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Multimedia Object: Podcast episode ID: CBB286614821

Arthur Asseraf, “Electric News in Colonial Algeria” (Oxford UP, 2019) (2020)

Panchasi, Roxanne (Author)
Asseraf, Arthur (Author)

New Books Network Podcast

URI: https://newbooksnetwork.com/arthur-asseraf-electric-news-in-colonial-algeria-oxford-up-2019/

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Information technology Technology and society Communication technology Colonialism France, colonies 20th century, early 19th century Algeria

Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing press, telegraph, cinema, radio (and later television)—in Algeria from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Throughout its chapters, readers are reminded to resist Eurocentric and teleological frameworks of “modernization” that do not apply to societies like Algeria’s where such technologies coexisted with other forms of news circulation including manuscripts, song, and rumor/word of mouth. The book is grounded in an impressive range of sources in multiple languages. It challenges ideas about the relationship between print capitalism and nationalism over the course of this pivotal period in both Algerian and French history. Interrogating the history of colonial hegemony in and through the analysis of how Algerians accessed and interpreted the news in myriad ways often not anticipated by settler and state authorities, the book also has far-reaching implications for how we think about knowledge and power in imperial contexts more broadly. Its pages are rich with exciting and fascinating moments and stories—of surveillance, violence, and injustice, but also of the counterforces of the Algerian subversion of and resistance to colonial oppression. *Special note in March 2020: I hope you are all keeping safe and healthy and that this conversation with Arthur might be helpful in some small way right now—with work, teaching and/or as a distraction in this period of global pandemic. Thanks so much to Arthur, who was SO much fun to speak with & to all the NBFS listeners out there!

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Book Arthur Asseraf (2019) Electric News in Colonial Algeria. unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB286614821/

Citations Indexes

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