DESTINOTIONS

Abstract In this essay I look at three biographic documentaries of some Maghrebi women, mostly rai singers. By this choice of material, I mean to relate the theoretic and the ‘actual’ by way of addressing one of the difficulties nomadology as a theory has been facing. I argue that far from the homogeneous outcome that nomadology theorizes for those who are subjected to the aggression of the war machine, the outcome of the nomad–sedate encounter can produce many diverse results which are rarely considered by nomadology, a system that hardly perceives the ‘other’, or any category outside itself. It can never achieve the singularity it opts for, partly because of its own internal contradictory need to create and dismantle an outside, partly because it is blind to the possibility of the other's self-specification.