This article proposes an interpretive reading of contemporary Algerian cultural practice as providing 'techniques of living' in which social memories of traumatic experiences are encoded. Working across several genres--literary fiction, popular music, scholarship, autobiography, political humor, and journalism--the essay seeks to delineate the economy of narration through which intensely disruptive experiences of exile and war, and competing ways of accounting for them, are internalized and expressed in the social production of self-narratives. **********
