Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
When people think of the fall of al-Andalus, they often picture a single dramatic moment — the surrender of Granada in 1492, or the mass expulsion of the Moriscos between 1609 and 1614. The reality was far more complex. Migration…
In 711, a commander named Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād led an army across the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Iberian Peninsula, setting in motion one of the most consequential military campaigns in Mediterranean history. More than thirteen centuries later, his…
For roughly three hundred years, the Regency of Algiers was one of the principal centres of a Mediterranean-wide system in which European Christians were captured, bought, sold and compelled to labour. Tens of thousands passed through the city’s slave markets…
Algerian cinema has been unusually closely entangled with the country’s political history and state institutions. Moving pictures arrived under French colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, and much early filmmaking reproduced a European gaze—reducing North African life to the…
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…