In this book Andrea Smith offers a rich account of how Maltese pieds-noirs live a condition of “double exile” in contemporary France: exile from the colonial Algeria in which they grew up and exile from Maltese ethnic origins about which they often know very little. As Smith details, these French citizens increasingly seek to rediscover their Maltese heritage through “pilgrimages” to the island and through participation in settler clubs organized explicitly along ethnic lines. Smith explains this turn toward a Maltese identity that might, at first glance, appear surprising given the lowly status of the Maltese in the hierarchy of French colonial settler society. She reads the embrace of Maltese identity by pieds-noirs in France as a figurative displacement, with Malta standing in for the “real” missing homeland. “The Maltese travel to Malta not to make a liberating journey home (it is significant that few ever decide to move there),” comments Smith, “but to undertake an ultimately unfulfilled journey back to Algeria” (p. 229). At the same time, she demonstrates the profound ambivalence that inflects nostalgia for the colonial past, given that the very existence of a distinctly “Maltese” identity in postcolonial France owes much to the collective memories of the discrimination experienced in the colony.

Smith deftly employs both archival and ethnographic methods to probe the historical realities of Maltese settlers in Algeria and their contemporary recollections of that past. Analysis of the Maltese case puts into question long-standing views of French identity in both metropole and colony, in particular the popular metaphor of the Algerian and French melting pots and the ideal of a “civic” national identity. In Algeria, for example, Maltese immigrants occupied the bottom of a racialized settler hierarchy, with some observers questioning whether they even belonged in the category of settlers owing to their “Arabic” language and hence dubious Europeanness. This subaltern status continues to shape the expression of a Franco-Maltese identity among repatriates in France.

Smith sensitively documents the many silences and erasures that characterize performances of this identity in the settler clubs. The most extensive practices of self-censorship occur, predictably, around the controversial history of the Algerian War. The actions of Smith's informants in that conflict constitute an unsettling absence that haunts the entire text, an absent presence that Smith could and should probe further. On the specific issue of the French military's use of torture, for example, Smith comments, “I did not want to engage my informants on this subject. There were limits to ethnographic objectivity, I felt, and I did not want to put myself in the position of knowing what the people I met had done during the war years” (6). While explicit discussions with her informants of the war admittedly “might render research among this population difficult at best” (158), Smith nonetheless loses an opportunity to mine other theoretical and methodological possibilities presented by these silences around questions of complicity. Smith might have examined such ellipses in light of scholarship on other divided memories, such as those of World War II and the Vichy experience, and might have considered in greater depth her own complicities as ethnographer.

Questions of accountability and responsibility prove inextricable from violent encounters, including those of colonialism. Hopefully other scholars will take up where Andrea Smith's pioneering ethnography leaves off, since this timely study highlights the urgent need for greater ethnographic understanding of the experiences of former colonizers who “came home” to Europe (sometimes for the first time) in the era of decolonization.