Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Longer, more researched pieces on significant historical, social, or cultural topics.
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…
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…
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…
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…