Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
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…
Few philosophers of the twentieth century have cast as long a shadow as Jacques Derrida, the thinker who made “deconstruction” part of the intellectual vocabulary of the modern world. Yet the standard portrait of Derrida—French philosopher, Parisian academic, towering figure…
The relationship between Algeria and China is older than many people realise. It predates Algerian independence itself: Beijing recognised the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic in 1958, during the war of liberation, becoming the first non-Arab country to recognise…
In the 1790s, the United States did not defeat Algiers. It paid Algiers — handsomely, repeatedly, and with a warship added to the bargain. Long before America became a global power, it was a cash-strapped young republic negotiating from weakness…
In Algeria’s north-east, close to the Tunisian border, sits a city that rarely gets the attention its stones deserve. Tébessa carries a Numidian past, the Roman name Theveste, a major role in early Christian North Africa, a Byzantine fortress phase,…
High above Algiers Bay, the Casbah — UNESCO’s official English spelling is “Kasbah”, while “Casbah” remains common in English-language writing, and القصبة in Arabic — climbs the hillside in a tangle of whitewashed houses, stepped lanes and covered passages. It…