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In 1972, the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine and his popular theatre troupe toured their first dialect play in migrant communities in France. Performed in Darija (Algerian Arabic) and Taqbaylit (Kabyle) and modelled after Maghribi genres of performance and storytelling, ‘Mohamed arfad valiztek’ (Mohamed pack your bags) inaugurated a new kind of theatre in France: binational theatre, by and for North African migrants. I focus on two early examples of binational theatre in Algeria and France: ‘Mohamed arfad valiztek’ and ‘Ça travaille, ça travaille et ça ferme sa gueule’ (They work, they work and they shut up), a 1973 play by the performance collective Al Assifa. Unsparing in their critique of postcolonial regimes’ complicity in ‘labor trafficking’, these plays site migration in a postcolonial history that begins with the ‘intrusion’ of France into Africa, and expose the links that continue to tie France to its former colonies. I argue that by creolising French with Arabic and post-’68 theatre with Maghribi cultural forms, binational theatre offers a new theatrical idiom for the postcolonial contact zone.
Olivia C. Harrison (Sat,) studied this question.