Writing empire, underwriting nation: discursive histories of Kabyle Berber oral texts

Abstract

In this article, I explore how colonial, nationalist, and media interests converge around the collection of oral texts. Moving from the French colonial project of collecting native lore to the nationalist project to recover indigenous heritage to the embedding of village songs in contemporary world music, I examine how oral texts from Algeria's Kabyle Berber region have been variously configured as signs through which social differences are imagined and hierarchically ordered. I foreground the history of intertextual penetration between North African poetic productions and Western aesthetic categories, [genre, intertextuality, oral text, colonialism, world music, Algeria]