Virtual Returns: Colonial postcards online and digital 'nostalgérie' among the former European settlers of Algeria

This article analyses how certain former European settlers of Algeria (pieds-noirs) have created digital spaces of remembrance using scans of colonial-era postcards. Tracing the role of postcards in pied-noir memory narratives from 1980s phototexts to mid-2000s websites, it argues these digital sites seek to maintain connections to an imagined Algerian homeland amid the memory wars. By collecting, scanning, and reproducing postcards and photographs of colonial landscapes, these websites reconstruct a lost urban topography altered since independence. These virtual returns rely on affective nostalgérie (nostalgia for Algeria) and in doing so recreate the early 20th-century visual economy of French Algeria. Despite the internet’s connectivity, the sites largely craft a homogeneous collective memory for an imagined pied-noir audience. The article concludes that this online model of colonial nostalgia has, in limited but influential ways, shaped how other groups interpret visual nostalgérie.

Beatrice Ivey