Transculturality in Algiers: The Cinema of Merzak Allouache

Thanks to its rich and diverse history, the city of Algiers is undoubtedly a privileged site of transculturality. This was certainly the case in the French colonial period when, as Zeynep Çelik argues, colonial Algeria was the most important but most problematic of the French overseas territories and constituted “the colonial city par excellence, the terrain of many battles— cultural, political, military, urban, architectural.”1 Furthermore, as Martin Evans and John Phillips point out: “French rule in Algeria lasted for 132 years, as opposed to 75 years in Tunisia and 44 in Morocco, a depth and duration of colonial experience unique within the Arab world.”2 As a consequence, France “remains an omnipresent feature of Algeria,” and the complexity of its historical legacy helps ensure that Algeria is “the most francophone of France’s former territories.”3 Crucially, the Bay of Algiers forms a major economic maritime hub. As Tom Trevor has asserted regarding port cities more broadly, such spaces provide “symbolic sites of cultural exchange. They are the points of entry and departure, the mouth of an imagined body of the nation-state, where the foreign gets muddled up with the familiar and land-locked certainty is blurred by maritime exchange.”4 Given that Algiers is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Trevor’s argument pertains all the more, as the profound cultural and linguistic diversity of this geographical space “encourages a reshuffling of the usual cards of national belonging and unilateral framing.”5 As the capital city and seat of state power, Algiers has played a pivotal role in the formation of Algeria as a nation and the development of Algerian cultural identity. Accordingly, it has functioned as an important site in both Maghrebi and French visual culture: the city inspired many painters throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has drawn the attention of filmmakers