The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi Drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Post‐Coloniality in Oran, Algeria☆

Abstract

Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mediterranean port city of Oran, this article examines why Algerians, after nearly sixty years of independence, continue to use French colonial‐era placenames instead of the post‐colonial names commemorating the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). I argue that vernacular place‐naming, including the use of colonial‐era names, should be understood as a component of what I call the “poetics of grievance,” whereby city dwellers simultaneously draw attention to linguistic and physical urban forms to express dissatisfaction with their post‐colonial authoritarian state. By examining local taxi drivers’ detailed knowledge of vernacular placenames and the everyday talk that often accompanies them, this article demonstrates how the colonial past can become a powerful poetic resource for city dwellers, serving as a means to conceptualize the potential for grief and rage to bring about revolutionary change in post‐colonial cities.

The Collective Image of the City: Informal Taxis and the Production of Vernacular Toponyms in Tashkent, Uzbekistan

“…The term's singular form, orientir, among its other meanings, is Russian for "landmark" or "reference point" and, hence, its use in a literal sense is by no means limited to Tashkent. Indeed, similar practices have been recorded in several other cities around the globe (Daramy, 2019;Gustafsson, 2015;Love, 2021), including elsewhere in post-Soviet Central Asia (Laszczkowski, 2016;Liu, 2012). Yet despite their centrality to everyday urban life in the Global East and South, vernacular toponyms have received relatively limited scholarly attention compared to official place-names and, more recently, the very process of place naming itself, which is at the center of socalled critical toponymy studies (Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009;Rose-Redwood, Alderman, andAzaryahu, 2010, 2018).…”

“…Tashkent's vernacular toponymic register is thus revealed as a fragmented two‐dimensional matrix of nodes, where large parts of the city, those areas between the nodes, simply do not exist. As Stephanie V. Love (2021, 433) states in her study of a similar wayfinding method in the Algerian port city of Oran, “a place often becomes a socially recognizable landmark only when it takes on a name and vice versa.” Once a name has been bestowed upon a location, the orientir can be socially reproduced as a corpus of geographical knowledge passed from one family member to another, from longtimers to newcomers, or from taxi drivers to passengers and the other way around.…”

Problematizing urban microtoponyms

“…Cultural and political conflicts between the authorities and locals (Babb, 2001; Basik, 2023a; Brocket, 2021; Madden, 2018; Rose‐Redwood, 2008a; Shoval, 2013). The vernacular urban names in everyday life (Love, 2021; Olma, 2023; Pred, 1990; Ryu, 2012; Zuvalinyenga, 2020). …”

Echoes of “dead” colonialism: The voices and materiality of a (post)colonial Algerian newspaper

“…Indeed, in Algeria, the dead are an agentive and material presence to be reckoned with, shaping social and political life (c.f. Love, 2021). Twenty‐first‐century Algerians continue to call themselves the “people of a million and a half martyrs” ( sha‘b al‐maliun wa niṣf shahīd ), an intimate and contested imagined community of the living and the dead (Mittermaier, 2015).…”

“…In their speech, people often point to the forms, qualities, and characteristics of their material environments to make sense of their social world. In postcolonial Oran, for example, city dwellers regularly draw attention to the countless places, objects, and institutions—like L'Écho d'Oran —left behind by the nearly one million pieds noirs who fled Algeria, by choice or by force, in 1962 (Love, 2021).…”