A MAGIC BULLET READING LIST
An offering from LubDub Theatre Co's The Magic Bullet Ensemble: Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, Robert Duffley, Noelle Ghoussaini, Pierre Jampy, Geoff Kanick, Ismail Khalidi, and Mohamed Yabdri
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the work-in-progress sharing of The Magic Bullet, and thank you to everyone who made us feel so welcome during our time in Dearborn. We miss you all already, and we can’t wait to return in 2025 with a full production. In the meantime, we wanted to share a few snippets of sources we’re engaging as we continue our work on the show.
To stay tuned for updates on the piece, check out @lubdubtheatreco on Instagram or visit the project website.
LAYLA FEGHALI, THE LAND IN OUR BONES (Penguin Random House, 2025)
“Belonging is a Practice: Village life itself has taught me there is nothing automatic about ‘home.’ Whether Indigenous, traditional, or diasporic—ancestral, displaced, or continuous across time, belonging is a practice. A cultivated relationship that deepens with presence and repetition, illuminates with the culmination of eras and efforts.”
From the publisher:
A profound and searching exploration of the herbs and land-based medicines of Lebanon and Cana’an—a vital invitation to re-member our roots and deepen relationship with the lands where we live in diaspora.
Tying cultural survival to earth-based knowledge, Lebanese ethnobotanist, sovereignty steward, and cultural worker Layla K. Feghali offers a layered history of the healing plants of Cana’an (the Levant) and the Crossroads (“Middle East”) and asks into the ways we become free from the wounds of colonization and displacement.
Feghali remaps Cana’an and its crossroads, exploring the complexities, systemic impacts, and yearnings of diaspora. She shows how ancestral healing practices connect land and kin—calling back and forth across geographies and generations and providing an embodied lifeline for regenerative healing and repair.
PETER LAMONT & JIM STEINMEYER, THE SECRET HISTORY OF MAGIC (Penguin Random House, 2018)
"History, in general, is a form of definition. We tell stories about the past in order to understand the present. The stories we tell, and the ones we prefer, define us in particular ways. They provide us with traditions that we can embrace, which shape how we see ourselves. And when we begin a history of something at a particular point, we are saying this is when it began. Whatever happened earlier was something else; if not, then we would have begun at an earlier point. So choosing a beginning is important, because it should tell us something about the subject at hand."
From the publisher:
If you read a standard history of magic, you learn that it begins in ancient Egypt, with the resurrection of a goose in front of the Pharaoh. You discover how magicians were tortured and killed during the age of witchcraft. You are told how conjuring tricks were used to quell rebellious colonial natives. The history of magic is full of such stories, which turn out not to be true. Behind the smoke and mirrors, however, lies the real story of magic.
It is a history of people from humble roots, who made and lost fortunes, and who deceived kings and queens. In order to survive, they concealed many secrets, yet they revealed some and they stole others. They engaged in deception, exposure, and betrayal, in a quest to make the impossible happen. They managed to survive in a world in which a series of technological wonders appeared, which previous generations would have considered magical. Even today, when we now take the most sophisticated technology for granted, we can still be astonished by tricks that were performed hundreds of years ago.
The Secret History of Magic reveals how this was done. It is about why magic matters in a world that no longer seems to have a place for it, but which desperately needs a sense of wonder.
ABDELMAJID HANNOUM, VIOLENT MODERNITY: FRANCE IN ALGERIA (Harvard University Press, 2010)
“Violence … has been central in the building of many nations, including France itself. The horrific violence and terror of the French revolution did not spare its own architects and makers and has been crucially important in the shaping and defining of modern France. ‘La Marseillaise,’ the national hymn of France, evokes ‘the fight’ and ‘war’ and cannot be called a hymn for peace.”
From the publisher:
In Violent Modernity: France in Algeria, Abdelmajid Hannoum examines the advent of political modernity in Algeria and shows how colonial modernity was not only a project imposed by violence but also a violent project in and of itself, involving massive destruction and significant transformation of the population of Algeria. The author analyzes the relation between culture and events and demonstrates how the culture of colonial modernity was generative of violent events, the most notorious and tragic of which were the spectacular mass killings of the 1990s, usually referred to as “the Algerian civil war.” This, the author argues, cannot be explained without an understanding of colonial modernity.
SARA RAZA, PUNK ORIENTALISM: THE ART OF REBELLION (Black Dog Press, 2022)
"The use of fragmentation and collage [is] an ideological tool for rethinking and navigating anti-imperialist artistic tactics is achieved through the poetic reodering and remixing of histories… Imagine an actual rhizome—the stem of a plan that defies gravity by shooting its roots both sideways and upwards"
To borrow from Cyrus Shahan, Punk Orientalism is ‘not a story of the oppressed, marginalized or persecuted minorities’; a punk narrative reveals instead an unwritten history of the middle. This middle space signals an affirmative gesture against the polarized representation of non-Western art, which has an unfortunate tendency to be presented within the frames of colonial ranking, where East and West are pitted against one another. Thus, emancipating art and artists from the burden of set representational ideals and principles is an important component of this book, which allows for a transcultural account to unravel.”
From the publisher:
Inspired by the titular concepts, punk and orientalism, the text functions as a form of bricolage, uniting punk movements and strategies, which can be traced in popular visual culture from the 1970s onwards. The idea of punk is coupled with a critical study of orientalism and its historical association with imperialist assumptions of knowledge concerning the East. Punk Orientalism expands its association with this territory to explore former Soviet possessions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as looking at the USSR’s complex relationship with the Arab world, Iran and Turkey.
The Magic Bullet Ensemble. Photography by Bjorn Bolinder.
The Magic Bullet is a transdisciplinary performance about an ensemble of seven contemporary artists trying to tell the story of a French colonial magic show that took place at Algiers’ Bab-Azoun Theatre in 1856. As the ensemble attempts to confront the legacy of this historical performance, an overlapping, intersecting sea of stories unfolds across space and time, defying a global legacy of colonization and reclaiming the liberatory potential of magic.
The Magic Bullet is created by LubDub Theatre Co with the following ensemble of artists: Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, Noelle Ghoussaini, Pierre Jampy, Ismail Khalidi, Mohamed Yabdri, Geoff Kanick, and Robert Duffley. The Magic Bullet is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Pangea World Theatre in partnership with the Arab American National Museum, Noor Theatre, and NPN.
During their residency at AANM, The Magic Bullet ensemble conducted research and translated devising work into performance text. Community members were invited to attend a work-in-progress sharing of The Magic Bullet at AANM on February 23, 2024. The Magic Bullet ensemble will return to Michigan in 2025 for production.
LubDub Theatre Co is an NYC-based company of artists that animates stories of science, magic, and myth. LubDubTheatre.com