History Sounds (Ep.1) The recording industry in North Africa

In the first conversation of the Borderlines series History Sounds, we learn about the history of the recording industry in North Africa from the colonial period through decolonization with professor Christopher Silver.

Check out Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa and Gharamophone: Preserving North Africa’s Jewish musical past, one record at a time.

Coming up: Mejgan Massoumi will tell us about radio and popular culture in modern Afghanistan.

The songs and recordings you heard during the conversation are:

• History Sounds Intro: Huna al-Qahira, Munir Murad ( هنا القاهرة - محدش شاف)

• Arjaa lebladek by Salim Halali, 1939

• Je t’appartiens (tango) by Salim Halali, c. 1945

• Kam wa-kam ya ‘ayni by Laho Seror, c. 1907-1912

• Mamak by Lili Labassi (performed by Mlle Ghezala)

• Lukan al-milayin by Elmaghribi, 1951

Further readings and resources:

• Mahieddine Bachetarzi, Mémoires, 1919– 1939; Suivis d’étude sur le théâtre dans les pays Islamiques (Algiers: Éditions nationales algériennes, 1968).

• Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco(Stanford University Press, 2013).

• Nadya Bouzar-Kasbadji, L’émergence artistique algérienne au XXe siècle: Contribution de la musique et du théâtre algérois à la renaissance culturelle et à la prise de conscience nationaliste (Algiers: Office des publications universitaires, 1988).

• Ruth F. Davis, Maʻlūf: Reflections on the Arab Andalusian Music of Tunisia(Scarecrow Press, 2004).

• Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (Verso, 2015).

• Dynamic Jewish-Muslim Interactions in Performance Art, 1920-2020, eds., Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince (Liverpool University Press, 2020).

• Jonathan Glasser, The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa(University of Chicago Press, 2016). 

• Alma Rachel Heckman, The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2020).

• Ethan Katz, “Did the Paris Mosque Save Jews? A Mystery and Its Memory,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Spring 2012), 256-287. 

• Hadj Miliani, “Crosscurrents: Trajectories of Algerian Jewish Artists and Men of Culture since the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, eds. Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (Indiana University Press, 2010), 177-187.

• Rebecca P. Scales, “Subversive Sound: Transnational Radio, Arabic Recordings, and the Dangers of Listening in French Colonial Algeria, 1934–1939,”Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2010, 52(2): 384–417.

• Christopher Silver, “The Sounds of Nationalism: Music, Moroccanism, and the Making of Samy Elmaghribi,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2020, vol. 52, no. 1: 23-47.

Interview and sound design by Olga Verlato.