Singers, Saints, and the Construction of Postcolonial Subjectivities in Algeria

Goodman, Jane

doi:10.1525/eth.1998.26.2.204

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Similarly, Andezian (2001: 107) reports that 'Isawiyya in her recent study understand the hadra as a mimetic "staging (mise en scène) of the prodigious feats attributed to their spiritual ancestors." It is difficult to draw conclusions about nineteenth-century 'Isawiyya doctrine from Andezian's research given the potential impact of colonial authorities and Islamic reformers (Goodman 1998;McDougall 2006;Merad 1967;Spadola 2008). eighteenth-century Parisian Jansenists famous for séances involving cataleptic trances (Kreiser 1978) and extreme mortifications-beating, stabbing, burning, and eventually even crucifixion (Maire 1985).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modern Magic and the War on Miracles in French Colonial Culture

Jones

2009

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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On 16 September 1856, gentleman illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin embarked from Marseille on the steamship Alexandre bound for the embattled French colony of Algeria. Thirty-six hours later, a detachment of French soldiers met him in the port of Algiers. Recently retired as an entertainer to pursue research in optics and the emerging field of applied electricity, Robert-Houdin was about to return to the stage in a series of magic performances that a French general purportedly called the most important campaign in the pacification of indigenous Algeria (Chavigny 1970: 134).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modern Magic and the War on Miracles in French Colonial Culture

Jones

2009

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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“…France's Berber politics was a primary site where this debate unfolded, as scholars, administrators, and missionaries scoured Berber regions for signs of proximity to Europe-republican institutions, secular laws, entrepreneurial spirit-that would make them appropriate candidates for assimilation (inclusion) (see Ageron 1960). The primary problem area, and the one where the exclusionary argument was made most powerfully, was the status of Berber women (see Clancy-Smith 1996,1998.…”

Section: Liberalism: Si Ammar Ben Boulifamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Festival publications appropriated anthropological definitions of culture formulated by Malinowski, Sapir, Herskovitz, L£vi-Strauss, and others, if at times ambivalently, both to attest to basic human similarities and to locate under the universalizing rubric of culture a range of practices that had been labeled "primitive" or "backward" during the colonial era (Organisation de I'Unite Africaine 1969). 37 Although independence marked the end of overt colonial control over such "material" domains (Chatterjee 1993) as state administration, economic policy, and social welfare, it also opened up a propitious ground upon which a new form of subjectivity could emerge (Goodman 1998). As articulated by political and cultural leaders throughout the African continent, this project involved two dimensions.…”

Section: Postcolonial Identity (2): Idir and Ben Mohamedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite these important transformations, Idir's Isefra resembles the older versions somewhat more than do other New Songs inspired by village repertoires. Some songs employ overt parody and hybrid juxtapositions, setting, for example, a traditional verse about the presumed power of local saints against the singer's critique of saint veneration (e.g., Idir and Ben's song Muhend-nney, discussed in Goodman 1998). Others imbue locally resonant words with larger meanings by embedding them in new semantic surrounds: The word tagmaf (brotherhood), for instance, which in village contexts can index patrilineal loyalty and its attendant rivalries, is set into a new frame (Idir 1976(Idir ,1991 where it acquires a meaning of "universal brotherhood" in Idir and Ben's song Qi'vy (Goodman 1999).…”

Section: Am Walking On the Plainmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Writing empire, underwriting nation: discursive histories of Kabyle Berber oral texts

Goodman

2002

American Ethnologist

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In this article, I explore how colonial, nationalist, and media interests converge around the collection of oral texts. Moving from the French colonial project of collecting native lore to the nationalist project to recover indigenous heritage to the embedding of village songs in contemporary world music, I examine how oral texts from Algeria's Kabyle Berber region have been variously configured as signs through which social differences are imagined and hierarchically ordered. I foreground the history of intertextual penetration between North African poetic productions and Western aesthetic categories, [genre, intertextuality, oral text, colonialism, world music, Algeria] French Colonel Adolphe Hanoteau had a mission. As part of the pacification program France was carrying out during the 1860s in its newly conquered territory of Kabylia, Hanoteau had been charged with finding out what the natives in this recalcitrant Algerian Berber region were up to. In addition to monitoring their activities from his various administrative positions in the Bureaux Arabes, as the offices for indigenous affairs were known, Hanoteau set out on a personal quest to collect Berber poems and songs. 1 The result: a nearly 500-page collection of more than 50 poems and songs through which, the colonel maintained, the Berber spirit could be unveiled. A century later, Kabyle geology student Hamid-soon to be better known through his stage name Idir-set off on a related trek. School vacations would find him journeying to Berber villages to mine not stones, but songs. Polished, set to guitars and percussion, and engraved on vinyl, Idir's songs hit the world music stage in 1973, launching a cultural revival through which Berbers would "rediscover" their identity and origins. During the hundred or so years between the two figures, several dozen collectors-Kabyle and French alike-traced a similar path, generating a plethora of anthologies and recordings of Berber "oral texts," as they are called today. 2 In this article, I critically examine the shifting relationship between claims of unmediated transparency and configurations of social difference. I suggest that a collector's claim of transparency-whereby an oral text is thought to capture unreflexively an essence or spirit of a people-is the very place where an investigation into the construction of difference should begin, for such a claim presumes rather than problematizes the relationship between a poetic text and its producer(s). In addition, it distracts attention from the contingent relationship between the collector and the situation of collection. Attending to these relationships, I show how poems have been entextualized, recontextualized (Bauman and Briggs 1990), or replicated (Urban 1996) in ways that allowed them to participate in constructions of Berber difference at discrete historical moments. In so doing, I situate oral texts as constitutive ingredients of three major metadiscursive traditions: the French colonial and social science literatures, American Ethnologist 29(1 ):86-...

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“…The emergence of the discipline of folklore attests to the role of modernism's particular gaze in imagining tradition and continuity (Bauman 1997). Yet, in the self-alienation that colonialism can produce, public discourses may call for putting the past behind, pulling up roots, creating the New Man (Goodman 1998). Societies may strive for discontinuity or radical change, or try to become like the colonial power-despite resisting colonialism in crucial ways.…”

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confidence: 99%

Genres of Memory and the Memory of Genres: “Forgetting” Lament in Bangladesh

Wilce

2002

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article seeks to place lament in the context of Asian modernities, theorize memory in relation to genres of performance, and introduce the notion of social technologies of forgetting. Evidence suggests that Bangladeshi culture is changing in ways congruent with some models of globalizing modernity. Indeed, my data indicate that displacing certain performance genres may be key to modernist transformation. Yet, several persons I describe here endured hardship over several years to continue performing genres their neighbors deemed dated or sacrilegious. This problematizes teleological visions of the progress of a monolithic modernity stamping out older expressive forms.If the construction of memory is a core theoretical issue in history, understanding how memories give way to forgetfulness also requires attention. This paper is about technologies of commemoration-amongst which we must count lament-and of forgetting. It must therefore concern metadiscoursestalk about forms of talk (forms, here, that serve or efface memory). Lamenttuneful, texted weeping-is a technique for keeping memories alive and transforming them. I will examine how Islamization or Christianization can serve as technologies of forgetting. Cultural and individual agency are at work in active forgetting; forgetting is not simply a matter of "false consciousness." Memory is never about the past alone and, at least in its guise as commemoration, never private (Casey 1987). It is a tenuous achievement, partly because commemorations may be contested. The contestations and commemorations I describe are about the present as well as about the past, since commemoration tends to make past and present consubstantial (Casey 1985:254). The "present" at stake 159 0010-4175/02/159-185 $9.50

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Singers, Saints, and the Construction of Postcolonial Subjectivities in Algeria

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

Modern Magic and the War on Miracles in French Colonial Culture

Modern Magic and the War on Miracles in French Colonial Culture

Writing empire, underwriting nation: discursive histories of Kabyle Berber oral texts

Genres of Memory and the Memory of Genres: “Forgetting” Lament in Bangladesh

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