The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar: The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar

By Robert Desjarlais

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 their victims was Abdelkader Bennahar, who was seriously beaten in Nanterre, a commune just west of Paris. Jewish-French photographer lie 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 and 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1478029064
• ISBN13: 9781478029069
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.