Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Our signature section that explores the historical and cultural links between Algeria and the wider world, highlighting figures or events with global significance.
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…
When Frantz Fanon arrived at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in November 1953, he was not yet the canonical voice of decolonisation. He was a young Martinican psychiatrist entering one of colonial Algeria’s most overburdened and unequal institutions. What happened in…
Albert Camus was made by Algeria. Born in a small farming town, raised in a cramped flat in working-class Algiers, he carried Algerian light, poverty, and heat into everything he ever wrote. He also spent much of his career insisting…
In the summer of 430, as Vandal forces laid siege to a North African port city, one of antiquity’s most influential thinkers lay dying inside its walls. Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius for more than three decades, had spent the…