Performing A Thousand and One Nights in Egypt

"The subject of this paper is the multiple intersections between oral performance and the written narrative of one tale from A Thousand and One Nights, the story of Anas al-Wujud and al-Ward fi-al-Akmam."--Page 392

Who and what is native to Israel? On Marcel Janco's settler art and Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's “Levantinism”

The poetics and esthetics of “natural occupancy” are relevant to the ways in which settlers’ colonists artistically and discursively produce their subsequent cultural formations. I focus on the decade of the 1950s to chart specific settler ideologies of ownership that emerged in Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948. What are the varied strands of colonizing ideology that define spaces currently inhabited by Jewish Israeli settlers seeking to forget the original colonial domination? One approach to questions about space, land, ownership, and indigeneity in Israel/Palestine is to investigate the literature and arts that serve to designate Jewish Israelis as natural occupants. Two seminal theories, the “Mediterranean option” (in Hebrew yam tikhoniyut) and “Levantinism” (levantiniyut), were imaginatively de-historicized in the art projects of Marcel Janco and the writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, respectively. Both fostered the myth of natural occupancy by appropriating for themselves a sense of nativeness, just as each eliminated the indigenous Palestinian Arab presence through their own selective cultural assimilations

Algerian Women’s Būqālah Poetry: Oral Literature, Cultural Politics, and Anti-Colonial Resistance

Būqālah refers both to a ceramic pitcher as well as to poems ritually embedded in the traditional, favorite, divinatory pastime associated with women city dwellers of specific Algerian towns such as Blida,Cherchell, Tlemcen, Constantine, and Algiers. This essay considers the shift from orality to a written archive of French and Algerian collections of būqālah poems by focusing on analyses of Algerian Arabic oral literature as an expression of feminine cultural protest and resistance to the domination of language policies under French colonialism. What are the ways in which an intimate ritual—one linked to orality, the divinatory, women’s poesis, and the Algerian Arabic dialect—begins to carry political meanings during the War of Independence and in post-1962 independent Algeria? Contributing to the circulation and creation of new meanings, forms, and venues for būqālah poetry are Algerian radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings, and the publication of the 1962 French poem “Boqala” by Djamila Amrane

Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeria

Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeri

Témoignages, écrits et silences : l’Instance Équité et Réconciliation (IER) marocaine et la réparation

Bien que l’État marocain ait emprisonné des dizaines de milliers de dissidents et d’opposants politiques depuis l’indépendance du pays, en 1956, au sortir de la domination française, les évènements qui ont suivi le décès du roi Hassan II, le 23 juillet 1999, constituent un tournant dans l’histoire des droits de l’Homme au Maroc. Pendant des décennies, qualifiées par les Marocains d’« années de plomb » ou d’« années noires » – en arabe, as-sanawat as-sawda’ –, les opposants politiques au régim..

Photography and Truth

Photographs in anthropology serve many purposes: as primary data, illustrations of words in a book, documentation for disappearing cultures, evidence of fieldwork, material objects for museum exhibitions, and even works of art. This course explores photography as art, research tool, and communication

“Every Slight Movement of the People . . . is Everything”: Sondra Hale and Sudanese Art

This essay traces the intertwined topics of collaboration and multisited ethnography in the writings of anthropologist Sondra Hale on Sudanese artists and art. Hale’s trajectories and movements in and out of Sudan traverse parallel, sometimes overlapping tracks with the artists she studied, championed, and curated. Studying Sudan and its artists may have begun in Khartoum during Hale’s first three-year period there from 1961 to 1964; however, this essay analyzes Hale’s subsequent writings based on the places where she encountered artists, residing abroad and in exile, in Cairo, Asmara, Addis Ababa, Oxford, the Hales’ Los Angeles home, as well as in American venues for meetings of the Sudan Studies Association