Abstract
La Main de Leila (Leila’s Hand) is a Franco-Algerian adaptation of several source texts among which is Romeo and Juliet. Written by the two French actors Aida Asgharzadeh and Kamel Isker and performed in 2016 in France, the story takes place in a town in Algiers in 1988. The main protagonists, Samir and Leila (played by Kamel and Aida) live a Romeo and Juliet-like secret tragic romance that is torn apart by the social and political problems of the time. This adaptation is a complex transposition of Shakespeare’s text at many levels. From the translation to the performance, proximity with the source text is heavily challenged, as many elements are questioned and transposed, such as the characters, setting, cultural context and time of the plot. These elements result in temporal, spatial and cultural tensions in the target text. The present paper seeks to identify these tensions by positioning Shakespeare’s text as a locus of cultural negotiations, and by addressing some prominent notionsrelevant to today’s social, literary and cultural studies, such as migration, in-betweenness, hybrid identity, intercultural exchanges, transculture and no-culture. The paper then tackles how the target text positions itself regarding the source texts, and further examines the cultural negotiations that are at stake here.