“More Than Friends: Muslim-Jewish Intimacy in Algerian Music” with Jonathan Glasser (William & Mary)

Music is a major site for remembering the Jewish presence in Algeria, and in many ways works against dominant discourses of Muslim-Jewish conflict and Jewish outsider status. But digging deeper uncovers multiple ways to read Muslim-Jewish intimacy around music, some of which edge into rivalry, hierarchy, and difference. This talk weighs these multiple interpretations, drawing on historical archives and contemporary memory in Algeria and in France.

Jonathan Glasser is Associate Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the author of The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the L. Carl Brown Book Prize from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies and a Mahmoud Guettat International Prize in Musicology from the Tunisian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. His journal articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Hespéris-Tamuda, and Turath. Glasser recently completed a book manuscript titled More Than Friends: Muslim-Jewish Intimacy in Algerian Music.

RSVP: via the online form