Amazigh kateb biography of michael jackson

Country in North Africa

This article is about the country. For other uses, see Algeria (disambiguation).

Algeria, officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered to the northeast by Tunisia; to the east by Libya; to the southeast by Niger; to the southwest by Mali, Mauritania, and Western Sahara; to the west by Morocco; and to the north by the Mediterranean Sea. The capital and largest city is Algiers, located in the far north on the Mediterranean coast.

Inhabited since prehistory, Algeria has been at the crossroads of numerous cultures and civilisations, including the Phoenicians, Numidians, Romans, Vandals, and Byzantine Greeks. Its modern identity is rooted in centuries of Arab Muslim migration waves since the seventh century and the subsequent Arabisation of the indigenous populations. Following a succession of Islamic Arab and Berber dynasties between the eighth and 15th centuries, the Regency of Algiers was established in 1516 as a largely independent tributary state of the Ottoman Empire. After nearly three centuries as a major power in the Mediterranean, the country was invaded by France in 1830 and formally annexed in 1848, though it was not fully conquered and pacified until 1903. French rule brought mass European settlement that displaced the local population, which was reduced by up to one-third due to warfare, disease, and starvation. The Sétif and Guelma massacre in 1945 catalysed local resistance that culminated in the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. Algeria gained its independence in 1962. The country descended into a bloody civil war from 1992 to 2002.

Spanning 2,381,741 square kilometres (919,595 sq mi), Algeria is the world's tenth-largest nation by area, and the largest nation in Africa. It has a semi-arid climate, with the Sahara desert dominating most of the territory except for

One of the outstanding performances at this year's WOMEX conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal in October, came from French-Algerian singer Djazia Satour. As she sings, plays guitar and dances, you quickly realize you are witnessing a professional who is in command of not only everything happening on stage, but as well is holding the entire audience under her spell. Djazia's journey to earn that degree of confidence and musicianship started when she began her professional stage career at the age of 15.

“You have all the informations,” she laughs deeply in response to our familiarity with her origin story.

Before the interview, Djazia had said it was fine to ask questions in English, but that she would prefer to respond in French. But as she grew more comfortable in the interview, she would dance between the two languages.

Born and first raised in Algiers, Djazia's family relocated to Grenoble, France as she entered her teens. “So yes, I started performing when I was 15,” she says. This opportunity came about because her half-brother, Amazigh Kateb, lead singer of Gnawa Diffusion – the long-internationally popular group that blends North African and Western sounds – invited her to be a part of the band while she was still in high school.

“I was always singing as a child,” she continues. “Music was this special thing that represented, you know, hopes. Music was like a drug for me. It was very special. I didn't analyze it at the time, but now I can put some words to what I felt then. Little by little, I started to engage with the music I was hearing in France. At that time, I was listening to things like Björk, hip-hop, Oumou Sangaré, and,” she adds, laughing, “of course, also my brother.

“When I was in Algeria, when I was a very little girl, we heard Elvis Presley and the Beatles. But when I came to France at nine years old, discovering Michael Jackson was a very important memory. I still remember the day I saw him for the first time. He

Patrick Crowley, Algeria: Nation, Culture, and Transnationalism: 1988-2015(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017)

Valérie K. Orlando, The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950-1979 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017)

Tristan Leperlier, Algérie, Les écrivains dans la décennie noire (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2018)

[This review was originally published in the most recent issue ofArab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

Algerianists frequently lament Middle East studies’ inability to recognize the wonderfully complex, multilayered, and fascinating country that is the subject of their inquiry. But on second look, its complex configuration, so different from better covered Arab countries, explains why Algeria is marginalized in scholarship as compared to, say, Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Algerian experience is frequently reduced to three historical markers—the War of Independence against France (1954 to 1962), the civil war in the 1990s, and the “Algerian exception” in 2011—and a few common tropes: Algeria as not quite Arab, Algeria as uniquely tied to France through its migrants, and Algeria as a country plagued by a perpetual cycle of violence (which, according to “experts,” might as well be written in its DNA). In the meantime, Algeria has also emerged as a privileged terrain for postcolonial studies, a pot in which to brew a rich blend of empire, violence, multilingual literatures, experimental poetics, alienated subalterns, and transnational connections with the old metropole. This scholarship tends to draw on Francophone texts, from which it derives a narrative of cultural hybridity to contrast with the execrable media portrayal of the Arab region in the aftermath of September 11.

This reductive portrayal is a serious shortcoming that Alger