Category: _b20_blockhover

This essay is part of a dossier on The Maghreb after Orientalism.

by Gil Z. Hochberg 

A Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy does not clarify everything, far from it,

                   but can I ever explain anything without it?

Jacques Derrida, “To Have Lived, and to Remember, as an Algerian”

To depart (so as) not to arrive from Algeria is also, incalculably, a way of not

                      having broken with Algeria

Hélène Cixous, “My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive

from Algeria”

Algeria is an unfinished story, no doubt for Algerians, but also for France. And for all those who cannot but continue to think through Algeria’s recent and long history of colonialism, as they think not only about Algeria and France but also about modernity, military occupation, Orientalism, Europe, armed resistance, war, and also about Zionism, Jews and Arabs, Palestine, missed opportunities, and possible outcomes. So much and more is contained in the name “Algeria”.

In the mid 1990s both Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous began to write about “Algeria” (about their “Algeria”), each investing in a writing both autobiographical and politically contemplative.[1] In their writings—primarily Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine (The Monolingualism of the Other) (Derrida [1996] 1998)), “Mon algériance” (“My Algeriance”), “Stigmata, or Job the dog” (both printed in Cixous’s 1998 Stigmata Escaping Texts), and “Bare Feet” (Cixous 2001)—“Algeria” is a specific place: their place of birth, a nation with a particularly violent and complex history of colonial occupation, but also a name and figure of speech hosting a vast and explosive web of memories, desires, attachments, fears, projections, and identifications both personal and public.

Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other is a short reflection on the relationship between language and mastery, identity, citizenship, and colonialism. It is also an intervention into the legacy of the relations between Arabs, Jews, and “Europe” under the conditions of French colonialism in the Maghreb, and above all a commentary about the still contested figure of the Arab Jew.[2] Derrida focuses on the particular case of Maghrebi Jews (Jews of Algeria who were granted French citizenship in 1870, lost their French citizenship under the Vichy regime in October 1940, and regained it in 1943) to talk about matters of possession and being possessed by language, memory, culture, religion, and ethnicity. But Derrida both tells and doesn’t tell the story of Algerian Jews. He both tells and doesn’t tell his story as an Algerian Jew, when he speaks of his “nostalgeria” and of his “independence from Algeria” (1998: 52) and of a “French Jewish child from Algeria” (1998: 49).

Cixous’s writings about Algeria similarly focus on her experience as a Jew, holding an outsider position in colonial Algeria, to which she belongs only through the direct touch of dust: “a sort of invisible belonging to the land to which I am bound by my atoms without nationality” (1998a: 154). Like Derrida, she centers on the drama of citizenship experienced by herself and other Jews of Algeria (“in 1940 we were thrown out as Jews” (1998a: 213). This is the pretext for her broader focus on being “at home, nowhere” (1998a: 155) and the history of colonial Algeria as a history of “brutal Algeriad . . . crudely fashioned by the demon of Coloniality” (1998a: 156).

“Algeria” is for both thinkers a way to speak the past in(to) the present, the personal in(to) the public, Algeria in(to) France, and the “Jew” (or the forbidden “J” to borrow Cixous’s expression)[3] in(to) the colonial drama as a third member along with the Arab and the French. It is also a way to speak of loss, of exile, of the limits of national belonging, the limits of origins and narratives of origins, possessing, and possession.

Both Derrida and Cixous came to “Algeria” late in their lives and writing careers. Their upbringing in colonized Algeria was for the most part absent from their texts until they began to write semi-autobiographies; until, that is, they turned their personal memories and narratives into new modes of political intervention. Indeed, as long as the two prolific writers were engaged in deconstructing Western philosophical metaphysics (Derrida) and advocating “feminine writing” (écriture féminine) (Cixous), they were unquestionably recognized as “French”: deconstruction was French; feminine writing was very French. But to continue to undo European hegemony without questioning “Europe” from its margins (and not only from “within,” by means of deconstructing key European texts) had become by the mid 1990s truly impossible. Certainly in France, which was watching the ongoing civil war in Algeria, while facing a whole series of heated legal debates about “immigration” in France itself. The critical need to question French identity and destabilize French language and citizenship is what led Derrida and Cixous “back to Algeria,” as a site (a memory, a place, a time, a past, and a future) through which to rethink the meaning of being European, and, more specifically, French.

Addressing the “traumatizing brutality of what is called the colonial war” Derrida, in a later text (“To Have Lived, and to Remember, as an Algerian”) writes: “some, including myself, experienced it from both sides, if I may say so” (Chérif 2008: 35). Writing from both sides, as it were, and from neither, is what Cixous’s and Derrida’s texts about Algeria perform textually by centering on the impossible figure of the Arab Jew. A figure that has become and then “become undone” through the not-so-subtle mechanisms of partition exercised by the French colonial administration. The “Franco-Maghrebi” is Derrida’s name for himself as the French-speaking-Maghrebi-Jew, who as such, is from Algeria but not of Algerian nationality, and who is a French citizen (at times) but who is not, cannot be, quite French. This Jew, not quite Algerian, certainly not quite Arab, can only appear in relation to French (language, citizenship, identity) given the colonial conditions dividing populations by ethnicities and policing language acquisition and national affiliations. The missing figure of the Arab Jew, the fact of its missing, the making of its impossibility, is, however, at the heart of The Monolingualism of the Other just as it is the nexus of Cixous’s Algerian texts. It is the ghostly impossible figure, whose impossibility haunts the historical narrative of colonialism told, most commonly, in terms of a binary division between two positions. In this case: colonizer and colonized, French and Arab, French and Arabic. Accounting for the impossibility of the Arab Jew in Algeria, Cixous writes: “There was not enough time. . . . There was no time. (If there had been time between Arabs and ourselves . . . the two destinal durations would have found themselves in concordance at a certain moment)” (Cixous 1998: 184).

Writing about their Algerian origins, about their early years in Algeria, about their childhood memories, and also about their becoming French (but never quite French); about their relationship to the French language, French citizenship, and writing (in French); but also about their Jewishness, about being Jewish, about being not-quite Jewish, and certainly not quite Algerian, but also not fully French. This is the similar manner in which Derrida and Cixous write about colonialism: about the colonialisms embedded in language (Derrida) but most certainly about French colonialism and its impact on them, on their own writings, on Jews, on Arabs, and on the making of the Arab Jew in Algeria. Colonialism is at the center of their texts, in the sense that is it said to be responsible for it all: responsible for everything that shaped their own personal experiences, responsible for the matrix of life in Algeria, and responsible for their writing—its content and its style. French colonialism created fractures between Arabs and Jews; it is responsible for the misery of most indigenous Algerians, and for the creation of “the Jew” as a specific figure of difference and alterity: at times more French than the Arab and other times less French, even less French than the Arab. In the context of French colonial Algeria, “Jew” is always already in relationship to Frenchness: “now we were Jews,” “now we were French” “now we were Jewfrench” (Cixous 1998b: 189).

Within this profound exposition of the nature of French colonialism in the Maghreb, Derrida and Cixous focus on the very unhappy triangle: the French, the Arab, and the Jew (“an utterly unworkable junction” (Cixous 1998b: 183). I have written elsewhere about the mobilization of animosity between Jews and Arabs/Muslims in Europe in the service of “Europe” as (Christian) secular protector (Hochberg 2006). Here it is sufficient to say that the manufactured rivalry between Jews and Arabs created under French colonial conditions is not a side narrative or a minor outcome but a profound and central aspect of the colonial structure as such. A structure very much still in operation, as a recent text by Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us (2016) reminds us. Regarding the ambiguous position of the Jew in France today, Bouteldja cleverly observes that the Jews are “on the one hand, dhimmis of the Republic to satisfy the internal needs of the nation state, and on the other, Senegalese riflemen to satisfy the needs of Western imperialism” (55-56, original italics). As observed by Ben Ratskoff, “the phrase ‘dhimmis of the Republic’ paints France with its own Orientalist brush—as pre-modern, religious, oppressive—and suggests that, despite their so-called emancipation, the functional role of Jews in Europe has not changed. At the same time, Jews are made into ‘Senegalese riflemen,’ the colonized colonizers to whom the perpetuation of imperial violence is outsourced” (2018).[4]

Derrida and Cixous’s texts invite us to see how colonialism and, more specifically, Orientalism create the “Jew” (as a double agent, both dhimmi and Senegalese rifleman) and at the same time create the impossibility of the “Arab Jew.” In a recent essay (delivered as a lecture), Ella Shohat shows that this process involves the ongoing production of the Jew as “less Arab” and “more French.” She calls this process “the de-orientalization of Jews” and locates it, like Derrida and Cixous, in the midst of the French colonial drama in Algeria (Shohat 2016).[5] In Orientalism, Edward Said already argued that Orientalism was responsible first for bonding Jews and Muslims together under the rubric of “Semites”—subjects of Orientalist study readily understandable in view of their primitive origins—and later for setting these two figures apart as different kinds of Orientals, managed differently by colonial forces (1979: 234). If Orientalism sometimes brings Jews and Muslims or Jews and Arabs together and sometimes sets them apart, Derrida and Cixous’s texts invite us to follow the production of what, in her analysis of French nineteenth century painting, Shohat calls “the split Arab/Jew figure” in becoming. (See Fig. 1-3) Examining French Orientalist representations of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, Shohat demonstrates how these images tend to be familiar Orientalist images, with no distinction made between Jews and Arabs. “When and how,” she asks, do we begin to see the “Arab Jew” as a distinct figure of Orientalist imagination and colonial control? Her answer, based on a survey of Orientalist paintings, is that this happens only in the early twentieth century, “when Jews in Algeria suddenly appear to have a lighter skin tone than Muslims, and Jewish women appear without head covers.” Around the 1930s, she notes, Jews begin to be visualized as modernized, and Jewish women begin to look more French. “The split of the Jew and the Arab/Muslim is a product of the colonial area,” she concludes. “It is a cut that has not even begun to heal.” <Figures 1-3 about here>

Cixous and Derrida write about this cut. They write from the place of this cut. They write from this cut and as its outcome. They write as Jews-already-not-Arabs, already (almost) French. They try to recapture the becoming of this writing position without, however, naturalizing any pre-given identity positions (i.e., “Jew,” “Arab,” “French,” “native”). Writing about identities in becoming, about Jews becoming less Arab and more French, both writers attempt to write from a different position: not “as a Jew” or “as an Algerian” or “as a French person.” Their writing seeks to undo these identities while recognizing they cannot be undone: “Certain Jews truly wanted to love France. But it was a love by force. We wanted to love Algeria. But it was too early or too late” (Cixous 1998a: 163).

The focus on the Jew, which is obviously an autobiographic detail, is not just that. It is also an opportunity to speak a different language: to speak from within the colonial cut and within the Orientalist operation as both an outcome and a resistant trace. To speak not the language of historicity, not the language of the law, not even the language of literature, but a language of a cut as prefigured through the figure of the always already impossible Arab Jew. Stigmata, “the fertile wound” (Cixous 1998b: 182).

The term Orientalism is not a term either Derrida or Cixous use. Said’s work Orientalism is similarly missing from Derrida and Cixous’s autobiographical texts. And this is perhaps not surprising. Said’s style and framework of analysis are utterly foreign to their writings. Orientalism doesn’t leave a lot of room for thinking in the spaces between binaries and that is precisely what both Cixous and Derrida do, albeit differently. If anything, one could say that both Cixous and Derrida, at times, mobilize an overtly Orientalist language to talk about France, Algeria, Arabs, and Jews (see, for instance, Cixous’s “unshakable certainty that ‘the Arabs’ were the true offspring of this dusty and perfumed soil” or her observation: “when I walked barefoot with my brother on the hot trails of Oran, I felt the sole of my body caressed by the welcoming palms of the country’s ancient dead…” (Cixous 1998a: 153)). But they recognize these Orientalist words as French (“the word Arab belonged to French colonialism” (Cixous 1998b: 183)). Orientalism is a borrowed framework, a borrowed language, a borrowed way of speaking and thinking but not an escapable one per se. Certainly not when speaking from the place of the cut. Not when speaking of the becoming of the separation and the making of the Jew and of the Arab.[6]

For Cixous, Algeria is primarily a stage on which the colonial drama unfolds: a “perfumed theater, salt, jasmine, orange blossoms, where violent plays were staged” (1998a, 155), where “the scene was always war” (1998a: 156). And on this stage there are roles and positions: “one said: ‘the Arabs,’ ‘the French,’” everyone was forced to play “in the play, with a false identity” (1998a: 156). The colonial stage produces caricature figures. People said: “the Arabs and the French, and also the Jews and the Catholics” (1998a: 156). Names, words, identities have limited freedom on the colonial stage, and very little room for innovation. Thus we get “Fatma,” the Arab maid, the “dirty Jew,” the Frenchman, and the “little Arabs” (1998a: 164). Against this discursive, linguistic, and political fixation—the outcome of colonial administration and Orientalist imagination—but also from within it, Cixous and Derrida attempt to generate a discourse that highlights instability, fragmentation, ambiguity, and loss in the figure of the always already displaced and the always already lost: lost home, lost Jew, lost Arab, and lost Algeria. As a result, we are left with a discourse that is both more intimate and less (overtly) political than the carefully measured discourse commonly modeled on the analysis of Orientalism.

But I would like to suggest that writing from the place of the cut is an unwritten chapter in Orientalism. Said’s theory, because it insists on a macro-political notion of history and a structural analysis of binary power positions, leaves little room for nuances, differences, and liminal positions that speak from the place of the cut. It is not simply that Derrida and Cixous’s texts bring in, as it where, the missing Maghreb, or the missing figure of the (impossible) Arab Jew and thus complicate an otherwise more coherent, binary formulation of colonial power. It is also that, unlike the discourse of the Arab Jew, developed for example in the writings of Albert Memmi (not just in La statue de sel but in his later essays such as “Who is the Arab Jew?”),[7] Derrida and Cixous’s Arab Jew is not so much a figure (an ethnic figure), but the theoretical elaboration on the production of this historical figure as an impossibility brought about by colonialism and Orientalism. A melancholic underlining precondition that runs through the Orientalist discourse and remains both key to the Orientalist dualistic imagination and invisible in its centrality.

I am not suggesting that the Arab Jew is central to Orientalism, which presents a rather coherent picture of the Orient, often conflating “Arab” and “Muslim.” And yet this figure is not marginal to the text either. It is a figure that demonstrates the triangulated operation within the (Orientalist) binary imagination. Reading Cixous’s and Derrida’s impossible Arab Jew into Said’s book is not only to challenge its binary structure, criticized by many in the past (Homi Bhabhba 1994, Ali Behdad 1994, Lisa Lowe 1991). It is also to develop a different language, one whose power resides in its ambivalence and non-identitarianism. A language which certainly can sound and read as self-centered, beautified, and sublimated (perhaps too French?) but which gains its importance from its ability to speak from the cut and about the cut.

The Arab Jew here is a figure of political failure and a failed figure. And this failure itself, visited and revisited as loss, impossibility, “fertile wound” and the outcome of Orientalist imagination is also to gesture towards a different future. One that takes a leap of faith away from but also back to the binary and structured world of fantasy-making reality, which Said left us with forty years ago; a fertile ground from which to “depart (so as) not to arrive from.”

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is currently writing a book on art, archives and the production of the future.

References

Ahluwalia, Pal. 2010. Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots. London and New    York: Routledge.

Behdad, Ali. 1994. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Duke: Duke University Press.

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Bouteldja, Houria. [2016] 2017. Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. Translated by Rachel Valinsky. South Pasadena : Semiotext(e).

Chérif, Mustapha. 2008. Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chow, Rey. 2001. “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.” PMLA 116, no. 1: 69-74.

Cixous, Hélène. 1998a. “Mon algériance” (“My Algeriance”). In Stigmata Escaping Texts, 153-172. New York: Routledge.

——-. 1998b. “Stigmata, or Job the dog.” In Stigmata Escaping Texts, 181-194. New York: Routledge.

——–. [1999] 2001. An Algerian Childhood: A Collection of Autobiographical Narratives. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. St. Paul, MN: Ruminator Books.

Derrida, Jacques. [1996] 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Di Cesare, Donatella Ester. 2012. Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz. Translated by Niall Keane. Albany: SUNY Press.

Egéa-Kuehne, Denise. 2001. “La langue de l’autre au croisement des cultures: Derrida et Le Monolinguisme de l’autre.” In Changements politiques et statut des langues: histoire et épistémologie, 1780–1945, edited by Marie-Christine Kok Escalle and Francine Melka, 175-98. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Herzog, Annabel. 2009. “‘Monolingualism’ or the Language of God: Scholem and Derrida on Hebrew and Politics.” Modern Judaism 29, no. 2: 226–38.

Hiddleston, Jane. 2010. Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Hochberg, Gil Z. 2007. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist       Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

——.  2016. “‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On the Prospect of Re-Membering the            Semites.’” ReOrient 1, no. 2: 192–223.

Memmi, Albert. [1953] 1972. La Statue de sel. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Edouard Roditi as The Pillar of Salt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

Laroussi, Farid. 2016. Postcolonial Counterpoint: Orientalism, France, and the Maghreb  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lowe, Lisa. 1991. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Naas, Michael. 2009. Derrida from Now On. New York: Fordham University Press.

Quayson, Ato. 2000. “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism.” In A Companion to Postcolonial
Studies, edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, 87-111. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ratskoff, Ben. 2018. “Liberation Utopias: Houria Bouteldja on Feminism, Anti-Semitism, and the Politics of Decolonization.” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 5.       lareviewofbooks.org/article/liberation-utopias-houria-bouteldja-on-feminism-anti-semitism-and-the-politics-of-decolonization/

Saito, Naoko. 2009. “Beyond Monolingualism: Philosophy as Translation and the Understanding of Other Cultures.” Ethics and Education 4, no. 2: 131–39.

Shohat, Ella. 2016. “Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited.” Paper presented at the Qattan Foundation in London, November 17, 2015. Video recording available at vimeo.com/154166534.

Young, Robert. 1990. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge.

[1] Not everyone welcomed this intervention. And some accused the French intellectuals for “asserting their authority over Algeria” and for ignoring “hard political questions” by choosing instead to write about their personal and privileged experiences and not about colonialism and its impact on the majority of the colonized people. See for example Laroussi (2016: 65).

[2] For readings of Monolingualism see, among many others: Di Cesare 2012; Naas 2008; Saito 2009; Egéa-Kuehne 2012; and Herzog 2009.

[3] “During the war . . . the word that begins with ‘j’ was not spoken it was a forbidden, dangerous poisonous word. . . . My mother . . . never said the word Jew in the street. Naïve, she said that a J. Exorcism. Taboo” (Cixous 1998a: 156).

[4] Dhimmis are non-Muslims under protection of Muslim law. The protection was historically extended to the “Peoples of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab), which included Jews, Christians, and sometimes Zoroastrians and Hindus. Protection, communal self-government, and freedom of religious practice were provided to dhimmis in return for tax. Dhimmis were also placed under restrictions and regulations in dress, occupation, and residence. The Senegalese riflemen (tirailleurs sénégalais) were among the many colonized peoples allured to serve in the French army during the First World War. By 1918, France had recruited some 192,000 tirailleurs from French West Africa, mostly from Senegal. It was only last year that France finally recognized a handful of these men and granted them French citizenship.

[5] At the time of writing this essay, Shohat was preparing her essay for publication but had not yet published a written version. A video recording of a talk version of the paper, “Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab /Jew Figure Revisited,” is available online at vimeo.com/154166534.

[6] It would be easy to do one of two things: 1. To accuse Derrida and Cixous of Orientalism. Their writings render themselves easily to such accusation. The most elaborate critique of Derrida’s Orientalism is famously provided by Rey Chow. Accounting for Derrida’s representation of Chinese writing in Of Grammatology, Chow deconstructs Derrida’s own European Orientalist approach. Derrida’s seminal text of deconstruction, she argues, orientalizes Chinese writing as an ideographic language and represents it as the West’s other, which as such escapes scrutiny. The East thus becomes represented by “a spectre, a kind of living dead that must, in his philosophizing, be preserved in its spectrality to remain a Utopian inspiration” (Chow 2001: 72). Cixous too has been blamed more than once, especially in her writings about Algeria. Farid Laroussi, for example, argues that Cixous’s very description of the Arab Jew is based on “an archaic type of Orientalism” (Laroussi 2016: 65). 2. The opposite tendency is to praise Derrida and Cixous (perhaps Deconstruction as such) for generating new ways of thinking and writing that directly challenge Orientalism, confront the superiority of the West, and disable the homogeneity of its “other,” the Orient. Since the early 1990s, several studies have emphasized the deep theoretical and political connections between deconstruction and postcolonialism. In 1990, Robert Young argued that at the heart of French deconstruction one finds “Algeria” as a postcolonial event. He famously opens his White Mythologies by proposing that “if so-called ‘so-called post-structuralism’ is the product of a single historical event, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence—no doubt itself both a symptom and a product” (Young 1990: 1). Since then, several critics have made similar arguments and connections. See, for example, Ahluwalia 2010 and Quayson 2000.

[7] In this sense these texts both continue and break away from the legacy of Albert Memmi, whose memoir The Pillar of Salt was perhaps the first to document the colonial tragedy in North Africa (Tunis in this case) through the figure of the Arab/Berber Jew as the failed figure of in-betweenness: indigenous but not quite, westernized but not enough. Memmi’s fragmented, displaced, exiled protagonist, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, is a tragic anti-hero and a true victim of colonial estrangement. Several years later Memmi would publish his essay on the impossibility of the Arab Jew, “Why we are not Arab Jews,” concluding that despite the end of colonialism, the figure of the indigenous Arab Jew is not and can no longer be, a possibility. As is well known, Memmi would also become, over the years, an adamant supporter of Zionism, despite choosing to live in France himself. Both Derrida and Cixous follow Memmi’s legacy in many ways, in their own autobiographical writings about Algeria, but they break away from his determined position, replacing it with ambiguity and open-ended futures. While Memmi presents a tragic image of displacement and exile, Derrida and Cixous, each in their own way, celebrate exile, displacement and the position of the outsider (with no mother tongue and no sense of belonging) as a privileged critical position. And as a position from which colonialism may appear not as a coherent subject matter based on monolithic power binarism but as a system based on the creation and generation of differences within. For a comprehensive reading of Memmi’s novel and other writings on the figure of the Arab Jew, see my chapter dedicated to his work (Hochberg 2007: 20-43).

This essay is part of a dossier on The Maghreb after Orientalism.

by Madeleine Dobie

Among the many commentaries devoted to The Battle of Algiers, a film widely hailed as a classic of anti-colonial cinema and perhaps the most significant political film since Battleship Potemkin, are Edward Said’s essay, “The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo,” published in the volume Reflections on Exile (Said 2000) and his contributions to a documentary, Pontecorvo: the Dictatorship of Truth, which is included among the bonus features of the Criterion Collection’s 2004 remastering of the film (Curtis 1992). Both pieces draw on a conversation between Said and Gillo Pontecorvo that took place at the director’s Rome apartment in 1988. The encounter between one of the foremost scholars of cultural imperialism and the most celebrated filmic portrayal of anti-colonial revolt would seem to be an ideal pairing. Battle of Algiers, after all, exemplifies the interweaving of politics and aesthetics that is the central concern of Said’s work. Yet in the end, the match-up falls short. Curiously, Said says little about either the film or the Algerian War of Independence as a watershed moment in the history of decolonization. Instead, both his essay and the documentary focus on the film’s Italian director, exploring the reasons for his relatively low productivity and what Said clearly perceived as his failure to make a film about the struggle of the Palestinian people. As the title of his essay announces, instead of focusing on the filmic object before him, Said embarks on a “quest” to understand the director’s artistic conflicts. Below, I consider this missed encounter from several perspectives, situating it in both the wider context of Said’s work and in relation to broader questions raised in colonial/postcolonial and Middle East studies.

Battle of Algiers (1966) is the product of a remarkable, perhaps unique partnership between a film maker and a cohort of political actors. Though it is often portrayed as the masterwork of Gillo Pontecorvo or, albeit less often, as the most significant aesthetic achievement of Algerian national cinema, it was in fact a product of collaboration and negotiation. While imprisoned in France, Saadi Yacef, commander of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) forces in Algiers during the ‘Battle of Algiers’—the dramatic standoff between French paratroopers and Algerian militants that ran from late 1956 to the fall of 1957—wrote a memoir revisiting events that had captured the imagination of people in and beyond Algeria (Yacef 1962). After his release at the end of the war, Yacef, who as a child had adored movies, wrote a film treatment based on his memoir and pitched it to some of the leading Italian directors of the day. Rejected by Francesco Rosi and Luchino Visconti, he met with interest from Pontecorvo, a left-wing film-maker who had already visited Algeria with his longtime collaborator, the screenwriter Franco Solinas, with the goal of making a film about the Algerian revolution.  Pontecorvo initially planned to foreground the perspective of a French paratrooper. Though this might seem to be a surprising angle given that Pontecorvo had led the antifascist militia in Milan in the 1940s, it is consistent with his previous film, Kapo (1960), which explored the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a young Jewish girl who, under a borrowed identity, becomes a guard in a concentration camp. These somewhat unexpected perspectives reflected, among other things, the director’s commitment to exploring the political and psychological investments of actors on all sides of a violent conflict.

The meeting of Yacef and Pontecorvo yielded a film that was neither the version of events offered in the former’s treatment—which Pontecorvo and Solinas dismissed as wooden and purely ideological—nor the execution of the latter’s initial plan to examine the internal conflicts of a French soldier, an angle that Yacef could not have embraced. If the artistic choices of the film—the casting of non-professional actors, the imitation of the style of newsreel and the iconic soundtrack by Ennio Morricone—must be credited to the Italian team, Yacef, backed by the newly installed FLN government, provided historical detail as well as logistical support and much of the funding. In recognition of this collaboration, the film was registered as a co-production between the Rome-based company, Igor Film and Yacef’s startup, Casbah Film.[1]

This merger of different perspectives and contributions disappears in Said’s commentaries, which treat the film as a pure product of Pontecorvo’s cinematic vision and political consciousness. While the documentary The Dictatorship of Truth includes sections on the director’s important collaborations with Franco Solinas, Ennio Morricone and cinematographer Marcello Gatti, it says next to nothing about the involvement of Algerians, noting only that one of the non-actors hired to perform in the film happened to be the former commander of the FLN in Algiers! Said speculates that several scenes may have been based on Pontecorvo’s experiences, twenty years earlier, as a leader of the Partisans in Milan, missing the seemingly obvious point that his Algerian collaborators had just lived through the events that were reenacted in the film, some of which are remembered in Yacef’s memoir.

Said’s neglect of the Algerian roots of Battle of Algiers in favor of the creative process of its European director reflect broader emphases and exclusions of his work. My observations about these tendencies, will, however, be ventured less with the goal of criticizing Said—already the object of so many critiques as well as a great deal of veneration—than to highlight wider patterns in the scholarship devoted to the Middle East and North Africa and to the interfaces of colonialism and culture. I argue that Said’s approach illustrates a dominant reception of Battle of Algiers as a monument to decolonization as an international political movement, a take that is certainly not ‘wrong,’ but which underrepresents the film’s specific rconnection to Algerian nationalism (Daulatzai, 2016). In Said’s case, I suggest that this reading was shaped by a deep-seated reticence toward nationalism and preference for internationalist and exilic politics and culture. I also highlight the difficult relationship between—to put things rather schematically—anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, decolonization and decoloniality as these modes of intellectual and political engagement are reflected in Said’s engagement with the cultural productions of non-Western writers and artists.

1. Locating Decolonization: the Maghreb and the Middle East

The fact that Said finds little to say about Battle of Algiers as a product and account of Algerian nationalism at first glance mirrors the broader geopolitical compass of his work. Algeria, and indeed the entire Maghreb region are scarcely mentioned in Orientalism (Said 1978), Said’s pioneering study of European discourses about the Arab and Muslim East. The travel narratives, political treatises and novels examined in this seminal work bear for the most part on Egypt, the Mashrek and India, not the French colonies of North Africa. In a particularly glaring omission, Said states that “by the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955 almost all of the Orient had gained its political independence from the Western empires” (1978: 104), overlooking the war in Algeria, which raged until 1962 and which was the region’s most significant episode of anti-colonial violence. This seeming blind spot in relation to the Maghreb is, however, not limited to Said. To put it in context, we need to consider the relationship between colonialism and Orientalism, at least in the French context, as well as the contours and divisions of the contemporary academic landscape.

Orientalism posits a direct connection between colonial history and Orientalist representation.That is to say, Said claims that European authors wrote obsessively about the regions that their nations were in the process of occupying and governing. Yet, at least in the case of French history and literature, there was actually something of a disconnect between the colonial occupation of North Africa and the most prevalent subjects of Orientalist literature and art. Though a few French-language artists and writers traveled to and/or wrote about the Maghreb (Eugène Delacroix, Eugène Fromentin, Théophile Gautier, and Isabelle Eberhardt are among the main examples), many more visited and fantasized about Egypt, Turkey and the lands of the ‘Levant.’ For example, neither of the French writers who are most central to Said’s analysis—Gérard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert—visited or wrote about France’s most important colony. In my book Foreign Bodies, where I discuss this ‘displacement,’ I suggest that one explanation is that colonial rule and the hybrid social and cultural forms to which it gave rise militated against the exotic tendencies of Orientalism (Dobie 2001: 4-6). The upshot is that Said devotes more time to French works about Egypt than to texts that represent Algeria.

If the Maghreb is relatively marginal to orientalist discourse, it has also been neglected in the intersecting fields of Middle East Arabic literary studies as they have developed in and beyond United States. Built around the Cold-War model of area studies, American departments of Middle East studies have foregrounded the regions and issues that are of greatest strategic interest to the United States, notably Israel, Palestine, Egypt and the nations of the Persian Gulf. Language has also been an important factor in this distribution. Shaped by the history of British colonialism, these regions share a legacy of English, particularly in sectors such as education and culture. The Maghreb, by contrast, bears the distinctive imprint of French colonialism and French remains an important language of communication and administration. Though language is clearly not an impermeable barrier to cultural exchange or to scholarship, its role in shaping academic fields and areas of scholarly expertise shouldn’t be underestimated. Many leading specialists of Algeria are based in French studies or history departments rather than in Middle East Studies programs. Only since 2011, when events in Tunisia and Libya ignited the ‘Arab spring,’ has the Maghreb begun to come into focus as an important terrain for research on democracy, religion and the role of civil society.

2. Algeria, Palestine and the Pitfalls of Nationalism

But if at first it seems possible to connect Said’s curious silence on the Algerian context of Battle of Algiers to the broader marginality of the Maghreb within Orientalism and the field of Middle East studies, a more extensive reading of his work yields a more complex picture. Though Algeria doesn’t receive much attention in Orientalism, it is discussed in a number of other texts, including many interviews and the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism, in which  the Emir Abdelkader—the 19^th-century leader of resistance to the French conquest—and Frantz Fanon are invoked as examples of anti-colonial resistance. Fanon was a frequent point of reference for Said, and indeed furnished one of his main examples of the politically-engaged intellectual. Considering these various texts together, I think it can be said that Algeria played two different and, in some ways, opposed roles in Said’s thought. On the one hand, it offered an important point of comparison with the Palestinian national struggle. On the other, it provided an illustration of the failings of nationalism.

In relation to Palestine, Algeria represents primarily a source of hope: the promise of a successful overthrow of colonial occupation. In an interview with Timothy Appleby, Said noted, for example, that although the French always proclaimed that would never leave Algeria, they ultimately did (Said 1986a). In imagining how an end to the occupation of Palestinian lands might occur he emphasized that while he didn’t endorse terrorism, he did support territorial resistance on the model of the Algerian revolution. In another interview, with Bruce Robbins, Said compared the protests of the Palestinian Intifada to “scenes from The Battle of Algiers” (Said 1998: 325).

The comparison between the two situations and Said’s apparent hope for an Algerian-style reversal of entrenched colonial domination in Palestine hovers in the background of his discussion of Pontecorvo’s career. As we have seen, Said frames his encounter with Pontecorvo and his work as a “quest” to understand why, after making two of the most important films about “politically engendered violence,” Battle of Algiers and Burn! [Queimada!], which depicts a slave revolt in Cuba, he didn’t achieve a third success. He goes so far as to say that he is “haunted” by the question of Pontecorvo’s disappearance from public view and speculates about the impediments that may have forestalled subsequent projects. He characterizes Ogro, the director’s 1979 film about Basque nationalists, as much too tentative, a failing that he attributes to the tense political situation in Italy at the time. Finally, he wonders why Pontecorvo abandoned a project on the Palestinian Intifada that would have been the “logical contemporary extension” of his work in Battle of Algiers (Said 2000: 289).

Said conversation with Pontecorvo’s about Palestine during their 1988 interview, seems, at least from Said’s account, to have been strained. He reports that Pontecorvo accepted his characterization of the Israel-Palestine relationship as a colonial situation, but then disagreed with almost everything else that he said about it. Said recalls airing the idea that Battle of Algiers was possible because the Algerian revolution had been successful and that a parallel European film about the Palestinians couldn’t be made since the conflict remained unresolved. Pontecorvo disgreed, venturing that it would be possible to make a film about a failure, but observed that the situation between Israelis and Palestinians was more complicated and less clear-cut than that of the French in Algeria. Unhappy with this response, Said, in turn, replied that “to us it is clear.” As the exchange continued, Said asked Pontecorvo whether being Jewish affected his judgment of the situation and Pontecorvo testily insisted tthat it did not prevent him from fully grasping the Palestinians’ perspective  (Said 2000: 290). Said ends the essay by acknowledging that the interview was tense and highlighting the paradoxes of a man who, in his eyes, sublimated politics to music and image and who was unable to carry his political engagement into the present (Said 2000: 291). This summary of Pontecorvo’s artistic and political dilemmas is clearly mediated by Said’s own preoccupations and probably reveals more about the critic than about the director. The issues that Said flags, i.e. the tensions between aesthetics and politics, were central to his own intellectual project and loom large in most critical readings of his work. Returning to the question of the presence/absence of Algeria in Said’s work, I would say that the interview, as replayed in the essay, illustrates a dynamic by which Algeria primarily came into focus as a counterpart to the Palestinian conflict.

If Said saw Algeria as a model of decolonization that the Palestinians could potentially emulate, he also deployed it as a repoussoir: an example of failed nationalism and indeed of the failings of nationalism. Though he certainly acknowledged the crucial role of nationalism in forging the political solidarity required to overthrow colonial rule, he also expressed deep reservations about its propensity to suppress internal difference and to become a theology or a fetish. “For all its success—indeed because of its success—in ridding many territories of their colonial overlords, nationalism remains a deeply problematic enterprise,” he observes in Culture and Imperialism (Said 1993: 223). In this and other works, Said contrasts what he regards as the narrow identitarianism of nationalism with “a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world.” He invariably prefers this hybrid, exilic or contrapuntal vision to separatist or nativist creeds and he repeatedly contests the conflation of nationalism and political independence with emancipation (Said 1993: 277).

Said indeed goes so far as to identify nationalism as one of the principal foundations of modern political authoritarianism. Drawing on Fanon’s analysis of the deviations of national consciousness in the postcolonial state and on Eqbal Ahmad’s reflections on the “pathologies of power,” he observes that colonial domination was often replaced by class domination at the hands of new post-colonial elites (Ahmad 1981). Algeria furnished one of his main examples of this kind of derailment. He described it unsparingly as “a one-party state with dictatorial rule and . . . an uncompromising fundamentalist opposition” (Said 1993: 226). He indeed went so far as to characterize the Front islamique du salut, the Islamist opposition party founded in the late 1980s, as the dialectical opposite of the degraded nationalist party (Said 1996). In the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism, which delves into the history of opposition to colonialism, Said contrasts the campaign waged against the French conquest by the Emir AbdelKader with the later militancy of Fanon. Whereas the former’s resistance was grounded in Sufi-inspired nativism (Said 1993: 332), Fanon, for whom Said expresses deep admiration, came to Algeria, and thus to nationalism, as an outsider. As this contrast illustrates, Said’s ambivalence toward nationalism was interwoven with his stance in favor of (a cautiously defined) secularism and his distaste for the merger of political and religious fundamentalisms.

Battle of Algiers is, of course, on one level a film about nationalism, though it can and often has also been approached more broadly as a celebration of popular resistance to power. To approach it as a film specifically about Algerian history is to be forced to confront the downward turn of Algerian nationalism starting with the rapid transformation of the FLN from nationalist insurgency to authoritarian, single-party regime. The almost unbearable character of this transition may be one reason why Said, like so many other viewers, elected to approach the film through a wider lens as a monument to the international movement of decolonization.

3. The Auteur and Collective Politics

If Said’s reading of Battle of Algiers as the product of the genius of a European director reflects his complex relation to the Maghreb, Algeria and its history of nationalism, it also illustrates signature elements of his critical methodology, notably his belief in the value of great works and his fascination with the complex figure of the engaged intellectual. Meditations on the dilemmas and private and public struggles of Gramsci, Foucault and Fanon, among other major thinkers, appear throughout Said’s work. This attentiveness to the relationship between political activism and the biographical context of the production of ideas was interwoven with his concern with the often unacknowledged relationship between academic disciplines and politics, a concern first articulated in Orientalism (Said 1978: 6-12). It was certainly also a reflection of his own bifurcated position as a literary scholar and unofficial spokesperson for the Palestinian cause. His perception of Battle of Algiers as a manifestation of Pontecorvo’s aesthetic vision and political history was in many ways consistent with these wider preoccupations.

One of the recurrent elements of Said’s reflections on the engaged intellectual is the contrast that he draws between Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon (Said 1993: 335, Said 1985: 39-40). Though Foucault’s concept of the discursive formation provides one of the theoretical scaffolds of Orientalism, the French thinker’s model of power circulating through society is—as many critics have observed—hard to reconcile with Said’s emphasis on the top-down exercise of colonial domination. Said himself quickly recognized this problem and gradually distanced himself from the work of Foucault, whom he characterized as brilliantly inventive but increasingly apolitical, interested in the “micro-physics” of power but lacking a theory of and even a real interest in resistance (Said 1993: 29). In his writing, this portrait of Foucault is often supported by a counter-image of Fanon, whom Said came to embrace as an intellectual and political model. Somewhat reductively, Said painted Foucault as an individualist, preoccupied with the meaning of power for the self, the body and identity, while acclaiming Fanon as the advocate of a collective politics that transcends the individual (Said 1986b: 51).

Given this judgment, it’s somewhat ironic that Said approaches Battle of Algiers, which was both the fruit of a collaboration and a representation of collective political solidarity through the exclusive lens of its meaning within Pontecorvo’s career. Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas were well acquainted with Fanon’s work, and traces and even paraphrases of Wretched of the Earth can be found throughout the film, from the opening sequence on the divided colonial city to the portrayal of women’s politicization and the representation of nationalism as a vehicle for anti-colonialism (Srivastava 2006). Strangely, however, Said’s commentary neglects the film’s depiction of the collective politics of protest theorized by Fanon. His literary methodology, constructed around his admiration for great writers, was fundamentally in conflict in this instance with his political vision.

4. The Battle of Algiers and ‘The Voyage In’

One of the most common criticisms leveled at Orientalism has been that in describing the prison of dominant representations, Said leaves no room for alternative, non-European perspectives or for voices raised in resistance. In responding to this objection, Said often noted that he was a specialist of European literature and not, say, the Arabic literary tradition. But he also took the opportunity to take a conceptual stance by rejecting the idea of replacing the canon of European works with a counter-canon of non-European literature (Sprinker 1992). But if Said offers explanations for this rejection of alternative and counter canons, his work at times seems to betray an attachment to European culture that simply precludes awareness of other traditions. Take, for example, his observation that Pontecorvo’s take on cinéma vérité had a profound influence on subsequent political filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Costa-Gavras and Oliver Stone—all European or American directors (Curtis 1992). Though he could have included in this list figures such as the Egyptian Khaled Youssef or the Algerian Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (who worked with Pontecorvo’s cinematographer, Marcello Gatti), these names apparently didn’t come to mind.

Instead of mapping disparate world traditions, Said writes about the grafting of anti-colonial and Third-Worldist visions such as those of Fanon onto the thought of European thinkers such as Hegel and Marx. One of his terms for this hybridization of political theory—the counterpart to European representations of other parts of the world—is the “voyage in.” In Said’s eyes, modern world culture is shaped by exchanges and cross-pollinations, yet bears, above all, the mark of engagement with European influences. This perspective, aligned with his theory of “contrapuntal” culture and “exilic” consciousness, is at once celebratory and tragic. If Said consistently expresses a preference for the hybrid or creolized over the presumed purity of the “native,” he also acknowledges the anguish involved in repurposing European epistemologies to critique European hegemony.

I would propose that, although Said clearly didn’t see it that way, Battle of Algiers can be seen as an example of the “voyage in.” Saadi Yacef, the revolutionary turned film producer, was a movie lover who thought that the aesthetic techniques of Italian neorealist cinema could be marshaled to memorialize the struggle for Algerian independence. The alchemy of his partnership with Pontecorvo played an important role in turning his country’s revolution into a world historical event. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the film put Algiers on the map of revolutionaries from the Black Panthers to the Red Army Faction. The fact that Said saw the film as an example of European political film-making rather than as a merger of different motives, experiences and political visions, exposes the always fragile boundary between the recognition and celebration of postcolonial hybridity and the re-canonization of European culture.

Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French at Columbia University. Her publications include Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (2001), Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (2010) and, with historian Myriam Cottias, a critical re-edition of two mid twentieth-century novels by the Martinican writer, Mayotte Capécia (2012). She is currently working on a monograph titled After Violence, about literature and cinema since the Algerian Black Decade. Her piece, “The Battle of Algiers at 50: From ’60s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point,” appeared in The LA Review of Books in September 2016.

References

Ahmad, Eqbal. 1981. “The Neo-Fascist State: Notes on the Pathology of Power in the Third World.” Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 2: 170-180.

Bensmaïl, Malek, dir. 2017. La Bataille d’Alger: un film dans l’histoire.

Algeria/France/Switzerland: Ina, Ciné+, Histoire, Imago, Radio­te­le­vione Svizera, Hikayet Films, Al Jazeera, Radio-Canada/RDI

Curtis, Oliver, dir. 1992. Pontecorvo: the Dictatorship of Truth. United Kingdom: Channel Four and Bandung Films.

Daulatzai, Sohail. 2016. Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue. Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press.

Dobie, Madeleine. 2001. Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1968. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Maspero.

Pontecorvo, Gillo, dir. 1966. The Battle of Algiers. Italy and Algeria: Igor Film and Casbah Film.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

—. 1985. “In the Shadow of the West” Interview with Jonathan Crary and Phil Mariani, Wedge. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, edited by Edward Said and Gauri Viswanathan, 39-53. New York: Pantheon.

—. 1986a. “Can an Arab and a Jewish State Coexist?” Interview with Timothy Appleby, The Globe and Mail. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 287-291.

—. 1986b. “Overlapping Territories; the World, the Text and the Critic” Interview with Gary Hentzi and Anne McClintock. Critical Text. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 53-68.

—. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

—.1996. “Language, History and the Production of Knowledge.” Interview with

Gauri Viswanathan.” Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 262-279.

—. 1998. “American Intellectuals and Middle-East Politics.” Interview with Bruce

Robbins, Social Text. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 323-342.

—. 2000. “The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo.” In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 282-292. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Srivatava, Neelam. 2005. “Anti-colonial Vioelnce and the ‘Dictatorship of Truth’ in the Films of Gillo Pontecorvo. An Interview.” Interventions 7, no. 1 : 97-106.

Yacef, Saadi, 1962. Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger, décembre 1956-septembre 1957. Paris: Julliard.

Sprinker, Michael and Jennifer Wicke. 1992. “Interview with Edward Said.” In Edward Said, a Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker, 221-264. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

I would like to thank Marco and Simone Pontecorvo and Malek Bensmaïl for their help with the preparation of this essay.

[1] A new documentary about The Battle of Algiers reveals that Yacef was given a large sum in cash by the FLN leadership, which saw him as a potential political threat and was therefore eager to divert his attention to international film-making (Bensmaïl, 2017).

This essay is part of a dossier on The Maghreb after Orientalism.

by Brian T. Edwards

The provocation for this dossier is a critical examination of what it might mean that Edward Said neglected, even ignored, the Maghreb in his 1978 masterpiece Orientalism. Or, more productively, given that Said teaches us to understand world “areas” as politically constructed categories, what it might have meant to his argument had he given extended consideration to a region (al-maghrib, French North Africa­) that has a particularly complex relationship to colonialism and representation. As I’ll argue below, cinema—both foreign and domestic—has been particularly important to representations of the Maghreb. Moreover, Hollywood film was central to the US encounter with the Arab world at a turning point in political history. So as we cast our eye backward on Said’s work on its 40-year anniversary, I inquire about artistic medium and wonder whether Said’s silence on the Maghreb is related to his silence on cinema. In other words, is there a particular relationship between the Maghreb, Orientalism, and cinema? And what in turn would extended attention to cinema mean to understanding the way Orientalism operated in the US and American cultural production in Orientalism?

In a piece written for Interview in 1989, Edward Said rhapsodized about Johnny Weissmuller, the swimmer-turned-actor who played Tarzan in a dozen movies during the 1930s and 1940s. In the Hungarian-born, German-American Weissmuller’s interpretation, Said saw a representation of exile that exceeded the literary character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. “[A]nyone who saw Weissmuller in his prime can associate Tarzan only with his portrayal,” he wrote. “Weissmuller’s apeman was a genuinely mythic figure, a pure Hollywood product” (Said 2000: 328).

Years later, in a 1998 interview with Sut Jhally, Edward Said made another notable reference to Hollywood, describing the joy with which he watched movies as a child:

Growing up in the Middle East . . . [I] used to delight in films on the Arabian Nights, you know done by Hollywood producers . . . with Jon Hall and Maria Montez and Sabu. I mean they were talking about [the] part of the world that I lived in but it had this kind of exotic, magical quality which was what we call today Hollywood. So there was that whole repertory of the sheiks in the desert and galloping around and the scimitars and the dancing girls and all of that.[1]

The next year, in his memoir Out of Place, Said elaborated on his youthful fascination with cinema as a source of stories and referred to Saturday afternoons spent at the Cairo cinemahouse. “It was very odd,” Said comments, “but it did not occur to me that the cinematic Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad, whose genies, Baghdad cronies, and sultans I completely possessed in the fantasies I counterpointed with my lessons, all had American accents, spoke no Arabic, and ate mysterious foods—perhaps ‘sweetmeats,’ or was it more like stew, rice, lamb cutlets?—that I could never quite make out.”[2]

Given Said’s fanboy appreciation of Hollywood colonial fantasies and his interest in the literary representation of the “pleasures of imperialism,” it is perhaps surprising that cinema plays such a minor role in Orientalism or his work in general.[3] Indeed, outside a reference to “Valentino’s Sheik,” a mention of newsreels, and a comment about “caricatures propagated in the popular culture,” cinema is not present in the 1978 masterwork (287, 290). To be sure, in interviews Said would frequently make references to popular culture and media, including television, but feature-length films do not figure in his otherwise capacious analysis.

Rather than take Said to task for yet another lacuna, we should wonder whether his relative silence on cinema in Orientalism is dictated by the historical arc of his argument, a critical distaste for popular culture, or is otherwise meaningful. The historical explanation is compelling enough: Said anchors Orientalism in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only at the end of which does cinema begin to emerge. Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt is a key episode for Said, particularly notable since the French imperial conquest was accompanied by a massive scholarly project. Said’s archive of Orientalism is rich in poetry, fiction, anthropology, scholarship, and painting, and he is clearly more interested in rich, textual discourse than popular ephemera. Gérard de Nerval and Eugène Delacroix are central; Valentino and Sabu are not.

Let us consider when cinema arrives on the scene. Historians of film point to the 1890s as the decade when cinema was invented—the projection of short films by the Lumière Brothers in Paris in 1895 was a signal event. Scholars who have attended to the history of ways of seeing and looking have charted earlier urban forms (the panaroma painting, the shopping arcade) which make the arrival of cinema and its dramatically different manner of representation seem less starkly disruptive (Anne Friedberg 1993; Jonathan Crary 1990).  Despite the arrival of this new form, feature-length films, such as the massively popular The Sheik (1921) and Foreign Legion pictures such as Beau Geste (1926; remade famously in 1939, and several times later), were some time off, after the Great War of 1914-18.

Still, given the extent to which Said focuses on twentieth-century US forms of domination in the final, 120-page chapter, it is somewhat surprising that Orientalism pays no attention to the most prevalent and dominant form of cultural production during the so-called “American century.” A decade later, his extended and subtle reading of Weissmuller’s essentially mute portrayal of Tarzan—in sharp distinction to the highly literate character in Burroughs’s novels—demonstrates Said’s sense that cinema is notably and profoundly different as a representational medium. Thus the lack of attention to cinema in Orientalism is both lamentable and provocative, since it suggests that Orientalism may follow different logics when it appears in the seventh art. And given the dominance Hollywood would come to exert globally, and the ways in which American audiences gravitated to visual media (both film and television) for entertainment in the second half of the twentieth century, splicing cinema out would seem to limit our understanding of how the US managed its emerging relationship to the colonial world. That films set in the Maghreb are central to this bibilography (from The Sheik and its sequels, to desert romances such as The Garden of Allah and Morocco and Foreign Legion pictures in the 1920s and 1930s to Casablanca and desert war films during the 1940s and beyond) is not, I’ll argue, incidental.

There are different ways to understand the importance of film to Orientalism. For my purposes I want to outline two distinct, but related, aspects. First, in the early 20^th century, cinema takes its place in the chronology of dominant forms of artistic production. And second, cinema has an intimate relationship to the history of empire, and to postcolonial forms of domination. These may be separated. In a famous passage, Said notes: “The period of immense advance in the institutions and content of Orientalism coincides exactly with the period of unparalleled European expansion; from 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface to about 85 percent of it” (1978: 41). During the height of Orientalism, as Said periodizes it, the dominant form of narrative cultural production is the novel, followed by travel literature. Precisely when European imperial power is at its apex, a new challenger arrives, both in geopolitical and cultural terms. Cinema emerges as a new technology and form of entertainment at the height of the colonial project and will itself become the dominant form of narrative cultural production just as the United States is emerging as a hegemonic power. By the time of World War II, when what Said calls American “ascendancy” on the global scene is secured, the Hollywood studio system has been established as a global corporate power. In what ways would Hollywood’s representation of the so-called Orient reflect the particularities of US neo-imperialism? In what ways would cinema help to create the logics of the postcolonial, neoliberal order?

We can create bibliographies to buttress both the chronological and the neo-imperial approaches to film and Orientalism I have outlined above. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994) took an extended look at what they called tropes of empire in cinema, including extended examination of mummy films and the theme of archeology as Orientalism. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (1997), in the introduction to their important collection Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, argued that Said’s discourse analysis could be extended to film. In her contribution to that same collection, Antonia Lant (1997) noted the fascination with Egypt, mummies, and pharaohs in very early cinema. Such work provides us with an implicit bridge from the late Victorian novels that Said was so effective at analyzing (such as Kipling’s Kim, 1900-1901) to the new medium, and helps us build the case for the chronological approach.

Another group of scholars, emerging from American studies in the wake of Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s watershed collection Cultures of United States Imperialism, with its call for attention to particular forms of US American colonialism, help build a different sort of case that focuses more on American political ascendancy. This approach tends to pick up with the post-WWII period. Melani McAlister’s important Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (2001) incorporates a brilliant analysis of Biblical epics in the early cold war. McAlister shows how the portrayal of the Holy Land in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956) crafted a vision of American supremacy that channeled rising religious sentiments in the US, suturing American power with the contemporary Middle East reimagined in Biblical terms. As the American postwar economy boomed, a Hollywood version of the Orientalist trope of superfluity overlapped with the popular fascination with American “abundance” as source of the nation’s newfound economic and political strength, melding the technicolor representation of the Orient with Hollywood’s prowess (Edwards, 2001). In the 1950s, Hollywood studios harnessed the sumptuousness of the imagined Orient in lush films to attract audiences to cinema houses as the rise of television posed a commercial threat. In this sense, Hollywood Orientalism served a decidedly domestic purpose. In a similar vein, Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003) made a case not only for extending Said’s model to Asia and the Pacific, as the US-Soviet confrontation took on a global scale, but into cinema and popular, “middlebrow” culture. Klein’s analysis includes Reader’s Digest, James Michener, and film musicals such as South Pacific and The King and I, which she argued proffered lessons about international integration to a mass public.

But if the early cold war saw a spate of Biblical epics, Arabian Nights musicals, and historical romances as spaces to work out domestic questions, the films that emerged during and/or depicted World War II’s North African campaign have a more complex legacy. Here is where cinema and Hollywood’s Maghreb both enhance and extend Said’s account of Orientalism most directly. After the November 1942 landings on the Moroccan and Algerian coast (known as Operation Torch), mass numbers of American GIs entered the war for the first time. The American public back home were forced to come to terms with new locations on a world map that were both completely foreign and somehow familiar from Hollywood films from previous decades (references to The Sheik and Beau Geste were frequent in the press). Hollywood war films set in the Maghreb and produced and released during the war juxtaposed figurations of the desert and geopolitical ambitions of the United States during the North African Campaign. General George S. Patton himself, who led the Operation Torch landings at Casablanca, expressed his sense that the land he had “taken” by military means in November 1942 would “be worth a million to Hollywood.” He was quickly proven prescient when Warner Brothers released Casablanca three weeks later (Edwards, 2005).

At first blush, the 1942 Warner Brothers film Casablanca would seem to offer evidence for Said’s case that the continuities of Orientalism carry over into the period of American ascendency. “The old Orientalism was broken into many parts; yet all of them still served the traditional Orientalist dogmas” (Said 1978: 284). In this sense, Casablanca is arguably the best example of high American Orientalism because it imagines a handoff from French colonial power to American models of domination (“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Rick says famously to Louis Renault, the fictional Vichy prefect of police as they stroll off into a foggy studio set). Although Said does not discuss the film, it would seem to lend itself to this sort of analysis, the transfer of power from one empire to another. Indeed, Hollywood and the Maghreb were at the center of how Americans came to understand “the Arab,” and Casablanca itself, as one of the most successful films in Hollywood history, would become a familiar touchstone. And yet we should also see in Casablanca how it figures a shift in the representational mode of Orientalism itself. Even while Casablanca represents the geopolitical transition from French late-colonialism to postcolonial US patronage in its story and characters, the temporal logics of cinema as medium constituted a distinctly American version of Orientalism.

Casablanca is in this regard the ur-text of American Orientalism because it expressed in celluloid the collision of military occupation and cultural representation, not only within the plot of the film, in which an American casino owner moves from disinterested businessman to wartime political commitment, but also by taking place within a temporality particular to cinema. (The song “As Time Goes By” is shorthand for this temporality.) Beyond Rick’s narrative arc, the studio’s sense that representation on film is akin to ownership is key to the emerging US relationship to Europe’s former colonies. Rick’s disjointed sense of what time he occupies in occupied Morocco (“If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?”) and the famous repetition of Sam’s performance of the theme song operate on a logic of what I call global racial time:  the assumption that Arabs and Africans in the global South were at a temporal remove from residents of the United States (see Edwards, 2005, chapter 1). This temporality underlies what would emerge as neoliberalism. The canonical Hollywood film set in an occupied Maghreb suggests that cinema does more than merely repeat and extend British and French Orientalism, but that it innovates too.

That Casablanca quickly became a Hollywood blockbuster in large part because of the coincidence of the US military landings at Casablanca in November 1942 and the interest in the region created by the subsequent North African campaign leads to a further aspect of how cinema creates a distinct form of Orientalism. The film, shot on California stage sets, quickly became equated with the city. The distance or difference between Casablanca and Casablanca was quickly obscured by the success of the movie. Four years later, Warner Brothers tried to discourage the Marx Brothers from entitling their final film A Night in Casablanca. Warner Bros. made the spurious claim that they held a copyright on the word Casablanca. (Groucho Marx responded by claiming that he and his siblings therefore controlled the word brothers and went ahead with the project.) But what begins as a strange joke emerges as a neoliberal reality as location shooting expanded substantially in subsequent decades. Morocco itself would stand in for a wide range of Middle Eastern or “Oriental” locations: the ksar of Ait Benhaddou, on the road between Marrakech and Ouarzazate, would provide the backdrops for both Aqaba in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and the lost Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (1962); the area outside Ouarzazate stood in for Tibet in Kundun (1997); Marrakech was Cairo and the desert near Erfoud was Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in The Mummy (1999); Casablanca substituted for Tehran and Beirut in Syriana (2005). One “Oriental” location could substitute for the rest by the Hollywood logics of Orientalism. And as neoliberal arrangements emerged to perpetuate the pattern, Atlas Corporation Studios was founded in Ouarzazate in 1983 by a Moroccan entrepreneur and has been partner to a long list of Hollywood productions since then.

With the advent of the digital age, beginning in the 1990s, another epistemic shift would take place, which goes beyond the purview of this essay. YouTube became an important platform in Morocco within which Moroccans themselves could represent life around them, including in some sensational and influential exposés of police corruption (the so-called Sniper of Targuist) and practices of homosexuality (the notorious Larache wedding videos) (see Edwards, 2016). Here the shift in modes toward YouTube suggests a way to understand the neoliberal relationship between Morocco and the US as a new chapter in Orientalism itself. In the 21st century, digital circulation and an interactive relationship of individual users to media allows for a more dynamic relationship to representation. However, new media and the ability of structurally disempowered amateur filmmakers to share their work with large audiences is not simply liberating, despite the claims of so-called “cyber-utopianists.” The global rise of social media as a space for sharing images and film clips dovetails too with virulent strands of nationalism, and the rapidity and range with which digital technology allows messages to circulate has at times exacerbated some of the tendencies latent in Orientalism. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump leveraged traditions of Orientalism in his call for a Muslim ban and in his excoriation of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a US soldier killed in Iraq in 2004 who criticized Trump at the Democratic National Convention (see Edwards, 2018). The ways in which Orientalism survives and mutates in the digital age ushers in a new stage, as the technologies and their logics intersect with the geopolitical concerns that are at the center of representations of Arab and Muslim peoples and places. In order to come to an understanding of those present conjunctures, we must see the transitional stage of Hollywood Orientalism for both its own continuities and ruptures with the previous, colonialist mode.

Brian T. Edwards is Professor of English and Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Prior to moving to Tulane in 2018, he was on the faculty of Northwestern University, where he was the Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and the founding director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies. He is the author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (2005), After the American Century: The Ends of US Culture in the Middle East (2016), and co-editor of Globalizing American Studies (2010).

References

Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Edwards, Brian T. 2001. “Yankee Pashas and Buried Women: Containing Abundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism.” Film & History 31, no. 2: 13-24.

—. 2005. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

—. 2016. After the American Century: The Ends of US Culture in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press.

—. 2018. “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations,” Arizona Quarterly 74, no. 3: 25-45.

Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. University of California Press.

Kaplan, Amy and Donald Pease, eds. 1993. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Klein, Christina. 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Lant, Antonia. 1997. “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, edited by Studlar and Bernstein, 69-98 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

McAlister, Melani. 2001. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

—. (1989) 2000.  “Jungle Calling.” In Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays, 327-36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge.

Studlar, Gaylyn and Matthew Bernstein. 1997. Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

[1] “Edward Said: On ‘Orientalism,’” dir. Sut Jhally, Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1998. Transcript available at: http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Edward-Said-On-Orientalism-Transcript.pdf

[2] Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 34.

[3] Said’s chapter on Kipling’s Kim in Culture and Imperialism is called “The Pleasures of Imperialism” (Said 1993: 132-62).