On Culture and the Power of the Dispossessed A Conversation with Abdo Shanan and Walid Aidoud
The dynamic relationship between culture and power, both political and economic, was central to the work of Edward W. Said. Culture is often used to suppress, control, and dominate, but it can also be a tool of resistance and subversion that has its own immanent power. How does this conceptualization resonate with your realities? Abdo Shanan
It became clear to me while working on Dry that the identity crisis we can now witness in Algerian society goes back to the creation of the Algerian nation state in 1962. After gaining independence from imperial France, the young Algerian government sought to homogenize the diverse population by creating a national identity that equated being “Algerian” with being “Muslim” and “Arab,” thus excluding the non-Arabic and non-Muslim minorities from the Algerian nation. Funnily enough, this construed collective identity is based on the same characteristics the colons had used to describe, divide, and rule their colonial Algerian subjects. Algerians had fought for eight years for their human dignity and the right to self-determination, and when it came to re-inventing the “Algerian,” we proved to be trapped in the colonial “Othering.” In that sense, I think we are yet to decolonize. Later, this recycled idea of “Algerianness” became the tool of the Algerian government to control its people, dictating cultural identity and practices through the national education system and the mono poly of public discourse. When interviewing different people for Dry it became apparent to me how much pain and loneliness this national project of homogenization has caused on the emotional level for those people who don’t relate to these markers of identity. Now, however, with alternative sources of knowledge being more
