Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
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…
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…