Book Launch & Conversation: Jewish–Muslim Interactions

Book Launch & Conversation
Jewish–Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France

Edited by Samuel Sami Everett & Rebekah Vince
In conversation with Adi Saleem Bharat

November 25, 2020
9am (EST), 2pm (GMT)

Register here: https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcO2grzwsH93HqN3kMITgzVqIMZ2-vTeu

By exploring dynamic Jewish-Muslim interactions across North Africa and France through performance culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, this volume offers an alternative chronology and lens to a growing trend in media and scholarship that views these interactions primarily through conflict. The 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 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 a summary of contemporary debates and artistic co-production across North Africa and France.

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

Rebekah Vince is a Lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London, associate editor of Francosphères, and co-editor of the Brill book series Mobilizing Memories (with Hanna Teichler). Her research explores depictions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Franco-Maghrebian literature and memories of Jewish life in Muslim-majority countries across the Mediterranean francosphère.

Samuel Sami Everett (who goes by Sami) is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from SOAS, University of London and a BA in North African Language and Culture from INALCO, Paris. His research focuses on the historical-colonial and spatial-political dimensions of interreligious identification to North Africa.

Adi Saleem Bharat is an LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is also a co-founder and coordinator of the Jewish-Muslim Research Network. His research broadly focuses on the intersection of race and religion, particularly in relation to Jews and Muslims, in contemporary France.