In the new millennium, amidst a crisis of antifascism as a source of political legitimacy, there has been a revival of antifascism in a more accessible and popular form, integrated into collective imagination and everyday practices. Events and themes of the Resistance have been revisited in venues and contexts beyond the traditional, utilising new approaches and languages outside conventional frameworks. This brief overview highlights the activities of five distinct organisations, spread across the country and all established between 1999 and 2009. Despite their differing methods and objectives, they have all played a significant role in promoting the Resistance through the lens of public history. Their work involves the collection and preservation of sources, the publication of studies and research, dissemination and educational activities. These organisations engage with local memories while addressing major international issues, and they promote original and innovative projects, either digital or conducted in open-air settings. This Contexts and Debates article aims to serve as a tool for those approaching the study of the Italian Resistance, helping them discover new research opportunities, particularly in the form of archival content, as well as alternative outlets to promote their findings.

During the 1980s, Egyptian football stadiums became the stage for two strikingly different events. The first occurred during the 1982–83 season when Al Ahly team fans launched a verbal attack on Zamalek’s star player, Hassan Shehata, following the arrest of his sister-in-law, actress ʿAida Riyad, on charges of prostitution. The extensive media coverage of the case provided Al Ahly supporters with provocative material, leading to chants that questioned the fidelity of Shehata’s wife and even the paternity of his child.1 In an attempt to quell the aggressive taunts, Al Ahly’s captain at the time, Mahmud al-Khatib, made a gesture of sportsmanship by holding Shehata’s hand and walking with him toward the stands, signaling solidarity.

The Egyptian singer-composer Shaykh Imam (1918-1995) holds an almost mythical place in the social imaginary of the Arab left. An icon of dissent, he rose to fame in the late 1960s with a stream of songs commenting on current events and criticising the failings of successive political regimes. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt with fans of Imam (all of whom were involved with student / leftist politics to varying degrees during the 1960s and 1970s) and a close listening of his repertoire, explores why this generation of the Egyptian left embraced Shaykh Imam so wholeheartedly, and why they remain so attached to his songs. I argue that identifying with Shaykh Imam was not only central in bolstering leftists’ claims to be the authentic representatives of the Egyptian nation, amidst many competing claims, but importantly enabled his listeners to perform national belonging of a more intimate kind.

On June 9, 1995, several stories surfaced in al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading newspaper. A conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a scientific study on the feeling of love and its chemical connections to the brain, and a meeting in Cairo between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to discuss the prospects for peace in the Middle East were among the day’s headlines. Buried at the very back of the periodical, obituaries filled an entire page. If readers managed to reach this point in the issue, the black-and-white photographs of four compatriots likely would have caught their eye, including one image of a man wearing a cap and sunglasses. Opening with a verse of poetry, this entry’s authors, the Egyptian National Forces (al-Quwwa al-Wataniyya al-Misriyya), announced the passing of Shaykh Imam ʿIsa, “the artist of the people” (fanān al-shaʿb).1

This article follows the history of migration from the mountain villages of the Jebel Nafusa in Ottoman Trablus al-Gharb (in today’s northwestern Libya) to the southern Tunisian island of Djerba in the early 20th century. It situates this local history of migration within the broader framework of Maghribi migration both before and during the colonial era in Libya (1911–43), while tracing the histories of two categories of migrants, in particular, manual laborers and Qur’an teachers (m’addibs). The article makes three claims: (1) Nafusi migration was as much the result of local historical circumstances as it was a response to colonialism; (2) the historical experience of migration of Nafusis differed according to social class; and (3) local circumstances shaped the dynamics of migrant integration in the Maghrib. In doing so, I demonstrate how Nafusi migration to Djerba both conforms to and diverges from the larger history of late Ottoman and colonial-era migration in Tunisia. By shifting the focus away from the colonial moment, I make the case for foregrounding longer-term regional connections and migrations that linked different spaces across the Maghrib and also attend to local histories and what they offer in the way of caveats and exceptions.