Literary scholar Nabil Boudraa: A pioneer of Amazigh studies in the United States

TSJ

TSJ: Thank you for agreeing to engage in this conversation with us about your work in and contributions to Amazigh studies. We were wondering if you could speak to us about your background.

Nabil Boudraa (N.B.): I often describe my trajectory as coming full circle. I was born and raised in a small Amazigh-speaking community in Kabylia, where I was immersed early on in my native tongue, Kabyle (Tamazight), and later learned Arabic and French in school. I then went to the University of Algiers, where I studied English, focusing on British and American history and literature.

From there, I moved to Paris for graduate work in American studies, and later to New York city, where I completed another graduate degree in French studies and eventually a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University, under the guidance of the late Assia Djebar.

In a way, it was my research fellowship at Harvard University, during my last year of the Ph.D. program, that brought everything together. This short but productive period at the Center for Middle East Studies allowed me to return intellectually and critically to my original culture and identity and to anchor my research in Amazigh studies. It was during that period that I truly began my focus on Amazigh culture.

TSJ: What was it like working with Assia Djebar and how do her lessons continue to inspire you today?

N.B.: Working with Assia Djebar for two years as her assistant and doctoral student was both an intellectual privilege and a deeply human experience. What struck me most was her quiet rigor and humility. She carried immense cultural and literary authority, yet she remained attentive, curious, and profoundly committed to listening—to history, to memory, and especially to women’s voices that had long been marginalized or silenced.

This was during the final years of the twentieth century, at the height of the violence and trauma of the Algerian civil war. We were both deeply affected by what was happening there, but for her the pain was especially profound. One could clearly sense this sorrow in the works she was writing at the time, particularly in Blanc de l’Algérie.

There was also something somewhat ironic about Assia Djebar and Amazighity. Before working closely with her, I had mainly encountered critiques regarding her perceived lack of “engagement” with the Amazigh cause, and I even witnessed some of these reproaches firsthand. She was often criticized for not taking a public stand—like Kateb Yacine or Mouloud Mammeri—in defense of Amazigh identity, language, culture, or the Berber Spring.

However, as I began reading her work more carefully and discussing some of these questions in proximity to her intellectual world, I realized that the relationship was far more complex than many assumed. Some of her most important works are deeply attentive to Amazigh history, language, and memory. Her historical novel So Vast the Prison, for instance, foregrounds the Amazigh language and reflects on the long history of attempts by successive colonizing powers, beginning with the Romans, to marginalize Amazigh language and Tifinagh within North African history. Likewise, her first film, The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua, is a powerful homage to the Amazigh women of the Chenoua region and to women’s oral memory more broadly.

What I learned from her above all was that cultural engagement can take different forms. Not all forms of commitment are expressed through slogans or overt political positioning. For Assia Djebar, literature, cinema, testimony, and the act of recovering erased voices were themselves forms of resistance. Another important dimension of her work was anamnesis: the recovery and reactivation of buried memory. Much of Assia Djebar’s writing and filmmaking sought to bring silenced histories back into consciousness, especially those of women, colonized subjects, and marginalized communities. She understood memory not as nostalgia, but as an ethical and political act. Through fragments, testimonies, voices, and multilingual traces, she reconstructed forms of collective remembrance that official histories had often erased.

She taught me the importance of nuance and the necessity of preserving complexity in societies often shaped by ideological polarizations. Her lessons continue to inspire me today in my own work. She showed me that scholarship and creativity can serve as bridges between languages, memories, and identities, and that one can remain deeply rooted in one’s culture while still speaking to a universal audience. I also continue to admire her insistence on dialogue across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

TSJ: You were trained in French and Francophone studies, but you have consistently incorporated Amazigh studies into your scholarly and pedagogical interests. What compelled you to be a pioneer of Amazigh studies in the US, a time when scholars from Tamazgha were not interested in this field?

N.B.: It really goes back to a very specific moment when I first arrived in the United States in the mid-1990s. That summer, I was visiting Los Angeles and happened to be walking on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. It was August, so the campus was almost empty. Then, completely by chance, I saw a door with a sign that read “Department of Berber [Amazigh] Studies.” For a second, I thought I was dreaming. I had just come from Algeria, where Tamazight was still deeply marginalized—both institutionally and socially—and would only be officially recognized years later. So, seeing that sign in the U.S. was surreal. To me, it revealed a striking paradox: Tamazight was being taught abroad, but not yet in its own country.

I went into the office and asked about it, and the secretary explained that although the office still existed, the program had essentially gone inactive after the retirement of the professor who had been teaching there since the 1960s, Tom Pencheon. I’ve always felt a deep respect for his pioneering work. Ten years later, while beginning my teaching career at Oregon State University, I discovered that he was living in retirement in a small town in Oregon, and I went to visit him. He shared so many stories about his experiences in Tamazgha and his teaching of Tamazight in the US from the late 60s to the early 90s. In 2005, I had the honor of inviting him as a guest of honor to an international conference on Imazighen (Berbers) that I co-organized with my colleague Joseph Krause. By the way, I cannot stress enough the importance of Joseph’s support for all the work on Amazigh culture, most of which I did with his collaboration.

That moment at UCLA. It stayed with me since, but it also revealed a deeper contradiction. I kept wondering how one could explain the shift from a department of Amazigh studies at a major American university to a complete tabula rasa? On the one hand, the general American public had little awareness of Algeria, let alone Amazigh culture. On the other hand, even within U.S. academia—including programs focused on Tamazgha (the broader North Africa)—Amazigh studies were largely absent. At times, I even encountered skepticism or dismissal when I raised the subject, including in major institutions. It was almost taboo to speak about anything Amazigh.

That experience was decisive for me. It pushed me to commit to making Amazigh culture part of my scholarly work. My training in Francophone studies gave me an entry point—through writers like Kateb Yacine, Mouloud Mammeri, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Driss Chraïbi, and Assia Djebar. Through their work, I began to uncover and engage more deeply with the Amazigh dimension embedded in North African literature.

So, in many ways, what compelled me was both a moment of discovery and a sense of absence—an intellectual and cultural gap that I felt needed to be addressed.

TSJ: Your work has encompassed organizing conferences, producing edited volumes, and leading NEH-funded summer workshops that centered the Amazigh dimension or put it into conversation with adjacent fields. Could you tell us more about the significance and the necessity of this multilayered work?

N.B.: What became clear to me early on is that Amazigh studies could not develop through isolated scholarship alone. It required building a scholarly ecosystem. The field was, and in many ways still is, underrepresented, so the work had to be multilayered: creating spaces for dialogue through conferences, producing scholarship, and training others—particularly through the three NEH Summer Institutes I co-directed.

Organizing conferences and symposia was essential because they brought together scholars who were often working in isolation—whether in literature, anthropology, history, or film—and allowed Amazigh studies to emerge as a shared intellectual project rather than a marginal topic. Similarly, edited volumes helped consolidate that work, giving visibility and legitimacy to the field by putting different voices and disciplines into conversation. In many ways, international conferences were real turning points in structuring the field. The NEH-funded summer institutes were especially important to me because they extended that impact beyond academia. They allowed us to work with college educators, giving them the tools and frameworks to integrate Amazigh perspectives into their teaching on North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the broader Francophone world.

So, the significance of this multilayered approach is really about sustainability. It’s not just about producing knowledge, but about creating networks, shaping curricula, and ensuring that Amazigh culture and history are no longer treated as peripheral, but as central to understanding Northern Africa and its global connections.

TSJ: If you were to tell us about one or two Amazigh intellectuals who inspired you to undertake this work. Who would they be and why?

N.B.: There are several figures who shaped both my intellectual formation and my commitment to Amazigh studies. The first group would be some of the pioneers Kabyle and Tamazghan, such as Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri, who were absolutely instrumental in my prise de conscience about Amazighity. Through their fiction, essays, lectures, and public positions, they placed Amazigh culture and identity at the center of intellectual and cultural debates. The same can be said of other major voices like Mohammed Khair-Eddine in Morocco.

For my deeper understanding of Amazigh history, I relied heavily on the foundational work of historians such as Gabriel Camps and Stéphane Gsell.

Last but not least, I would mention Tassadit Yacine, whose work in France was particularly inspiring to me. She was, in many ways, doing what I was trying to do in the United States—bringing Amazigh studies into academic visibility and legitimacy. I had the privilege of inviting her to the U.S. on several occasions for lectures, and we even co-wrote an article on Amazigh oral poetry in Morocco. Her work is remarkably rich and multidisciplinary.

TSJ: How has the field of Amazigh studies changed since you started working in it in the early 2000s?

N.B.: There has been a significant leap forward and tangible progress. Many misconceptions have been corrected, and Amazigh studies has gained much more visibility and legitimacy than when I first started in the early 2000s.

I often think of a moment from about thirty years ago, when I was taking a classics course in the U.S. I remember telling the professor after class that Augustine of Hippo was Amazigh, and he reacted with skepticism, even disbelief. When I later turned to standard biographies, I found the same pattern—his Amazigh background was either minimized or simply ignored.

More recently, however, scholars such as Catherine Conybeare have begun to correct this kind of erasure. Her work acknowledges and restores the Amazigh dimension of Augustine’s identity, which is a significant shift.

I could share many similar anecdotes and examples of misrepresentation or omission, but the broader point is this: compared to my early experiences in the 1990s and 2000s, the field has evolved considerably. There is now a growing recognition that Amazigh history and culture are essential—not peripheral—to understanding North Africa and its global intellectual traditions.

TSJ: What are some of the challenges and opportunities that you see ahead? Feel free to also tell us how you think opportunities should be harnessed and challenges surmounted.

N.B.: In terms of challenges, the most immediate one is the lack of resources. As we all know, culture needs sustained funding, and the academic world today is facing significant budget cuts. More broadly, there is also a declining interest in the humanities, which affects emerging fields like Amazigh studies even more. Sometimes it feels as though we arrived just as the train was leaving. We managed to get on, but we’re still holding on at the edge rather than being fully established within it.

At the same time, there are very encouraging developments. New platforms such as the Tamazgha Studies Journal and the Journal of Amazigh Studies are creating much-needed spaces for scholars and students to publish and exchange ideas. In the realm of cinema, events like the New York Forum of Amazigh Film have also played a crucial role in giving visibility to Amazigh cultural production.

I cannot overstate the joy and pride I feel when I see the work that so many scholars are doing—including you, the editors of the Tamazgha Studies Journal, those of the Journal of Amazigh Studies, the team behind the New York Forum of Amazigh Film, and many others.

Looking ahead, I believe collaboration is key. If there is one lesson from the past, it is that fragmentation and internal competition have often slowed progress, sometimes even leading to forms of self-sabotage. To move forward, we need to build stronger networks, support one another’s work, and think collectively about how to institutionalize and sustain Amazigh studies for future generations.

TSJ: We agree that the state of fragmentation has not helped form a unified front for the development of the field of Amazigh studies. In a final work, what do you think should be done to turn our presence, both Amazigh and non-Amazigh scholars, to create this sense of a shared purpose?

N.B.: Like I said earlier, collaboration is key. For example, why can’t we share articles among journals on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as with those based in Tamazgha? This would, of course, require translation between the different languages involved—English, French, Tamazight, Arabic, Spanish, and others—but the effort would be well worth it.

More generally, by combining our modest individual efforts, we can develop larger projects and unlock much greater potential. For instance, instead of organizing separate small conference panels around the same theme, a jointly organized thematic conference would undoubtedly have a much stronger impact.

Another important step would be investing more in younger generations of scholars and students. We need stronger institutional structures: collaborative research networks, translation initiatives, student exchanges, archives, digital humanities projects, and accessible publications that circulate beyond narrow academic circles. Too much important work remains isolated because of language barriers or lack of coordination.

I also believe that Amazigh studies should continue engaging with broader global conversations about indigeneity, minority languages, memory, decolonization, migration, and cultural preservation. This would not dilute the specificity of Amazigh experiences; on the contrary, it would situate them within larger human and historical frameworks while creating opportunities for solidarity with other communities facing similar challenges.

I believe that we are all moving in the same direction: toward both the preservation and development of our ancestral culture and language. Other minority communities around the world that have experienced similar forms of exclusion can serve as important models for us in terms of solidarity, collective work, and shared purpose.

Lastly, this common effort should go far beyond language barriers, national identities, and geographic borders—an approach that fully reflects the broader idea of Tamazgha.