Maghrib in Past & Present | Podcasts

Episode 113: À la découverte de copies manuscrites d'une même œuvre : Le 'Kitâb  al-siyar' de Wisyânî, un auteur Ibâdite Nord-Africain du 6ème AH. / 12ème Constituant une ressource appréciable pour les sciences humaines et sociales, les manuscrits berbères écrits en caractères arabes sont répartis un peu partout dans les pays du Maghreb. Un bon nombre de ces manuscrits se trouve dans des bibliothè...

Episode 112: Terra Incognita: Mapping the Afterlives of French Nuclear Imperialism in the Sahara   How can aesthetic works and humanities training help us to apprehend the danger that nuclear toxicity poses to ecological health and human life?   Taking off from the premise that French maps of the Sahara Desert have long served to enable military occupation and violent erasure, this podcasts explor...

Episode 111: Non-State Actors and State-Building in Libya after 2011 In this podcast, Professor Amal El-Obeidi discusses power struggles in Libya, as well as the country's instability since 2011. In the absence of a central state after the fall of Qaddafi's regime, processes of national reconciliation and transitional justice have been ineffective. Additionally, the increased number of municipalit...

Episode 110: Centralization and Decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa   In this podcast on local governance in Morocco and Jordan, Dr. Janine A. Clark , Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto , examines how decentralization and centralization mechanisms are implemented at the municipal level. She asks why Morocco decentralized while Jordan did not. Relying on th...

Episode 109: Bread and Circuits: Illness, Food, and French Algeria In the midst of ongoing drought, famine, and epidemic disease in the 1860s, a few settlers in Algiers got sick with a mysterious illness. Investigations determined that the culprit was construction debris from the Haussmannization of Paris, shipped across imperial channels and then used as fuel in a few Algiers bakeries. Lead pain...

Episode 108: Anti-Elitism in Tunisia: Condition of Political Success? In this podcast,  Associate Professor Tarek Kahlaoui  reflects on populism in the post-revolutionary context of Tunisia. Kahlaoui questions the idea of an umbrella definition of Tunisian populism, a misleading term that overlooks important nuances. He asks whether populism is a real threat to representative democracy. He compare...

Episode 107: الشعبوية: قراءة حول المثال التونسي في هذا التسجيل الصوتي، يناقش  الأستاذ محمد شفيق صرصار آثار الخطاب الشعبوي الذي عرفه المشهد السياسي التونسي منذ 2011 على نتائج الانتخابات المتعاقبة في البلاد، كما يربط هذه الظاهرة ببروز الشخصيات السياسية الشعبوية في الإنتخابات الرئاسية والتشريعية ل 2019. ويأتي الأستاذ صرصار على العوامل التي أعدت المناخ السياسي التونسي لصعود الخطابات الشعبوية مؤكدا على...

Episode 106: Populism and the Crisis of the Republic In this podcast,  Professor Charles Tripp argues that populism is a form of collective politics that embodies distinct ideas, particularly those about popular sovereignty. Populism, he stresses, claims to communicate and respond directly to the political base – the people – by passing increasingly unpopular political elites and institutions. Thr...

Episode 105: Jedba, Jinns, and Hāl: Bodily Modalities of Mental-Emotional Health and 'Musico-thérapie' in Algeria In this podcast, Dr. Tamara Turner illustrates the inextricable relationship between mental-emotional health, sound, and consciousness through a spectrum of 'psychological' states that are locally mapped in Algeria as bodily modalities: jedba, hāl, and bori. These three bodily modaliti...

Episode 104: Of Jinn Theory and Germ Theory: Translating Bacteriological Medicine and Islamic Law in Algeria In this podcast, focusing on colonial Algeria c. 1890 to 1940, Dr. Hannah-Louise Clark explores how Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people learned about microbes and responded to bacteriological medicine. Many Algerians feared invisible spirits (jinn) and sought the healing powers of sain...

Episode 103: On Memory, Remembering, and Mourning in the Maghrib Since the Tunisian Revolution In this podcast, Dr. Idriss Jebari contemplates the outpouring of memory from the former leftists of the Perspectives movement, following the 2011 Tunisian Revolution. In a series of published memoirs, the likes of Gilbert Naccache, Fethi Ben Haj Yahia and others take their readers from their experience...

Episode 102: Conversation with Lisa Anderson and Tarek Kahlaoui: Reflections on Tunisia's State Building History and Contemporary Democratization Experience In this discussion,  Lisa Anderson  and  Tarek Kahlaoui  reflect on Tunisia's post-independence state-building history and the country's contemporary democratization experience. The conversation draws listeners to the transformative moments th...

Episode 101: "Willis from Tunis, 10 ans et toujours vivant!" - Entretien avec Nadia Khiari Le chat  Willis from Tunis  est né jeudi le 13 janvier 2011 au moment où le président tunisien déchu, Ben Ali, prononçait un discours dans lequel il promettait, entre autres, la liberté d'expression. Cette chronique graphique était pour l'auteur un moyen de partager avec son entourage direct via les réseaux...

Episode 100: Constitution-making Processes during Democratization: Egypt and Tunisia after the 2010/11 Uprisings In this podcast, Dr. Tereza Jermanová, discusses the differences in the constitution-making processes and design in Tunisia and Egypt during their transitions. Dr. Jermanová looks at how constitution-making procedures are perceived as, on the one hand, constraints –that might restrict t...

Episode 99: Oran, The Plague and COVID 19 The French critical tradition has seen in Camus’ La peste (1947) an allegorical representation of German occupation, during the Second World War. He staged it in Oran, a coastal town in French Algeria, at the time, closed to the rest of the world because of a plague pandemic. The recent COVID-19 pandemic that flared up through the world sparked off reminis...

Episode 98: En hommage à feu Pr. Abdelkader Lakjaa  La méthode n'enfante pas d'idées par elle-même En hommage à feu Pr. Abdelkader Lakjaa, Sociologue à l'Université d'Oran 2, qui nous a quittés le 7 novembre 2020, nous vous proposons de réécouter sa communication intitulée "La méthode n'enfante pas d'idées par elle-même", programmée dans le cadre de la rencontre autour de l'ouvrage collectif La sc...

Episode 97: Maghrébins en Méditerranée: Complicités corsaires maghrébines à l'époque moderne entre Méditerranée et Atlantique   La journée d’étude « Maghrébins en Méditerranée » s’inscrit dans le prolongement du workshop « La Méditerranée vue d’Afrique du Nord » organisé par l’Institut Américain d’Études Maghrébines en juillet 2019 à Tunis.  Cette journée d’études, coordonnée par Pr. Fatima Zohra...

Episode 96: Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa In this podcast,  Professor Jacob Mundy  examines the historical and geographical definition and categorization of the MENA region through the discourse of the “everywhere war”, questioning the middle east as a permanent structure of conflict. In nowhere else in the world, war-particularly foreign intervention-is as prevalent and constant as...

Episode 95: Medieval Ifriqiya & the Emergence of the Hafsid Dynasty In this podcast, Samantha Cloud , PhD candidate in the Department of History at Saint Louis University ,  discusses her work on medieval Ifriqiya and the emergence of the Hafsid dynasty. The Hafsid dynasty ruled Medieval Ifriqiya (roughly the territory of modern-day Tunisia, Eastern Algeria, and parts of Libya) from the 13th t...

Episode 94: Students in Tunisia, 1963-1979 In this podcast, Dr. Idriss Jebari  discusses the student question’s emergence in the context of the Parisian radical sixties and the importance of Maoist insights. Jebari examines the way Perspectives seized on the “student question” in its journal in relation to the state’s reforms in the education sector and its discourse on youth faced with contestati...

Episode 93: The Transmission and Effectivity of the Ma’luf Tradition, an Andalusian Music within Tunisia and Libya In this podcast, Jared Holton discusses the transmission and effectivity of ma'luf, an Andalusian musical tradition of North Africa. Holton’s research project explores the historical and ethnographic circulations of Tunisian and Libyan ma'luf primarily through the tubu', which are rec...

Episode 92: The Buffalo Agency: Maghribi Ibadis in Cairo, 1850-1950 In this interview, Paul Love discusses the early stages of his new book project on the history of Ibadi Muslims from the Maghrib who lived, worked, and studied in Ottoman Cairo. Tentatively titled The Buffalo Agency: Ibadi Muslims in Ottoman Cairo, the book follows the history of a trade agency, school, and library known as the ‘B...

Episode 91: L’anthropologie des pratiques langagières dans le contexte maghrébin   L'anthropologie linguistique se donne pour objectif d’examiner, dans une perspective comparative, comment la langue façonne la vie sociale, la culture, l'identité et l'appartenance à un groupe social, et comment elle met en place des idéologies et des croyances culturelles dans la vie sociale. Langues, cultures et s...

Episode 90: Economic Policy in the Middle East and North Africa In this podcast, Dr. Shana Marshall frames global discussions on populist trends in the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Marshall argues that populism is an articulation of global capitalism that is marked by an anti-elite sentiment and a class-based ideology. She considers that the rise of populism is due to the difficulty of disman...

Episode 89: France's Shattered Empire: Fascism and Republicanism in Colonial Tunisia, 1931-1944 In this podcast, Luke Sebastian Scalone , Ph. D. candidate in the Department of History at Northeastern University , discusses his research project on “France's Shattered Empire: Fascism and Republicanism in Colonial Tunisia, 1931-1944.” In the midst of the ideological upheaval of the global 1930s, fasc...