SNAP Bulletin Third Edition

The third edition of the SNAP Bulletin, focuses on music and literature. We begin with Jonathan Glasser’s photo essay, which traces the backgrounds and connections of several musicians and dancers who performed in the Algerian tent at the 1889 World Exposition in Paris. In doing so, Jonathan Glasser helps us to reframe our view of the Algerian music revival by examining the diversity of the actors involved in its prehistory. Following chronologically, Liz Matsushita has prepared a beautiful story map that tracks the transnational geographies of participants in the 1939 First Congress of Moroccan Music in Fez. This multi-media platform helps to emphasize the breadth of the intellectual networks in which the North African musicians and scholars operated. Finally, Randa Jebrouni brings us back to the present with a brief interview and précis of her new book: La letra y la ciudad: Tánger en las literaturas española y marroquí actuales. In it, Randa Jebrouni invokes theories of topophilia, psychogeography, and nostalgia to showcase how contemporary Spanish and Moroccan authors use the space of the city as a vital place in Morocco for recovering the past in its various manifestations.

In all three posts our authors invite us to rethink temporal, geographic, and paradigmatic contingencies to explore a diversity of connections - diving more intimately into the histories of the musicians, authors, and scholars involved. We hope that these stories will provide a welcome respite to our members during this time of pandemic.