1st Edition
Global and Local in Algeria and Morocco The World, The State and the Village
This book brings together contributors across the disciplines to examine the local, national, regional and global processes that have shaped Maghribi societies, economies and politics since the colonial period.
Focusing equally on the local shape of global processes and on the broader significance of particular ‘ways of doing things’, these studies move beyond generalisations about globalisation and its impact on local societies, whether developmental or detrimental, of the ‘global in the local’, or of ‘glocalisation’. Cases range from the onset of the ‘first wave’ of globalisation in the colonial era to the most recent developments in identity politics, consumerism, and telecommunications. Contributors show how nationalising and globalising influences are seized, remade, and put to work in very different ways by High Atlas farmers or urban real estate speculators, human rights activists at the edge of the Sahara and amateur theatre actors in Mediterranean towns. Always located somewhere, these social actors nonetheless act in different ways, with different effects, at different levels of engagement, whether with each other, their own governments, or the wider world.
This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.
1. Locating social analysis in the Maghrib James McDougall and Robert P. Parks
Economies
2. Inventive articulation: how High Atlas farmers put the global to work David Crawford
3. Catenating the local and the global in Morocco: how mobile phone users have become producers and not consumers Hsain Ilahiane
4. An effect of globalisation? The individual appropriation of ‘arch lands in Algeria Brahim Benmoussa
5. Spatial and social mobilities in Algeria: the case of Algiers Madani Safar Zitoun
Politics
6. The full place of power: interwar Oran, the French empire’s bullring? Claire Marynower
7. A local approach to the UDMA: local-level politics during the decade of political parties, 1946–56 Malika Rahal
8. From the mountain sanctuary to the nation Fanny Colonna
9. The Moroccan nationalist movement: from local to national networks Fadma Ait Mous
10. Activism under authoritarianism: young political militants in Meknes Thierry Desrues and Said Kirhlani
Cultures
11. The pitfalls of transnational consciousness: Amazigh activism as a scalar dilemma Paul A. Silverstein
12. The man behind the curtain: theatrics of the state in Algeria Jane E. Goodman
13. The challenges of maintaining local identity in international biennale exhibitions: lessons from the third AiM arts in Marrakesh Biennale Holiday Powers
Biography
James McDougall is a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Oxford, where he teaches modern European and world history, with a focus on the Middle East, Northwest Africa, and the global history of Islam.
Robert P. Parks is the Founding Director of the Centre d’Études Maghrébines en Algérie, at the American Institute for Maghrib Studies’ Overseas Research Center in Algeria.