Event: Research Seminar in Inter-Religious Relations, Dr Sami Everett (CRASSH, University of Cambridge), ‘From Textiles to Telecoms: Retro Reinterpretations of North Africa in Postcolonial Parisian Jewish-Muslim Interaction’, Thursday 10 May 2018 12:00-14:00
Given by Dr Sami Everett (Research Associate, CRASSH, University of Cambridge):
From Textiles to Telecoms: Retro Reinterpretations of North Africa in Postcolonial Parisian Jewish-Muslim Interaction
A response to the paper will be given by Dr Ben Gidley (Birkbeck, University of London).
All welcome. There will be an informal lunch after the event: please email team@interfaith.cam.ac.uk if you would like to attend so that we have an idea of the numbers attending
Abstract
This talk investigates the enigma of Jewish North African sensibility and its intergenerational changes and continuities in Paris since 1981 through the notion of retro. After giving an historical overview of the Maghrebi presence in France and building the theoretical scaffolding on which retro sits in relation to ways of identifying with the Maghreb this talk proceeds by way of an ethnography of commercial exchange in the domain of textiles and globalised telecommunications as privileged locations for witnessing working and social relations with and across religious difference between Maghrebi Jews and Muslims and their descendants. I argue that an obfuscated Maghrebi centre exists to these relations across complex, little-known sites that lie at the meeting point of common cultural memories, mutual economic dependency, changing gender and class relations, and geopolitical conflict. More specifically, relationships between Jews and Muslims in the textiles and dress shops of la Goutte d’Or that we will discover are often defined by the desire to recover a variously expressed 'lost world' of the Maghreb. Retro, as a hermeneutic device to read Maghrebi Jewish imaginaries in Paris across generations, allows us to look at how contemporary re-conceptualisations of the past are utilised to negotiate an ethnically plural and potentially — through clearly not always — convivial present.
Other Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme seminars this term:
Dr Susannah Ticciati (King's College London), 'Negotiating Conflicting Religious Truth Claim: Rabbinic and Christian Accounts in Dialogue'
Thursday 24 May, Seminar Room 7, Faculty of Divinity, 14:00-16:00