Memories Of The Maghreb

Using a cultural studies approach, this book explores how the Spanish colonization of North Africa continues to haunt Spain's efforts to articulate a national identity that can accommodate both the country's diversity, brought about by immigration from its old colonies, and the postnational demands of its integration in the European Union.

Examines how French colonial modernity invented the concept of the Maghreb, making it distinct from Africa and the Middle East.

This book studies women’s resistance in the three countries of the Maghreb, concentrating on two questions: First, what has been the role of women artists since the 1960s in unlocking traditions and emancipating women on their own terms? Second, why have Maghrebi women rarely been given the right to be heard since Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia gained national independence? Honouring the artistic voices of women that have been largely eclipsed from both popular culture and political discourse in the Maghreb, the work specifically examines resistance by women since 1960s in the Maghreb through cinema, politics, and the arts. In an ancillary way, the volume addresses a wide range of questions that are specific to Maghrebi women related to upbringing, sexuality, marriage, education, representation, exclusion, and historical memory. These issues, in their broadest dimensions, opened the gates to responses in different fields in both the humanities and the social sciences. The research presents scholarship by not only leading scholars in Francophone studies, cultural history, and specialists in women studies, but also some of the most important film critics and practicing feminist advocates. The variety of periods and disciplines in this collection allow for a coherent and general understanding of Maghrebi societies since decolonization. The volume is a key resource to students and scholars interested in women’s studies, the Maghreb, and Middle East studies.

In 1832, Eugène Delacroix accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco, the first leg of a journey through the Maghreb and Andalusia that left an indelible impression on the painter. This comprehensive, annotated English-language translation of his notes and essays about this formative trip makes available a classic example of travel writing about the “Orient” from the era and provides a unique picture of the region against the backdrop of the French conquest of Algeria. Delacroix’s travels in Morocco, Algeria, and southern Spain led him to discover a culture about which he had held only imperfect and stereotypical ideas and provided a rich store of images that fed his imagination forever after. He wrote extensively about these experiences in several stunningly beautiful notebooks, noting the places he visited, routes he followed, scenes he observed, and people he encountered. Later, Delacroix wrote two articles about the trip, “A Jewish Wedding in Morocco” and the recently discovered “Memories of a Visit to Morocco,” in which he shared these extraordinary experiences, revealing how deeply influential the trip was to his art and career. Never before translated into English, Journey to the Maghreb and Andalusia, 1832 includes Delacroix’s two articles, four previously known travel notebooks, fragments of two additional, recently discovered notebooks, and numerous notes and drafts. Michèle Hannoosh supplements these with an insightful introduction, full critical notes, appendices, and biographies, creating an essential volume for scholars and readers interested in Delacroix, French art history, Northern Africa, and nineteenth-century travel and culture.

The impulse for the recent transformations in the Arab world came from the Maghreb. Research on the region has been on the rise since, yet much remains to be done when it comes to interdisciplinary comparative research. The Maghreb is a heterogeneous region that deserves thorough investigation. This volume focuses on Entanglements as a cross-field and cross-lingual concept to generate a new approach to the region and its inner interdependencies as well as exchanges with other regions. Eminent researchers conceptualize Entanglements through the description of various thematic fields and actors in motion, addressing culture, politics, social affairs, and economics.

The time period of 1990-2010 marks a significant moment in Spanish literary publishing that emphasized a new focus on Africa and African voices and signaled the beginning of a publishing boom of Hispano-African authors and themes. Africa in the Contemporary Spanish Novel, 1990-2010 analyzes the strategies that Spanish and Hispano-African authors employ when writing about Africa in the contemporary Spanish novel. Focusing on the former Spanish colonial territories of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, Mahan L. Ellison analyzes the post-colonial literary discourse about these regions at the turn of the twenty-first century. Heexamines the new ways of conceptualizing Africa that depart from an Orientalist framework as advanced by novelists such as Lorenzo Silva, Concha López Sarasúa, Ramón Mayrata, and others. Throughout, Ellison also places the novels within their historical context, specifically engaging with the theoretical ideas of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), to determine to what extent his analysis of Orientalist discourse still holds value for a study of the Spanish novel of thirty years later.

The Exile in the Maghreb entails the first attempt at describing the historical reality of the legal and social condition of the Jews in the Muslim countries of North Africa (principally Algeria and Morocco) over a thousand year period from the Middle Ages (997 C.E.) to the French colonization (1830 Algeria/1912 Morocco.). The Exile is not a formal history but a chronological anthology of documents drawn from literary (section A) and archival sources (section B), many of which are published for the first time. In section A, Arabic and Hebrew chronicles, Muslim legal, and theological texts are followed by the accounts culled from European travelers—captives, diplomats, doctors, clerics, and adventurers. Each document is introduced and annotated in such a way as to bring out its importance. The second section (B) reflects the diplomatic activity deployed by humanitarian organizations in favour of North African Jewry. Spanning the 19th and early 20th centuries, these are mainly drawn from the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris) and the Anglo-Jewish Association (London). The documents are richly elucidated with illustrations taken from the international press. The book presents a new and illuminating insight into the status of Jews under the Crescent. The Jews of North Africa were the only minority under Islam, in this region and their history reflects Judaism's exclusive encounter with Islam.

Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin have shown that flanerie is anything but an aimless stroll. Walking through London, Paris, and Berlin entailed engagements with the latest modernity. Thought-provoking, exhilarating, and at times terrifying: flanerie adjusted to and documented the mobility of modernity, its aesthetic possibilities and social risks. Antonio Muñoz Molina is one of several contemporary authors who have closely coupled the development of their literary characters to urban perambulations. Their biographic growth, cultural and social adaptations, as well as epistemological insights are so dependent on flanerie that his late twentieth and early twenty-first-century texts warrant the designation flaneur literature. Muñoz Molina has also contributed to the current decentralization of flaneur literature from Paris to smaller cities, including Spanish cities like Granada, Córdoba, and San Sebastián. Reflecting on Poe, Baudelaire, and Benjamin in these cities, his characters update and revise the canon of flaneur literature, stretching its discursive boundaries. This study examines not only the mobility of his characters but also draws attention to intercultural aspects of his flaneur literature which lie both in a uniquely Spanish perspective on flanerie as well as in engagements with cultural otherness. Walking through a Moroccan city or through Chinatown in New York, Muñoz Molina’s characters broaden the Eurocentric horizon of canonical flaneur literature and the modernist one of his Spanish flaneur precursor, Federico García Lorca, whose portrait of New York is revisited in Muñoz Molina’s longest flaneur text. National and literary boundaries blur as intercultural urban spaces transform his characters into transnational subjects. This study traces the author’s struggle with this globalization: a residual rural nostalgia straddles uneasily with forays into filmic flanerie, a form of spectatorship that renders the flaneur newly mobile in the mass-mediatized environments of postmodernity. If Muñoz Molina is generally regarded as an incisive chronicler of Spain’s transition from Francoism to democracy and an attentive memorialist of the Spanish Civil War, this study bases its portrait of a much more globally engaged Muñoz Molina in his characters’ movements from Spain into the urban centers of Euro-American postmodernity and its northern African periphery.