Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Algerian chaâbi—Arabic الشعبي, literally “popular” or “of the people”—is the great urban art music associated above all with Algiers, its Casbah, and the neighbourhoods that cluster around them. It is built on vernacular poetry, modal melodic practice inherited from the…
In the popular Western imagination, Isabelle Eberhardt is a romantic figure: the Swiss-born rebel who wore men’s clothing, converted to Islam, travelled through the Sahara and died in a flash flood at the age of 27. It is a compelling…
For more than a century, France maintained a legal system in Algeria that managed to be both inclusive and exclusionary at the same time. Muslim Algerians were claimed as French—bound by French sovereignty, subject to colonial law, unable to invoke…
A shower passes over the Atlas while sunlight still catches the falling drops. Someone says ʿers ed-dīb — “the wolf’s wedding”. Thousands of kilometres to the east, under the same meteorological paradox, a Japanese speaker says kitsune no yomeiri —…
Watch Algerian politicians or senior business figures speaking French and you will often hear it: a particular rolling quality to the r, the tongue tip vibrating against the ridge behind the upper teeth rather than retreating to the back of…
For more than two millennia, outsiders have been writing about the peoples and polities of present-day Algeria. Greek writers classified them among distant “Libyan” peoples. Roman authors foregrounded cavalry, kingdoms and imperial utility. Early modern Christian European writers reduced Algiers…