Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures Between North Africa and France

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 transnational French 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 an autobiographical afterword, which reflects on memories and legacies of Jewish-Muslim interactions across the Mediterranean.

Contributors: Cristina Moreno Almeida, Jamal Bahmad, Adi Saleem Bharat, Aomar Boum, Morgan Corriou, Ruth Davis, Samuel Sami Everett, Fanny Gillet, Jonathan Glasser, Miléna Kartowski-Aïach, Nadia Kiwan, Hadj Miliani, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, Elizabeth Perego, Christopher Silver, Rebekah Vince, Valérie Zenatti

Samuel Sami Everett is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Rebekah Vince is a Lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London.