Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Algerian culture is a living tapestry woven from Amazigh roots, Arab and Islamic traditions, Ottoman influences, and the legacy of French colonialism—shaped by the Sahara and the Mediterranean, by resistance and resilience, by poetry and prayer.
From the rhythms of Raï to traditional dress, from wedding customs to the foods that bring families together, these stories offer a window into what it means to be Algerian.
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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…
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 —…
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…
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,…