Transgressive Imaginaries: Nation and Identity through Raï

Status host Omar Shanti traces Raï throughout its history from its inception in the 1930’s until the early 2000’s. This podcast episode will analyze Raï not as a strictly musical phenomenon, but as a vehicle for articulating and embodying complex narratives. In the tradition of Schade-Poulsen (1999), it will treat Raï as a total social fact defined by the situated practices of performance and listening - which in the age of records also translate to production and consumption. This approach allows one to read history through Raï precisely as one reads Raï through history. To facilitate this reflection, the podcast contextualizes Raï’s history against its relevant social, political, and cultural backdrops. Where appropriate, it theorizes these developments, drawing off of post-colonial, sociological, and anthropological repertoires. It also incorporates musical excerpts and snippets of lyrics to color the analysis. By orienting its analysis on a genre, this podcast emphasizes the sociocultural continuities that link time and space. It offers an important counterweight to the historiography that is grounded in formal politics and that draws from its ideological economy of borders and rupture. Moreover, it dismantles the methodological nationalism of these approaches by focusing on social agents rather than reified state actors. In studying Raï specifically, this podcast observes a rich legacy of multifocal transgression that produced alternative conceptions of self-identity and collective imaginaries at important historical junctures. Throughout this history, resident and migrant Algerians alike have turned to Raï to carve out inhabitable spheres within their societies. In Raï music, they had an accessible and inclusive medium through which they could contest the constructed identities that were imposed upon them.