène.

Woven through these fascinating cases are thoughts on public patrimony, ‘theft’ and contested ownership, international co-operation and nationalist anxieties over heritage, art and architectural history, critical theory and (occasionally) psychoanalysis. Individual Algerian artists’ sometimes subtle and sophisticated engagement with colonial monuments (Mohammed Issiakhem’s ‘sarcophagus’ placed over the war memorial in central Algiers; Ahmed Benyahia’s reuse of the bronze from Constantine’s Gallic cockerel for a statue of FLN guerilla chief, Zighout Youcef) are juxtaposed with the Algerian state’s usually rather less artistically subtle interventions. To some extent these reflections remain a little scattered and inchoate rather than coalescing into a sustained line of argument, and there is a certain amount of repetition (as if parts of the book had been intended as standalone articles before being assembled into a monograph). There are a (very) few errors or omissions: it’s slightly surprising to omit the fact that Edouard Herriot (who enters this story because his parents’ remains would be removed from Oran’s cemetery and reinterred in France) was notable as a historian and member of the Académie Française who served three times as Prime Minister under the Third Republic, as well as being the long-serving mayor of Lyon. More significantly, the statue in Figure 31 (described on p. 58) of the Duc d’Orléans, which before independence stood on the Place du Gouvernement (now Sahat al-Shuhada, Martyrs’ Square) in Algiers, is misidentified with that of Marshal Bugeaud, a different statue which stood in the rue d’Isly where the Emir Abd al-Qadir’s statue now stands (the statue of Bugeaud was not equestrian).

Quibbles aside, however, this is a richly-documented and generously-illustrated, thought-provoking work, and a valuable addition to the literature not only on Algeria or North Africa but to wider, still-topical conversations around colonialism and its material legacies. Slyomovics unearths an abundance of telling evidence which she handles respectfully, carefully and subtly, with an equal abundance of attention to both pieds noirs and Algerian historical experience and sensibility. Ex-settlers often claimed, in the years after Independence, that ‘their’ monuments (especially war memorials) had to be ‘repatriated’ to France, as they themselves had been, to save them from vengeful destruction at the hands of Algerians. But anticolonial militants, such as Larbi Berredjem, the National Liberation Army commander in Constantine in 1962 who called for the wholesale destruction of French colonial artworks and monuments, have been very much the exception. More commonly, Slyomovics shows, Algerians have been much more creative in reimagining and repurposing their country’s ‘difficult heritage’, often leaving it in situ and relatively intact, and even in preserving it, than pied noir communities have been in reassessing the reality of their own historic ties to, and their sundering from, Algeria. As so often, it is the heirs of anticolonial struggles who have been best able to recognize the whole history of colonialism and to live with it; it is those who cling to roseate imaginaries of empire, like the persistent proponents of nostalgérie seeing colonialism through the lens of its own propaganda, who are more often engaged in acts of historical erasure.