Liverpool University Press Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France (Francophone Postcolonial Studies): 11

Product Description By exploring dynamic Jewish-Muslim interactions across North Africa and France through performance culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, we offer an alternative chronology and lens to a growing trend in media and scholarship that views these interactions primarily through conflict. Our volume interrogates interaction that crosses the genres of theatre, music, film, art, and stand-up, emphasising creative influence and artistic cooperation between performers from the Maghrib, with a focus on Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and diaspora communities, notably in France. The plays, songs, films, images, and comedy sketches that we analyse are multilingual, mixing not only with the former colonial language French, but also the rich diversity of indigenous Amazigh and Arabic languages. The volume includes contributions by scholars working across and beyond disciplinary boundaries through anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and literature, engaging with postcolonial studies, memory studies, cultural studies, and French and Francophone studies. The first section examines accents, affiliations, and exchange, with an emphasis on aesthetics, familiarity, changing social roles, and cultural entrepreneurship. The second section shifts to consider departure and lingering presence through spectres and taboos, in its exploration of absence, influence, and elision. The volume concludes with a summary of contemporary debates and artistic co-production across North Africa and France. Review When the creative and performing arts recount relations between Jews and Muslims, they offer to the reader vibrant echoes of a shared history whose legacies continue to resound today. Such is the challenge taken up by the authors of this volume who, free from political and ideological paradigms, reconnect with a forgotten history, somewhere between past and present. --Karima Dirèche, CNRS TELEMME This collection dances off the page, with a series of engaging, accessible, insightful essays on the many ways in which Jewish and Muslim artists and performers from North Africa engaged (and continue to engage) with one another creatively, through comedy, art, film, theater, and music, from the colonial period to the present day. --Sarah Abrevaya Stein, UCLA "In brief, this is an exciting and much needed contribution to intercommunal religious studies in North Africa and France.… Scholars in art, music, theater and film will undoubtedly applaud the incontestable demonstration that the arts deeply matter in history and geopolitics." --Tamara Dee Turner, The Journal of North African Studies About the Author Samuel Sami Everett is a Research Associate in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. Rebekah Vince is a Teaching Fellow in French in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University.