Since the engaged writings of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Jean-Paul Sartre – works situated squarely within the anti-colonial struggle – the colonial history of North Africa has all too often been narrated as a history of violence, relying on monolithic categories of the European coloniser and the indigenous colonised, the victimiser and the victimised. While such a dichotomous portrayal may have been intellectually and politically productive in the post-independence nationalist historiography of Abdellah Laroui and others, it rings anachronistically hollow in more recent work. In contrast to such scholarship, Fanny Colonna has spent the last four decades empirically documenting the messiness of the North African colonial encounter, of which she herself is a direct descendant – an encounter certainly framed by violence, oppression, and inequality, but also underwritten by interpersonal intimacies, cultural hybridities, and liminal subjects. With two newly published works inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s micro-historical approach, she offers a methodology for studying such colonial complexity and the traces it has left in the ‘after-colonial’ present.