States of Emergency - by Léopold Lambert (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum navigates the temporal and spatial dimensions of France's states of emergency across three colonial space-times: the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962), the Kanak Insurrection (1984-1988), and the French banlieues riots (2005) and their fallout (2015-). In recounting the mechanics of this counter-revolutionary legal framework across multiple geographies--extending and fortifying key anti-colonial solidarities past, present, and future--this book reads the state of emergency not as an exception but as a heightened form of every-day colonial state violence.

Contrasting the architecture of sites like "regroupement' camps in Algeria, the white settler city of Nouméa, and the police stations of Paris's suburbs with that of Algiers's Casbah, Kanaky's tribes, and Paris's banlieues neighborhoods, States of Emergency narrates the bureaucracies and protocols that continue to enable and underwrite the far reaching violence of this legal measure, as well as the anticolonial and antiracist resistance brought against it. The book thus offers a guide and a method for making the colonial continuum legible across contexts and for spatializing the many actors, agents, immigrants, and revolutionaries working both for and against the shared project of liberation.

Translated from French by Lara Vergnaud, with a preface by Zoé Samudzi.

About the Author

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).