Diasporic Community of the Berber in France: Recreating Home and Harem from Exile in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du chaâba and Ben Jelloun’s Les Yeux baissés (original) (raw)
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Une Ambiance Diaspora: Continuity and Change in Parisian Maghrebi Imaginaries
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2020
This article is an investigation of ethno-commercial exchanges and interactions between Jews and Muslims of North African heritage that takes account of their cross-cultural antecedents and continuities. The ethnographic focus is a telecommunications company called M-Switch located in the Parisian neighborhood of le Sentier, the trajectory of which is part of a broader cultural and economic shift observable in the neighborhood from industry to new technologies. This particular company is a privileged site for witnessing how people work with and across religious differences between Maghrebi Jews and Muslims in France. The ethnography looks at how contemporary, non-nostalgic reconceptualizations of the past are utilized to negotiate an ethnically plural and potentially convivial present. Relationships within the company have a Maghrebi center made up of shared cultural memories, economic interdependency, and changing gender and class relations. More specifically, relationships between Jews and Muslims at M-Switch are often defined by a desire to re-appropriate and adapt a Maghrebi world. This project is complicated by French and geopolitical representations of ethno-religious conflict.
IMAGO, 2024
Stories are vital in trying times as they are testimonies of lived experiences. Among these tales, the Algerian exilic practices, with all their complexities during and after the French colonisation, offer an intriguing setting to explore the historical ties between different cultures. To illustrate, we first look into Kassa Houari's Confessions d'un Immigré, which delves into the emotional depth of Algerian immigrant workers’ experiences in France while recounting their challenges of assimilation. In the second narrative of mobility, Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine Était Rouge, we analyse the quest for belonging among Algerians in France during a period of historical pain and political turmoil. Les Balcons de la Mer du Nord, by Wassiny Laredj, is the third story that accentuates the emotional upheaval in a foreign distant land. These three exilic discourses showcase different facets of memory displacement, converging on the emotional difficulties faced by Algerian immigrants at different times, especially during the Algerian War of Independence. This paper reveals three complex perspectives on memory and exile within the Algerian diaspora under the shade of the Algerian War of Independence
The Question of Cultural Identity in Wafa-Faith-Hallam's The Road from Morocco
2019
The Road From Morocco is a memoir written by the Moroccan author Wafa Faith Hallam. It recounts the story of Wafa and her mother. Based on a recorded story the memoir tells much about the situation of women in Morocco and the beginning of emerging bourgeois class in Morocccan society. This class started flirting with a Western lifestyle. This fact brought in the horizons of the memoir the old debate between traditionalism and postmodernism. Told from the perspective of a diasporic subjects (Wafa and Saadia), the memoir shows the difficulties one might encounter outside his/her homeland and thus suggesting that a certain kind of cultural transformation is always related to human mobility and movement from one place to another. This paper tries to cover these issues by focusing on how the identities of the characters are affected by both this mobility as well as the different historical moments in which they live. Methodologically, the paper indulges with the theoretical array of postcolonailism in which culture and identity of the native coming from the colonized world was given much attention. Therefore, I found it useful to use Walter Mighnolo's notion of coloniality and Edward Said's talks about diaspora and exile, just to mention these two critical figures, as an attempt to indulge in a discussion with what the memoir includes.
Journal on English Language Teaching, 2020
While political analysts, economists, cultural studies scholars have all been offering insightful analyses of the different matters relating to immigrant life in different parts of the world, this article reaches for a first-hand testimony in two autobiographical novels by two internationally recognized Maghrebian novelists who respectively represent the first and second generations of Maghrebian immigrants in France. In a rather innovative manner, the portrayal of immigrant life in the two novels is analyzed from a cognitive stylistic perspective, and informed by the author’s multiple research viewpoints, those of a Maghrebian literature critic, a francophone postcolonial studies researcher and a frequent visitor to France carrying the concerns of an extended family based there. The interest in style during our close reading of these largely autobiographical narratives is based on the assumption that an author's style is a reflection of their attitude and worldview. Chraibi’s n...
Proceedings of International Conference on Modern Approach in Humanities and Social Sciences, 2019
Since the colonial era, Algeria has faced the issue of Berber 1 activism that aimed to call for the recognition of their culture and their written language. Later during the 1990s, Algeria had slipped into a period of terrorism that is known as the 'Black Decade', which led to violent conflicts and a long period of instability affecting politics, economics, social unity and cultural advance. These push factors triggered the movement of many Algerians in general and many Kabyles in particular to seek safety and better life prospects in different Western countries including the United Kingdom. The current paper which presents one of the prominent findings of my forthcoming doctoral thesis aims to offer the reader how the Black Decade is still affecting the Kabyles' diaspora and how the violent confrontation that occurred during the earlier 'Berber Spring 2 ' had reinforced the ties between Kabylia and the diasporic community in the UK. The narratives of this research gathered through the self-retrospective diary and indepth open-ended semi-structured interviews, which were conducted amongst skilled Kabyles who left Algeria during the periods of cultural conflicts and the Black Decade, and its aftermath, reveal that the Kabyles' diaspora presents themselves as post-modern cultural hybrids, who demonstrated against oppression in many cultural and political activities to improve the lives of those living in Algeria.