Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism: 1988-2015

Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988-2015 offers new insights into contemporary Algeria. Drawing on a range of different approaches to the idea of Algeria and to its contemporary realities, the chapters in this volume serve to open up any discourse that would tie ’Algeria’ to a fixed meaning or construct it in ways that neglect the weft and warp of everyday cultural production and political action. The configuration of these essays invites us to read contemporary cultural production in Algeria not as determined indices of a specific place and time (1988-2015) but as interrogations and explorations of that period and of the relationship between nation and culture. The intention of this volume is to offer historical moments, multiple contexts, hybrid forms, voices and experiences of the everyday that will prompt nuance in how we move between frames of enquiry. These chapters -- written by specialists in Algerian history, politics, music, sport, youth cultures, literature, cultural associations and art -- offer the granularity of microhistories, fieldwork interviews and studies of the marginal in order to break up a synthetic overview and offer keener insights into the ways in which the complexity of Algerian nation-building are culturally negotiated, public spaces are reclaimed, and Algeria reimagined through practices that draw upon the country’s past and its transnational present.

Patrick Crowley teaches French at University College Cork. He is the author of ’Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names’ (Peter Lang, 2007). Together with Paul Hegarty he is co-editor of ’Formless: Ways In and Out of Form’ (Peter Lang, 2005) and, with Silvia Ross and Noreen Humble, ’Mediterranean Travels: Writing Self and Other from the Ancient World to the Contemporary’ (Maney, 2011).