Response to Jakob Krais’s review of <i>Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021</i>

I would like to thank Professor Krais for his thoughtful engagement with my book. However, I believe it is important to identify the book’s central argument, methodologies, and sources to readers, aspects of the work that I believe justify the project’s scope/focus, although I acknowledge that Professor Krais and I may disagree on that point. In particular, I would like to emphasize that the source base for this project—oral history testimonies with Algerian experts and artists, previous literature written mainly by Algerians, and Algerian media archives—really drove the book’s focus. I cover these aspects (central argument, methodologies, and sources) more thoroughly in the book’s introduction, but I present them here in the spirit of intellectual debate and a desire to advance scholarly knowledge of political humor and cultural production in Algeria more globally. Most importantly, I will conclude here with what I believe to be a very important observation concerning the drawbacks of trying to graft observations true for other parts of the Middle East and the Maghreb onto Algeria, which has its own unique history of cultural production, even if significant overlap and cross-pollination with these other countries and regions have historically taken place.Despite the title—which I admit is quite broad but allowed for the greater argument I wished to make—the introduction explains that the book is not intended to be a comprehensive study of Algerian humor. Instead, the book argues broadly “that humor served as a critical site for political expression as well as identity and social memory formation throughout Algeria’s post-independence history” (5). The work goes back to the 1920s as the interwar, WWII, and post–World War II periods were critical to laying the groundwork for future developments and the construction of post-independence Algeria. The book also argues for the value in tracing shifts in engagement with political humor by communities over time. The first chapter demonstrates that, from the 1920s to the 1980s, many Algerians and other agents used political humor in Algeria to try to define the nation. During the October 1988 Revolution, the political opening that followed, and the Black Decade, a rupture occurred in how popular humor was used to comment on national politics. Algerians still used humor to reflect on national identity, but the humor became more varied and much darker as the body politic became more fractured as a result of political events. To prove the utility of tracing changes in humor over time, I examine this major shift in humor and the different shifts that occurred during the tumultuous civil conflict as a case study. These changes drove the decision to focus on the civil conflict because my sources (oral history testimonies, previous literature produced mainly by Algerians, and other evidence, which I’ll return to below) revealed them to be significant. Black humor during the civil conflict was actually so prominent that it has inspired numerous different studies and cultural projects.1The work likewise privileges cartoons and jokes because, as explained at a few points in the book (13, 22, 157), those were the only major genres of humorous expression that Algerians had access to throughout the civil conflict and they could use to comment on national politics. In other words, I did not make a choice to set aside, for instance, comedic cinema in the 1990s; only one of the explicitly comedic films produced in Algeria during the Black Decade contained political humor. But, while Carnaval fi Dachra/Carnaval in the Village dealt with corruption, it did not comment specifically on contemporary political events.2 The immediate post-independence period witnessed some landmark comedic films, and I discuss the most popular one, Hassan Terro, which inspired a four-film series, and the wildly successful Inspecteur Tahar in the first chapter (59).To return to the civil conflict, artists and ordinary Algerians had to be very careful about what they said and produced during the fraught and dangerous context of the 1990s. Many artists had to leave the country, and some who stayed were assassinated. It would have been dangerous to put on, for instance, plays with critical political commentary. Moreover, factors linked to the violence, like curfews, changed how and when theater could be performed (13). I focused on political cartoons and jokes because Algerians continued to produce them throughout this period, which, once again, witnessed an important change in how Algerians employed political humor.I do agree that an in-depth study of only jokes or only cartoons could have been interesting and possibly more convincing for some. That said, I did want to look at the richness of exchange and overlap of humor across genres. For instance, cartoons reflected both intellectual and popular visions of politics while orally transmitted jokes were more communally produced, yielding interesting comparisons. Additionally, I could not have examined either jokes or cartoons for as long a period given that there were gaps in production or the archive for certain periods due to reasons I explain in the book. These included narrators not recalling colonial-era jokes because they were generally too young (48) or the memories of the Revolution being so imbued with trauma that Algerian cultural commentators do not generally associate the period with humor (53).To go into more depth regarding the book’s sources, I relied on literature produced mainly in Algeria about comedy and humor in the country as well as oral histories with some of the country’s leading comedic artists and experts in local cultural studies. I used these oral histories along with excellent local writing and scholarship on Algerian humor (Aïssa Khelladi’s article is of particular note) and the frequency with which certain humorous products were mentioned across documents to determine which cultural products to focus on throughout the book.3 For instance, for the work’s first chapter, I looked at theater because it was considered a central genre for generating an idea of the “Algerian nation” (41). In the introduction, I highlighted how I leaned into the expertise of Algerian scholars, journalists, and the oral history narrators to try to theorize Algerian humor from below in order to prioritize and preserve local epistemologies and avoid applying, wherever possible, theories of humor developed in other contexts (18–19). While many of the artists I interviewed were cartoonists, and, therefore, may have been more prone to speak about cartoons, their status as some of the leading creators of comedy in the country reflected the popularity of cartooning versus, say, television comedies, which only emerged and became influential with the advent of private television stations in the 2000s (and, even then, these shows dealt more overtly with political topics only later, in the 2010s).4I absolutely agree that the book does not explore all possible avenues of interpretation for the humorous materials at hand. Yet, the book’s inability to do that within a reasonable amount of space for a monograph testifies to the rich and multilayered nature of these materials. On the subject of gender, I plan to look at the gendered aspects of Algerian cartoons as part of a new book project on the prominent role gender played in interpretations and representations of the violence.5Ultimately, I leave it to the reader to see if the central argument holds up throughout the work and if the decision to move between genres in the book’s first two chapters and then to focus on jokes and cartoons proves compelling enough to substantiate the book’s major claims.All of this brings me to the major point that I want to make here and the real impetus behind this response, which has implications beyond this book: We have a pressing need to move beyond viewing the Maghreb mainly through the lens of either colonialism (not what Professor Krais has done here but what others unfortunately continue to do per M’Hamed Oualdi’s apt critique of the field) or through reference to events happening in other parts of the Middle East/North Africa.6 Parts of the review imply that, since work has been conducted on other genres of cultural and comedic expression in the Middle East (radio, film, etc.) than the ones I focus on in the book, or more in-depth than what I present (cartoons in Turkey), that such means of cultural expression most likely existed, were produced on the same scale, and held the same or similar significance in Algeria, and that a study of such genres of expression could be possible in Algeria, which simply was not always the case. As explained above for comedic cinema in the 1990s and television comedies before the early 2000s, sometimes these genres did not exist or they did not resonate with populations to the point that my sources mentioned them as having been popular. A particularly glaring example is satirical journals. Writers in Egypt were publishing them by the late nineteenth century, but the first Algerian satirical journals were only founded during the brief period between the 1988 revolution and the start of the Black Decade in 1991/1992 (102–6).While it is often beneficial to draw comparisons between work from across the region, the practice sometimes obscures the specificities of the Maghreb, including between different parts of the Maghreb itself. Recently, Idriss Jebari evoked the equally persistent problem in Maghribi historiography of “history by substitution,” which refers to the attempt to use the history of the region to say something about another place and other communities. In the case of Jebari’s essay, he critiques attempts to use the Maghreb as a way to better understand the Middle East.7 Arthur Asseraf has likely drawn attention to how historians of colonial history have at times mined Algeria’s past to shed light on developments in France, while often setting aside Algerians’ experiences and voices.8Here, the substitution can work in the other direction: We substitute observations from the Middle East to stand in for realities in the Maghreb. We critique a study of Algerian humor because it does not look like historical work similar to that produced for other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, a critique that assumes the researcher must have missed or put aside something if they did not look at similar material and/or come to similar conclusions. Yet—and this is a point numerous Algerians and scholars have made when asked why Algeria did not experience an “Arab Spring” revolution in 2010 and 2011—Algeria and other parts of the Maghreb have had their own unique historical trajectories that we have to acknowledge when conducting work on Maghribi communities.9 To ask why a study of Algerian humor did not examine certain cultural products that were important to populations in other contexts is to overlook the very specific circumstances of cultural production and consumption in the country, conditions the book covers. This is not to say Algerians produced less culture, but rather that, due especially to the legacy of settler colonialism in general and the extremely violent atmosphere of the civil conflict I focus on, the material and political conditions of production differed from, say, Turkey or Egypt.This problem of assuming a relatively similar pattern of cultural developments across the Middle East and North Africa is not limited to Professor Krais’s assessment of my book. At a recent Middle Eastern studies conference, after presenting a paper on Algerian playwrights’ and actors’ representation of companionate marriages as the key to societal well-being during the interwar period, an attendee asked what contemporary Algerian novelists had said about these topics. I was met with skeptical looks when I responded that interwar Algerian novelists were generally not writing for Algerians but that poetry was far more important.10 Sometimes, an absence in the archive or scholarship is not an intentional choice on the part of the researcher but rather a reflection of the historical processes specific to the context they are examining.I thank the editors of Bustan for this opportunity to respond. I appreciate Professor Krais’s engagement with my work, and I hope that this response helps readers to better understand the book’s scope and focus. I also hope that my major point here about not losing the specificities of cultural production in Algeria through comparison with other contexts can generate future conversation.