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The CMES New Works in Middle East Studies series presents
New Histories of Algeria: A Book Panel with
Muriam Haleh Davis, Associate Professor, History, UC Santa Cruz; and author of Markets of Civilization: Racial Capitalism and Islam in Algeria, and
Sara Rahnama, Assistant Professor, History & Geography, Morgan State University; and author of The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria
Discussant: Myriam Amri, PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Middle East Studies, CMES, Harvard University
In Markets of Civilization (Duke University Press, 2022) Muriam Haleh Davis provides a history of racial capitalism, showing how Islam became a racial category that shaped economic development in colonial and postcolonial Algeria. French officials in Paris and Algiers introduced what Davis terms “a racial regime of religion” that subjected Algerian Muslims to discriminatory political and economic structures. These experts believed that introducing a market economy would modernize society and discourage anticolonial nationalism. Planners, politicians, and economists implemented reforms that both sought to transform Algerians into modern economic subjects and drew on racial assumptions despite the formally color-blind policies of the French state. Following independence, convictions about the inherent link between religious beliefs and economic behavior continued to influence development policies. Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella embraced a specifically Algerian socialism founded on Islamic principles, while French technocrats saw Algeria as a testing ground for development projects elsewhere in the Global South. Highlighting the entanglements of race and religion, Davis demonstrates that economic orthodoxies helped fashion understandings of national identity on both sides of the Mediterranean during decolonization.
The Future Is Feminist (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Sara Rahnama offers a closer look at a pivotal moment in Algerian history when Algerians looked to feminism as a path out of the stifling realities of French colonial rule. Algerian people focused outward to developments in the Middle East, looking critically at their own society and with new eyes to Islamic tradition. In doing so, they reordered the world on their own terms—pushing back against French colonial claims about Islam's inherent misogyny.
Rahnama describes how Algerians took inspiration from Middle Eastern developments in women's rights. Empowered by the Muslim reform movement sweeping the region, they read Islamic knowledge with new eyes, even calling Muhammad "the first Arab feminist." They compared the blossoming women's rights movements across the Middle East and this history of Islam's feminist potential to the stifled position of Algerian women, who suffered from limited access to education and respectable work. Local dynamics also shaped these discussions, including the recent entry of thousands of Algerian women into the workforce as domestic workers in European settler homes.
While Algerian people disagreed about whether Algeria's future should be colonial or independent, they agreed that women's advancement would offer a path forward for Muslim society toward a more prosperous future. Through its use of Arabic-language sources alongside French ones, The Future Is Feminist moves beyond Algeria's colonial relationship to France to illuminate its relationship to the Middle East.
Muriam Haleh Davis' research interests focus on development, decolonization and race in North Africa. Her first book, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria was be published with Duke University Press in 2022. She is currently working on the history of the social sciences and decolonization, with a particular focus on the discipline of sociology. She is Co-editor of North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institution and Culture. Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2018. And selected recent articles include: "Race and Decolonization in North Africa," Oxford Research Encylopedia of African History, Spring 2023; and “‘Algiers and the Algerian Desert: Decolonization and Territorial Planning in France, 1958-1962,” Journal of Modern History, Fall 2023.
Sara Rahnama is an Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Program for the Study of the Middle East & North Africa at Morgan State University. She is the author of The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell University Press), which examines how commentators saw women’s advancement as key to a prosperous and modern future for Algeria. Her writing has appeared in both academic and popular spaces, including Gender & History and The Washington Post. She was formerly a fellow at the Library of Congress’s Kluge Center.
Myriam Amri is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and visual artist. She is currently a PhD candidate in the joint degree in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Her scholarship investigates the articulations between money, the economy, and global capitalism from North Africa. Through ethnographic, multimodal, and archival research, her dissertation examines the making of Tunisia’s official currency – its institutions and policies – in relation to its subversions – the informal, illicit, and illegal. In addition, she has published on border economies, inflation, environmental degradation, photography and visual methods, and the colonial histories of fire and coral in the Mediterranean. Her recent writings have appeared in Anthropology of the Middle East, NiCHE, and Kohl Journal.
As a filmmaker and visual artist, her creative practice explores intimacy as resistance against the backdrop of capitalist crises and environmental dystopias using moving-image, film photography, installations, and sound. Her creative works have been part of the Protocinema exhibition in New York, Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, the Jaou Biennale in Tunis, and the NYU Gallatin Galleries. She’s the co-founder of the experimental Arab literary collective « Asameena » and is a 2024 artist in residence at the Swiss Arts Council.
Contact: Liz Flanagan