Maghrib in Past & Present | Podcasts themaghribpodcast.com

Dans ce podcast, Lydia Haddag, doctorante en histoire de l’art à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, parle de la formation et les recompositions des mondes de l’art algérois au XXème siècle à travers la génération du Môle d’Alger. Aux lendemains de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la génération du Môle rassemble une pléiade d’artistes autour du peintre Sauveur Galliéro (1914-1963) et du poète Jean Sénac (1926-1973). Ensemble, ils mobilisent un imaginaire marin et développent une esthétique citadine, cosmopolite et populaire. Leurs œuvres rendent compte d’une algérianité nouvelle qui s’affranchit progressivement des mythes coloniaux. Entre révolution artistique et art révolutionnaire, nous souhaitons mettre en lumière un groupe méconnu qui, à la manière d’une « Internationale des peuples de la mer » a marqué les mondes de l’art algérois et contribué à l’avènement d’un art moderne algérien à l’indépendance du pays.

Lydia Haddag est doctorante en histoire de l’art à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, rattachée au laboratoire InVisu (CNRS/INHA). Elle est diplômée du Master « Cultural Policy and management » de Sciences Po Paris du programme Arts, Littératures, Langages de l’EHESS. Ses recherches doctorales portent sur l’histoire des collectifs artistiques entre les villes d’Alger et de Tunis, des années 1930 à 1990. Elle est l’auteure de La génération du Môle d’Alger, un essai consacré à un groupe d’artistes algérois réuni autour du peintre Sauveur Galliéro. Elle a collaboré en 2022-2023 avec l’AMCA et la Fondation Getty au projet « Mapping Art Histories in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey » en qualité de « Lead Researcher » pour l’Algérie.

Cet épisode a été enregistré le 25 avril 2023 via Zoom, par le Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) 

Pour consulter les diaporamas associés à ce podcast, veuillez visiter notre site web: www.themaghribpodcast.com

Nous remercions notre ami Ignacio Villalón, pour sa prestation à la guitare pour l’introduction et la conclusion de ce podcast.

Posté par: Hayet Yebbous Bensaid, Bibliothécaire / Chargée de la diffusion des activités scientifiques (CEMA).

Climate change and migration have a complex relationship, and Morocco presents an interesting case of intertwining environmental change, national development policies, and human mobility. For her dissertation research, Rachael Diniega looks at the influence of social remittances, intangible non-material transfers across migrant connections, on climate adaptation and sustainable development in Skoura M’Daz, Morocco.



Rachael Diniega is a human mobility and environment specialist. She has studied the intersection of climate change and migration since her BA at the University of Virginia, through her MA Human Rights & Cultural Diversity at the University of Essex, UK, and currently for her PhD in Geography at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has worked and done research in sustainable development and human rights across North Africa and Central Asia. During her AIMS and Fulbright research from 2021 to 2022, she completed fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, in Skoura M’Daz, an olive town in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Rachael previously worked there as a US Peace Corps Volunteer and was very excited to return to beautiful sunsets, couscous Fridays, and the sound of waterfalls and irrigation canals.

This episode was recorded on December 8th, 2022 at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM). 


To see related slides please vista our website: www.themagribpodcast.com

Recorded and edited in Tangier, by: Abdelbaar Mounadi Idrissi, Outreach Coordinator, TALIM

Posted by Hayet Lansari, Librarian, Outreach Coordinator, Content Curator (CEMA).

In this podcast, Austin Bodetti, talks about Ecotheology, a new academic discipline and social movement, that focuses on the relationship between nature and religion. In a number of Muslim-majority countries, proponents of ecotheology have argued that the Quran, the Hadith, and other religious texts impose a unique obligation on humans: because God placed humans in charge of the environment, they must care for it. Morocco, for its part, has taken this argument to heart, launching the Green Mosques Program to find inspiration for the environmental movement within Islam. Moroccan scholars may want to look at the writings of the medieval Muslim jurist Ibn Rushd—better known in the Western world as ”Averroes.” In the book The Distinguished Jurist’s Primer, he analyzed how Islamic law dealt with a range of complex topics, including environmental issues. Having studied Islam in Morocco, Ibn Rushd could continue to inform the kingdom’s environmental policy.

Austin Bodetti is an alumnus of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program from the 2019-2020 academic year and an independent researcher specializing in the culture, politics, and history of the Middle East. He graduated from Boston College in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in Islamic studies and now lives in Rabat, Morocco, where he writes about current events in the region and his love of French tacos.

This episode was recorded on May 28th, 2021 at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM). 

Recorded and edited in Tangier, by: Abdelbaar Mounadi Idrissi, Outreach Coordinator, TALIM

Posted by Hayet Lansari, Librarian, Outreach Coordinator, Content Curator (CEMA).

In this podcast, Dr. Leila Tayeb, Assistant Professor in Residence in the Communication and Liberal Arts Programs at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q), explores the cultural politics of mobility and memory in Libya. Looking at Bousaadiya, a figure who has been performed in many iterations throughout North Africa, she offers a reading of these performance practices as a space in which Libyans enact and contest practices of belonging. Tayeb describes how performance, and specifically dance, creates a frame through which to observe political, historical, and cultural phenomena. Highlighting repetition as an important element of performance, she argues that mimesis of certain practices over time can serve to reinstantiate – or disrupt – power structures. Bousaadiya performance practices, Tayeb argues, serve as a space in which Libyans grapple with the unresolved history of the trans-Saharan slave trade which took place in Libya for centuries and persisted even after it was
formally abolished. Reading Bousaadiya through these lenses allows for an excavation of this history, its legacies, and opportunities for repair.

Leila Tayeb is Assistant Professor in Residence in the Communication and Liberal Arts Programs at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q). She earned her PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University and holds an MA in performance studies from New York University (NYU) and an MA in international affairs from The New School. Leila is an interdisciplinary scholar of performance and politics, focusing on topics including sound and militarism in daily life, dance studies, digital intimacies, race and indigeneity in North Africa, and state-sponsored performance. Her writing has appeared in the Arab Studies Journal, the Journal of North African Studies, Communication and the Public, and Lateral. Together with Adam Benkato and Amina Zarrugh, Leila is a founding member of the editorial collective of the multilingual, open-access publication Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies. The article that Leila discusses in this episode, “To Follow Bousaadiya: Mobility and Memory in Libyan Cultural Politics,” is forthcoming in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication in English and is in the process of being translated into Arabic for subsequent publication. Leila can be reached at leila-tayeb@northwestern.edu.

This episode is part of the “Libya Studies” lecture series and was recorded via Zoom on the 22nd of February, 2023 by the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) 

We thank Hisham Errish, a music composer and oud soloist, for his interpretation of “When the Desert Sings” in the introduction and conclusion of this podcast.

Posted by: Hayet Yebbous Bensaid, Librarian, Outreach Coordinator, Content Curator (CEMA).

In this podcast, Stephanie Malia Hom, Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at the University of California - Santa Barbara, discusses her work on colonial Libya. She applies Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacra and simulation to make sense of the way that Italian authorities constructed the Tripoli Trade Fairs (1927-1939) as an idealized vision of Libya, and the Italian colonial empire more broadly, while simultaneously applying violent practices in Cyrenaica to crush anti-colonial rebellion. She ultimately argues that the pavilions at the Tripoli Trade Fairs ”belie an insecurity on the part of Italian colonizers to demonstrate the worth of their own enterprise.” Throughout her work, Hom raises questions about mobility, hyperreality, imperialism, nationalism, violence, aesthetics, and spatial production while depicting how these themes are profoundly intertwined.

Stephanie Malia Hom is Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. Prior to her appointment at UCSB, she served as Executive Director of the Berkeley-based nonprofit organization, Acus Foundation, and before that, as Presidential Professor of Italian at the University of Oklahoma.

She is the author of Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell, 2019), which won the 2019 AAIS Book Prize (20th and 21st century), and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto, 2015). She also co-edited with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the edited volume Italian Mobilities (Routledge, 2016), and with Claudio Fogu and Laura E. Ruberto the special issue of California Italian Studies (2019) on “Borderless Italy/Italia senza frontiere.” Her essays and articles have been published in wide range of venues, including the leading journals in the fields of Italian studies, tourism history, urban studies, and folklore. She has also worked as a journalist in the U.S. and Europe.

For her research, Hom has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Academy in Rome, American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Harvard University, Stanford Humanities Center, and The Nantucket Project.

She earned her MA and PhD in Italian Studies at UC Berkeley, and a BA with honors in International Relations from Brown University.

This podcast was recorded via Zoom by the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) on December 13, 2022 with Luke Scalone, CEMAT Chargé de Programmes.

We thank Hishem Errish, a music composer and oud soloist, for his interpretation of “When the Desert Sings” in the introduction and conclusion of this podcast.

Posted by: Hayet Yebbous Bensaid, Librarian, Outreach Coordinator, Content Curator (CEMA).

Dans ce podcast, Mohamed Bennani, propriétaire de Beit El Bennani, une bibliothèque privée à Tunis, parle de l’histoire de sa collection, construite depuis cinq générations et qui abrite des livres rares, des correspondances et d’autres vestiges offerts par des familles.

À travers cet entretien, Mohamed Bennani répond aux questions suivantes : comment les collections privées peuvent-elles être un complément aux grandes archives publiques ? et comment un archiviste qui a construit sa propre bibliothèque peut-il guider des chercheurs de façon plus personnelle ?

Grâce à son projet actuel en partenariat avec l’American Institut for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) pour l’acquisition, la restauration, et l’indexation de la collection de Mahmoud Djellouli, Bennani nous aide à comprendre comment l’accès direct à des documents peut changer l’expérience d’un(e) chercheur(e), notamment en leur offrant l’opportunité de parler directement avec le restaurateur de ses archives. De plus, il explique à quel point la numérisation de l’archive familiale de Djellouli, diplomate, commerçant, et corsaire tunisien, représente un ajout important au patrimoine de la Tunisie et de toute la Méditerranée.

Mohamed Bennani, issu de la 5ème génération de la famille Bennani, est un ancien représentant de la Ligue Arabe à Bruxelles, chargé des relations avec l’Union Européenne. En 1995, Il a hérité de la maison familiale ainsi que de sa riche bibliothèque. Il a donc volontiers ouvert les portes de la seule bibliothèque tunisienne privée fonctionnant à plein temps, pour les chercheurs, les étudiants et les éditeurs. Beit El Bennani abrite plus de 25 000 livres et manuscrits historiques de la Tunisie dont 6000 sont mis gratuitement à la disposition du public.”

Cet épisode a été enregistré par le Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) le 09 décembre 2022, à Beit El Bennani, Tunis.

Nous remercions Bacem Affès, compositeur de musique et soliste de oud, pour son interprétation de « Isteftah » dans l’introduction et la conclusion de ce podcast.

Posté par: Hayet Yebbous Bensaid, Bibliothécaire / Chargée de la diffusion des activités scientifiques (CEMA).