Tag: Algeria

Susan Slyomovics on her book, Monuments Decolonized

February 10th, 2025

https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/monuments-decolonized

Sultan Doughan: There is so much material to mine and ask questions about in this wonderful book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage, with so many beautiful and moving images. It is truly a monumental book! I am particularly intrigued by this last passage in the conclusion of the book:

“Algeria’s place in settler colonial theory by virtue of decolonization seems to offer closure in settler colonial studies because the country presents a self-contained, neatly bracketed evolution from its 1830 colonization to its 1962 decolonization. Since the Algerian Revolution first defined itself by anti-colonialism, the emergence of newer Algerian sensitivities attests to a transition: colonialism ceases to be the foundation of the state (even if negatively) and becomes one part of a complex patrimony to be used, repurposed, mobilized, valorized, and reclaimed. When viewed through the lens of a reproducible transcultural memory and shared heritage on both sides of the Mediterranean, the presence of Algerian memories about France’s places, beliefs, and ceremonial occasions, while saturated with painful violence and nostalgia, underscore how settler colonialism might end in the former colony. A post-settler passage into something else may be happening in Algeria, not in France.” (p. 199)

You trace in your book the actors that are “safeguarding the patrimony of French Algeria.” In most of your examples of Algerian monuments, we see how pedestals, plinths, stelae are reinterpreted, repurposed and rebuilt to replace former French war memorials and generals. It is certainly moving away from the French past and reclaiming history from an Algerian nation-state position. It could well be seen as a closure, as you yourself suggest in your last paragraph. To what effect do various actors safeguard the patrimony of French Algeria, or better how does the patrimony in fact safeguard colonial structures and unsettle notions of belonging and loyalty in the territorially demarcated nation-state, be it France or Algeria?

Susan Slyomovics: Ahmed Benyahia, the artist profiled in my last two book chapters (in addition, his painting is the book’s cover) was historically responsible for saving the most magnificent interwar colonial monument in Algeria. He convinced Constantine’s then mayor to keep the monument, and refuse the request of former European settlers of Constantine, who came to visit after Algerian independence and their relocation to France in 1962, with the sole purpose of taking the magnificent World War I monument with them to France. This was in fact the same protocol for the Oran war memorial described in chapter two, a rare case of legal removal in 1968 five years after Algerian independence. Benyahia’s argument was, and still is based on an expansive definition of provenance to determine the many ways that the Constantine war memorial is Algerian and should remain in Algeria: many war memorials and statues are made from Algerian stone because Algeria has extensive marble and stone quarries long exploited since Roman times; the artist who sculpted the giant Winged Victory figure on top of the war memorial was an Algerian Jew, Joseph Ebstein. His Winged Victory is a scaled-up copy of a delicate Roman statue found when the French troops “modernized” or “Haussmann-ized” Constantine, meaning they destroyed large swaths of the walled city after the French conquest to build their European city. The monument’s main section is a copy of the Roman arch of Timgad, some 100 miles away. The monument is incised with the names of Algerian soldiers who died fighting for France in two world wars. This included Benyahia’s own family members. Algeria was the only French colony with a mandatory conscription and military service beginning in 1913, just in time for World War I. And finally, Constantine’s war memorial was built with native Algerian labor. So, these definitions of provenance are both the conventional ones of art history, but also new ones linked to colonial violence – of a people, the land, the city, and their extracted materials. Provenance is more than reclamation; it is an assertion of ownership over a statue, and it comes with taking care of it in the place where it was originally sited.

Dan Hicks: I want to ask something about the place of Patrick Wolfe’s work and settler colonial studies in the study. In the introduction you discuss Wolfe’s famous line that “settler colonialism is a structure,”and then you write that“a statue is literally a structure meant to be looked at.” It would be great to hear more about how you apply settler colonial studies, and Wolfe’s work in particular, to the question of monuments and monumentality.

Susan Slyomovics: My influences are from Patrick Wolfe but more so Lorenzo Veracini, a colleague of Wolfe’s. Both came to UCLA, and I am lucky to know and learn from them since they write extensively about settler colonialism but with different emphases. In fact, Lorenzo and I organized a conference at UCLA in 2017 after Patrick’s death followed by our co-edited volume: Race, Place, Trace: Essays in Honour of Patrick Wolfe (London, Verso, 2022). Veracini writes about political sensibilities and the rhetorical traditions of settler-colonial expansion in his book, The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea (London, Verso, 2021) which has a section on the Pied-Noirs or former European settlers of Algeria. Although Algeria began as failed convict colonialism, the colony was a place to move French Republicans in 1848, the Communards, the Spanish Republicans expelled from France to Algeria in the 1940s, all movements that established a new geopolitical order elsewhere. Overseas displacement to Algeria transformed Europe’s poor (or the revolutionary) into farmers, landholders, and settlers. After Algerian independence in 1962, European settler colonial traditions continue into the global present after the settlers were largely “repatriated” to France. The memories of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) are re-enacted in France as the loss of empire and grafted onto World War I and II commemorations, as in the rare case of the legally removed Oran war memorial statue now in Lyon, France that became a locus for settler “nostalgeria.” Now nostalgeria (in French nostalgérie) is a compound word – nostalgia plus Algeria – and it has real everyday consequences. Nostalgeria by European settlers of Algeria now in France imagines colonial Algeria as a place where Muslims and Europeans got along, a brotherhood of races and religions mixing. In reality, they have reproduced the legal and spatial actuality of a colonial Algeria divided by race and religion in France and many support the politics of anti-immigrant, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic views.

Dan Hicks: What about the connections between fallism and restitution? It would be great to hear more about the points you make around the differences between the Sarr-Savoy Report on sub-Saharan African collections and the Stora Report on Algeria. How does the history of repatriation to France (which involves war memorials, statues and statues, and people too) relate to issues of monuments. And thinking about returns in the other direction, how do your arguments play out in debates about longstanding demands for the return of Algerian archives, reparations, apologies for atrocities, and Macron’s memory politics?

Susan Slyomovics: I thought about some of these issues as I wrote the book when I published two relevant articles: “Commissioning Memorial Reconciliation: The Stora Report and Algeria’s Ottoman Cannon in France,” Modern and Contemporary France, 2023; and “Repairing Colonial Symmetry: Algerian Archive Restitution as Reparation for Crimes of Colonialism?” In Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective, edited by Jacqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache, and Caroline Elkins (2021).

Since the archive of French Algeria remains largely in French hands, there is no escaping historical linkages between France’s settler colonial project in Algeria and ongoing disputes about archival sovereignty, provenance, and digitization. Who physically possesses the actual archive therefore raises issues about the afterlives of settler colonialism in France, the metropole, and human rights definitions of reparation and restitution. These ongoing disputes related to the colonial archive highlight theoretical, affective, and historical arguments and also serve as a real and symbolic proxy for unresolved claims against the former French colonial state over crimes its agents perpetrated during its period of conquest and rule in Algeria. While historian Benjamin Stora calls this “memory wars” in his Stora Report, in contrast, Algeria’s leadership speaks of colonial crimes that demand acknowledgment, restitution, and reparation. Numerous documented cases of French destruction of archives both during the 1830 conquest and 1962 independence bookend the extreme violence of imperialism and colonialism between those dates. Alexis de Toqueville was in Algeria in the 1830s and describes the French army’s wholesale, deliberate destruction of the archival record such as Ottoman property records, taxation rolls, manuscripts, entire libraries, institutional mortmain deeds – in fact and in deed, a deliberate state policy of destruction, replacement or removal. In 1971, then President of Algeria Houari Boumedienne established Algeria’s National Archives and launched an early campaign to recuperate archives held in France perhaps spurred by the creation in 1966, in Aix-en-Provence, of France’s overseas archives with an estimated 60% holdings from Algeria. More recently Algeria has made archival demands as a form of restitution grounded in Article 11 of the 2008 UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights pointing to archives taken without their prior informed consent and in violation of their laws, traditions and customs. Until the 1980s when Mitterand came to power in France, there were some archival restitutions usually as diplomatic gifts during state visits. So, the gift was not the acknowledged legal transfer. Only in 2007, were Algerians given the supposed gift of maps of mines placed alongside both their borders during the war, which after independence not only killed 30,000 people but also made large swaths of border lands uninhabitable. In addition, there is little agreement on digitization versus the original between the two nations, and to this day there is incomplete knowledge about the French holdings of Algerian materials. The Stora Report, commissioned by President Macron, does not come anywhere near the scholarly value of the Sarr-Savoy Report, which unequivocally states that objects deemed spoils of war resulting from punitive imperial military expeditions be restituted. Quantification of colonial violence visited on exotic objects preoccupies the Sarr-Savoy Report as the authors discuss two key concepts: tabulating plunder, a kind of numerical visibility, and ways to determine provenance. The Stora Report does none of that, but deals in platitudes about reconciling memories, with little detail, enumeration, what’s held where, and merely calls for more binational commissions, which have not happened. The Stora Report does mention an important Algerian object transformed into a war memorial in France which has been a major point of contention between the two nations. Algiers was defended successfully for several hundred years by massive Ottoman cannons. The city’s harbor was called the well-protected, encircled by Ottoman cannons that staved off incursions from Spain, and other nations. After the French conquest of Algeria, the French melted down some Ottoman cannons, one became a beautiful statue of St. Augustine which still stands in Algeria, while Algerians keep demanding another Algiers cannon, which was shipped to the French naval academy in Brittany in 1830. Cannons defending Algiers are horizontal facing the enemy outward, but this one was turned vertically upright, with the ubiquitous Gallic rooster placed on top and made into a war memorial. The two countries don’t agree on definitions of repatriation and reparation. French law refers to returning European settlers, some one million at independence, as “repatriates” and has enacted several reparation programs for settler losses after they departed from the colony at independence which facilitated their integration into France after 1962. In these ways France did not compensate the colonized in Algeria but rather reinvigorated the settler in France through “repatriation” and “reparation.” And Algeria has never stopped demanding pre-colonial archives and artifacts.
Jane Goodman on her book, Staging Cultural Encounters

May 31st, 2021

Interview by Janina Fenigsen

https://iupress.org/9780253049629/staging-cultural-encounters/

Janina Fenigsen: You’ve written a fascinating account of the 2016 US tour of the Algerian theater troupe Istijmam, which was sponsored by the Center Stage program of the US State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. How did you come to be involved with this tour? More broadly, what led you to study Arab Algerian theater after writing a first book on Berber/Amazigh music (Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video)?

Jane Goodman: As I discuss in the book, Algeria underwent a very difficult period in the 1990s, referred to as the “Dark Decade.” That period of conflict escalated during my doctoral research, when I was working in a Kabyle Berber mountain village. I had to leave Algeria at the end of 1993, when it became unsafe for me to remain and unsafe for the village to continue hosting me. When I was ready to return to Algeria in 2008, I was not given permission by the US Fulbright program to go back to the Kabyle region, as it was still considered too dangerous. I had good research and personal connections in the western city of Oran, and it was among the safest areas of the country. For those reasons, I decided to change regions. At the same time, in my earlier research (both ethnographic and archival) I had noticed that Algerians had long been practicing amateur theater, and I was curious about what contemporary theater troupes were doing. Oran is the city where Algeria’s renowned playwright, the late Abdelkader Alloula, had been based (and where he was tragically assassinated in 1994). I was fortunate to have had a personal introduction to the Istijmam Culturelle theater troupe, which included several members of Alloula’s family and was working in his legacy. Istijmam was only in its second year of existence at the time, but they were already invested in working in an experimental or laboratory mode. The actors were open to me being present for their rigorous daily rehearsals. To them, my engagement was another way for them to experience other disciplinary perspectives and approaches. During my stay in Oran in 2008-2009, I also carried out research with several other troupes (which I’ve written about elsewhere). Fast forward a couple of years: I saw an announcement flash by on email that the Center Stage program of the US State Department was inviting nominations of music and theater troupes from Algeria and Tanzania, the program’s featured countries in 2016. I nominated Istijmam, and when they were accepted, I knew instantly that I wanted to write about the tour. The book unfolds very much in relation to the tour itself: I take up the play Apples that they presented, the historical context of the early 1990s when the play was written, the actors’ engagement with the play some 25 years later, and the genre of the Algerian “halqa” or marketplace theater that inspired both the playwright Alloula and the troupe. I also write about our process as we translated the play from Arabic to English, and, of course, about the various encounters that took place with a range of US audiences on the tour itself.

Janina Fenigsen: You discuss the scenarios of cultural exchange encounters as heavily scripted genres that create “a sense among participants that they have seen it all before”—both comfort and constraint—while noting the potential for a space of critique to open up. You also say that to the members of the troupe, the tour was somewhat disappointing. To what extent and in what ways in their engagements with American publics were they able to break out of the script? Was this particular script more difficult to shake off than those of their other tours? Did they feel that they were able to open up a space of critique at all? if so, in what ways?

Jane Goodman: In the book, I developed the idea of scenarios of cultural exchange from Diana Taylor’s work on scenarios as repertoires of scripted encounters that tend to unfold in similar ways time and time again. I saw this tour as situated within a decades-old scenario of cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy through the arts, which has been informing artistic exchange since at least the early 20^th century (and even earlier, if we want to include the worlds’ fairs). As a form of “soft diplomacy,” these exchanges are based on the premise that encounters at the interpersonal level can “scale up” to become signs of good will between nations. The Center Stage program, formed under President George W. Bush, was envisioned as a way to provide a softer, friendlier view of America to countries where populations did not necessarily see the US in a positive light. Yet the scenario of cultural exchange entails a familiar repertoire of encounters or social roles through which the tours are structured, such as meet-and-greet events, classroom visits, workshops, or panel discussions. It relies on all participants knowing the script. Whereas the tours are structured around valorizing cultural difference, in fact, as genres of encounter they are deeply familiar. Although the cultural content itself may be different, the encounters through which a cultural exchange tour unfolds are similar worldwide. If they weren’t, it would not be possible to orchestrate a tour like this successfully. So this is the paradox I take up in the book: Cultural exchange tours are organized around a premise of cultural difference, but in fact they require deep familiarity on all sides with the performances associated with genres of encounter.

As to whether this script was more difficult to “shake off” than some of their other tours, I think that Istijmam felt that they were on display as cultural others more in the United States than they had felt during their work in Europe. In Europe, they were involved in producing an original work with troupes from France and Germany. Participants from the three countries were co-eval: they were all working together in a process of co-creation. But, in the US, Algerians were framed as representing Algerian culture and Algerian theater, but the Americans were not framed as representing American culture or American theater (with one happy exception). Instead, the Americans were, by and large, consuming what the Algerians had to offer, whether it was the play or, especially, the workshops. This was often frustrating for the actors.

Janina Fenigsen: You point to this disparity in part through the term “celebratory otherness.” There is a rich irony at the heart of the “celebratory otherness” that you describe as underpinning the paradigm of cultural exchange. While in the Center Stage promotional materials for the US audiences the untranslated language tokens of halqa and goual emphasize and evoke the folklorized otherness, the traditions and rehearsal discipline of Brecht’s and Grotowski’s “poor theater” that are at the heart of Istijmam’s practice seem to be erased. How does it work for the members of the troupe themselves? Do they view their blending of Algerian street theater and European performance principles and philosophy as an example of a cultural encounter in its own right? As an evidence of shared human experience? Something else?

Jane Goodman: I drew the term celebratory otherness from Rupert Stasch to refer to the ways figures of cultural difference become marked as folklorized forms of pleasurable consumption. Artistic traditions such as music and theater are among the most common ways that figures of celebratory otherness circulate globally. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong about enjoying other artistic traditions. But celebratory otherness tends to erase more problematic forms of difference. US audiences could see Istijmam’s colorful dress and joyful music making in the streets of New York, but they did not see the difficulty one member had in obtaining a visa to the US. They did not see the behind the scenes labor that the troupe engaged in to be able to create theater with little support in Algeria. The troupe members did seek to make Algerian theatrical traditions known in the United States, and they did want to talk about these traditions with US audiences. At the same time, however, they wanted to learn about what US troupes were doing. This was where the encounters in the US fell short. The Algerians were the only ones understood to be sharing culture. This made the exchange unequal and incommensurate and is part of what contributed to their being cast in terms of celebratory otherness. Celebratory otherness is one of the systemic, historically shaped ways that the global north has viewed the global south. This is not to say that this was the only way the troupe was seen, but it was certainly part of it, as it is part of the wider scenario of cultural exchange through the arts.

As for Istijmam’s blending of Algerian street theater and European performance principles and philosophy, you are right to suggest that the troupe members also viewed this as an encounter. I write about the ways that their rehearsals in Algeria brought together the space of halqa, or improvisational marketplace performance, with Brechtian principles of identification and distanciation. They saw both of these as evoking a similar kind of space, an example of shared human experience if you will. To them (as well as to the playwright Alloula), Algerian halqa-style performance had been operating for centuries through performance techniques that Brecht, much later, would term identification and distantiation. That is, the street performer would go into and out of multiple roles, identifying with one character and that moving out of that character to go into another. Istijmam adopted this style of performance in their own work, with each actor playing multiple roles. They also brought to halqa theater the embodied discipline they drew from the work of Jerzy Grotowski, which very much influences their brand of physical theater.

Janina Fenigsen: How might the Istijmam actors script the tour and cultural exchange events it involved if given an opportunity? How would you?

Jane Goodman: I imagine Istijmam’s ideal tour as consisting of similar kinds of engagements (performances, workshops, theatrical exchanges), but the balance of activities would have been different. On the tour itself, the performances of the play, followed by audience talk-backs, went well on the whole. Certainly the play would have remained a central part of any tour. But the actors and I would have liked more conversation around it. If the scheduling could have been done in reverse, such that Istijmam would have first presented the play, and then gone into a classroom presentation able to talk with students about it, that would have made for a richer exchange. We all understood that scheduling constraints made this impossible. In fact, even at my own university, the conversations and panel discussions came first, and the play was the last item on the agenda, due to scheduling and travel needs. The exchanges with theater troupes could have been done differently. What performance theorists call emergence – that sense of unexpected, creative novelty that performance can generate – is part of what the actors were looking for. The closest engagement that featured a balanced, two-way, emergent cultural exchange came with the Hartbeat Ensemble, as I write about. Here, the troupes co-created improvisational scenes and participated together in a panel discussion on theater in times in crisis. But it was a brief encounter. The actors would have loved to return and spend focused time with a theater troupe in the US to develop a truly cross-cultural co-creation, as they had done in Europe.

Janina Fenigsen: I view your book as an excellent teaching resource, even more so when paired with the video of the play and guided by your notes that collate the text with the portions of the video. What kind of student audience would you envision for the book? What would you like the students to get out of its reading?

Jane Goodman: I wrote the book with my students in mind. I regularly teach about performance in North Africa and the Middle East, and my students come alive when they see video of the material we’re discussing. Usually I have to do my own searches to find audiovisual support for what we’re reading about. I wanted to include this material in the book itself, so from the beginning I envisioned a multimedia project. The e-version of the book includes embedded hyperlinks where readers can go directly to the specific video they are reading about. Readers of the hard copy can find these links on the book’s website . The website also includes two performances of Istijmam’s play Apples, around which the book is based. For a full multimedia experience, instructors can screen and discuss the play (60 minutes)and then have students read the book and view the associated videos. The website also provides more information about the troupe and the six actors, and it includes ancillary footage both from the tour and from the rehearsal residency the troupe and I held in Algeria in the month before the tour.

Another reason I wanted to do this project is because I felt that students could relate to it. Much of the ethnography took place among students just like them in the United States. Universities are among my field sites: the book engages with students from the University of New Hampshire, Sarah Lawrence College, Yale University, the University of St. Joseph, and Indiana University. Students today have almost all experienced performances by travelling groups from abroad. Students can also relate to the six Algerian actors, who, like them, are young people with similar hopes and aspirations. I anticipate that future student readers will recognize themselves (as participants or audience members) and their own institutions (as hosts) in cultural exchange tours like this one. My hope is that readers will come to a deeper understanding of some of the systemic global imbalances that underpin cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy through the arts (despite the very best of intentions on all sides), and to reflect on their own positionalities within a broader global arts community.
On Tour: Algerian Actors in the United States

March 21st, 2016

Photo Credit: Chris Van Goethem

By Jane E. Goodman

When I got a call last spring from the Center Stage program, I never imagined that it would lead me to drop (well, postpone) everything I was working on and start a new digital book project. The previous fall, Center Stage had announced a competition to bring music and theater troupes from Algeria and Tanzania to the United States for a month-long tour. I had been working with several Algerian theater troupes since 2008, and I put them in touch with Center Stage. The upshot: one of the troupes, Istijmam, was selected and will be touring the U.S. in September 2016.

I knew I wanted to make something of this. The opportunity to tour the U.S. with a troupe I had already been working closely with was too good to pass up. So for the past several months I’ve been submitting proposals to more funding agencies than I can keep track of. I’m happy to report that so far, I’ve been successful. I’ll be joining Istijmam in Algeria for their month-long rehearsal residency in August. Then I’ll fly back with them to the United States to embark on the four weeks of touring, video camera in hand. (Never mind that they’re 30 years younger than I am – this will be fun!)

Right now, I’m framing the project in terms of anthropology’s time-honored mandate to “make the strange seem familiar and the familiar seem strange” (aaanet.org). It’s not just “other cultures” that are strange; we often have to make familiar things “strange” to ourselves in order to explain them to someone who does not share our assumptions. In other words, the process of “making strange” can occur when we make explicit the behaviors or assumptions that we usually take for granted – when we understand what we do as cultural rather than inherent or natural. Here’s an example. Istijmam will be producing the play “The Apples,” written by the Algerian playwright Abdelkader Alloula. Now, in Algeria, there are no apple trees – it’s not the right climate. You can get grapes right off the vine, succulent oranges, juicy watermelons, but no apples (except as imported luxury products). In this play, set several decades ago, a pregnant woman develops a craving for an apple, and her husband chases all around town trying to find one. He succeeds in locating a market with shiny red apples, but they’re not actually for sale. They’re only there for show. An Algerian audience would know implicitly that an apple represents all that is foreign and unavailable – and thus an ultimate symbol of desire. This does not need to be stated anywhere in the play. But how will Istijmam convey this to Americans, who can buy a cheap apple in every corner market? The actors will first need to hold up the apple reflexively – that is, make it “strange” to themselves by explicitly identifying what they had always taken for granted about what apples represent. We often make things “strange” by using a comparative process – in this case, setting Algerian understandings of the apple against those that are common in the United States. Next they’ll need to figure out how to make Algerian experiences of the apple come to seem “familiar” (or at least comprehensible) to American audiences by helping them understand that the apple, in the Algerian context, is as rare as caviar is in the United States. How will they accomplish this? That’s their job. Mine is to translate what they do into ethnography.

Photo Credit: Chris Van Goethem

Historically, the anthropologist was the one to mediate the relationship between familiarity and strangeness. That is, the anthropologist saw his or her role as explaining unfamiliar or “strange” practices from other cultures to Western audiences while also enabling readers to denaturalize their familiar habits and beliefs by comparing them to related practices from other places. In recent decades, scholarly focus has shifted to the anthropological encounter as collaborative, co-constructed, and multisited. Yet resource and mobility issues almost always result in the ethnographer traveling abroad to encounter and then write about those she is working with. I want to reverse the lens by focusing on how U.S. culture is being envisioned and encountered by young North Africans before and during their tour of the United States. As the actors move between the two countries and across roles of artist, cultural translator, tourist, consumer, and North African Arab citizen in the United States, precisely what constitutes the “familiar” and the “strange” – and how they are interrelated – will be continuously shifting ground. By conducting fieldwork with the Istijmam actors before and during the tour, I hope to develop an account of the specific ways we all move into and out of a range of relationships of familiarity and strangeness with both our own cultures and with those whom we construe as cultural others. Will the tour reconfigure familiarity and strangeness in unexpected ways? Might it unsettle the very distinction between familiarity and strangeness that has informed so much of our anthropological history?

“The Apples,” of course, is about more than finding an apple. It conveys the explosive frustrations that Algerians experienced in the aftermath of that country’s 1988 uprising, which toppled 30 years of single-party dictatorship but led to a decade of civil war. While U.S. audiences are familiar with recent Arab Spring events in Tunisia and Egypt, most are unaware that Algerians experienced similar developments and still contend with the aftermath. The play foregrounds the hardships and frustrations that permeate daily life in Algeria and much of the Arab world while commenting on the dangers of political ambition, the value of freedom, and what it means to love one’s country while rejecting its rulers – issues that resonate with particular poignancy in contemporary public discourse surrounding the Middle East and North Africa. Playwright Abdelkader Alloula was assassinated by Islamist terrorists in 1994; he was the father of one of the Istijmam actors and the uncle of another.

Photo Credit: ISTIJMAM

I’m also excited to be exploring new publication mediums with this project. I’ll be publishing an enhanced digital book with embedded video about the tour with Indiana University Press (currently titled On Tour: Algerian Actors in the United States). I also look forward to developing several pieces of digital public scholarship.

Istijmam will be in residency at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) September 8-10, 2016. They will present “The Apples” at the Wells-Metz Theater on Friday, September 9, at 7:30 pm. Mark your calendars now for this one-time opportunity! The IUB residency is generously supported by the College Arts & Humanities Institute; the Office of the College Dean; the Hutton Honors College; the Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Folklore & Ethnomusicology, and Near Eastern Language and Cultures; and the Programs in African Studies, Cultural Studies, and Islamic Studies.

For more about the tour, including a video excerpt of “The Apples” (in Arabic) and a full tour itinerary (anticipated in April), please visit the Center Stage website.

The presentation of Istijmam in the United States is part of Center Stage, a public diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts in cooperation with the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations, with support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. Center Stage Pakistan is made possible by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc.

Jane Goodman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She is the author of Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video (Indiana University Press, 2005) and the editor of Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments (University of Nebraska Press, 2009, with Paul Silverstein). In her spare time, she sings.