Women, Algeria, Torture, Foucault:
Advancing the Anticolonial Sociology of
Marnia Lazreg
September 25-26, 2025
Location:
Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College & The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York
New York City
Abstract Submission Deadline
The extended deadline was May 5, 2025. Late submissions will be considered on a rolling basis. Please consult the call for papers here.
Introduction
Marnia Lazreg was a pathbreaking sociologist who made important contributions to a wide variety of fields, including the study of women, torture, colonialism, Islam, Foucault, international development, and her native Algeria. Much of this work was informed by an abiding belief in the emancipatory potential of a universalistic conception of the human—an approach that bucked prevailing academic trends and inspired a highly original oeuvre rich in critical perspectives. We convene in honor of this unique liberatory voice, who was taken from us in 2024.
The conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines and locales to build upon ideas that Marnia expounded in the five books described below.
Topic 1
The Eloquence of Silence:
Algerian Women in Question
(1994)
Feminism and Difference
In a celebrated article, “Feminism and Difference”, that she published in Feminist Studies in 1988, Marnia challenged some approaches to feminism for engaging in an “antihumanist celebration of unmediated difference” both between men and women and between Western women and women in other parts of the world. Marnia argued that colonial experience taught that an emphasis on shared humanity was more likely to deliver liberation. She wrote that:
the universalistic claim to a supracultural human entity embodied in reason provided colonized societies with the tool necessary to regain their freedom. Colonized women and men were willing to give up their lives in order to capture their share of humanity celebrated but denied by colonial powers. But what does antihumanism offer “different” peoples? On what grounds (moral or otherwise) can powerless people struggle against their relegation to the prison house of race, color, and nationality into which antihumanism locks them?
In her book The Eloquence of Silence (1994), which grew out of the article, Marnia sought to break Algerian women out of one part of that prison: the view that, unlike Western feminists, who could point to a history of struggle against patriarchy, Algerian women were passive victims in need of salvation. Drawing on extensive archival research, Marnia detailed the massive resistance that Algerian women had offered to multiple systems of domination trained against them, not least that of colonialism. The book remains a pioneering rejoinder to the savior narrative in some approaches to feminism.
Topic 2
Torture and the Twilight of Empire:
From Algiers to Baghdad
(2008)
Torture and Colonialism
In Torture and the Twilight of Empire (2008), Marnia showed that torture was not only a pervasive practice of the French military during the Algerian War but also that it formed the core of French military intellectuals’ theory of colonial war, which they called “revolutionary war theory”. Marnia leveraged this insight to demonstrate that torture is neither a colonial pathology nor merely a colonial tactic but rather a constitutive element of the colonial project that can be used as a marker of colonial intent. This made it possible for Marnia to identify in America’s embrace of torture in the War on Terror troubling implications regarding the trajectory of American foreign policy.
Topic 3
Questioning the Veil:
Open Letters to Muslim Women
(2011)
The Veil in Question
In Questioning the Veil (2009), which is structured as a series of open letters from one Muslim woman to another, Marnia offered a reappraisal of the four contemporary grounds for veiling—modesty, sexual harassment, cultural identity, and piety. She challenged the view that the veil is an act of resistance against Western cultural imperialism and suggested that there are more effective ways for Muslim women to assert their cultural identity, express modesty, fight sexual harassment, or express piety than by wearing a piece of cloth that ultimately expresses their anatomy rather than their humanity.
Topic 4
Foucault’s Orient:
The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan
(2017)
Foucault and Non-Western Thought
In Foucault’s Orient (2017), Marnia considered “the puzzling gap between Michel Foucault’s powerful demystifying thought and his view of the Orient as an enigma beyond the grasp of Western reason.” Digging into a vast Foucauldian oeuvre that contains relatively little discussion of non-Western thought, Marnia identified an assertion by Foucault that the “Orient” is the “limit” of Western rationality. Drawing both on Foucault’s published work and original interviews that Marnia conducted with those who knew Foucault during his trips to Tunisia and Japan, Marnia suggested that, despite his critique of power and knowledge, Foucault was prone to othering the non-West. Marnia traced Foucault’s disappointing outlook on the non-West to his rejection of Kant’s universalist anthropology in favor of a localist conception of culture.
Topic 5
Islamic Feminism and the Discourse of Post-Liberation:
The Cultural Turn in Algeria
(2021)
Assessing Islamic Feminism from an Anticolonial Perspective
In Islamic Feminism and the Discourse of Post-Liberation (2021), Marnia called into question attempts by some Muslim countries, working in conjunction with Western backers seeking to combat what they see as Islamic extremism, to ground progress on women’s roles in Quranic text. Focusing on Algeria, Marnia showed that this approach limits the liberatory potential both of feminism and of Islam.
Registration, Venue, and Dates
The conference will be held on September 25 and 26, 2025, in New York City at Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.
Registration will open in late June, 2025 via the conference website: marnialazreg.work . To receive an email announcement and registration link when registration opens, please subscribe to the conference email list at this link: marnialazreg.work/#conference-signup .
The conference has a pay-what-you-wish policy for conference registration. The suggested registration fee for paper presenters is $120 for established scholars and $70 for early career scholars. There will be an evening reception for presenters on September 25, 2025 and a dinner on September 26, 2025. At present, the reception and dinner are being planned as self-pay events.
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“My work reflects my horror of dogma, be it theoretical, methodological or political.”
Marnia Lazreg