Category: The Maghreb After Orientalism

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).

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

by David Fieni

In his free verse anti-manifesto from 1976, Class Warrior – Taoist Style, Abdelkebir Khatibi warns readers against the dangers of turning metaphor into an idée fixe, challenging them to “hold to poetic knowledge without creating a fetish” (2017: 17).  Such a formulation sums up one core impulse of Khatibi’s body of work, which activates the opaque force of language in the elaboration of a decolonial idiom that shutters back and forth between critique and poetics.  This injunction also offers a productive frame for understanding a central task of Edward Said’s Orientalism, namely the imperative of detailing the violence involved in the figuration of worldly experience.  Thinking through the legacy of Said’s groundbreaking study forty years after its publication, and particularly the book’s continued relevance both in the Maghreb and for critical work about the Maghreb, prompts us to ask how critique today can resist turning knowledge about the Maghreb – poetic or otherwise – into a fetish.  In what follows, I work through some of the ramifications of this confluence of Khatibi and Said regarding figuration and knowledge as it relates to the disciplines of Francophone studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial criticism.

In “Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison,” Françoise Lionnet makes a welcome call for a renewed interest in Khatibi’s work for comparative critique, and more specifically, for the study of postcolonial and transnational literatures.  She reexamines Khatibi’s critical writing, focusing on the key chapters in Maghreb Pluriel (Plural Maghreb), alongside the work of Edward Said.  Lionnet begins by comparing Khatibi’s “double-critique” and Said’s practice of “contrapuntal reading,” but ends with an appraisal of the two authors’ different approaches to the critical practice of contrepoint. She argues that while both thinkers should be lauded for having opened new avenues of reading, rendering minor or marginalized voices audible amidst the din of colonial and neo-colonial babble, Khatibi ultimately offers a more convincing model for critique:

Therein I believe lies the principal difference between Khatibi and Said: for although Said is interested in how “a particular type of research and knowledge begins to build up” allowing for the study of culture “as contrapuntal ensembles” of hybrid identities (Said, 1993: p. 52), ultimately he can only address their common ground of translatability, whereas Khatibi wants to allow for an as-yet-unthought exteriority beyond the “archeology of silence” that represses other languages, genders, and peoples in their unheard difference.  For Said, what is translatable is that which is discernible within the overall arrangements of literary and musical high culture as the site of a historic face-off between the imperial west and those who resist its claims in their “disparities and discrepancies” (Said, 1993: p. 114) which must eventually come to order and harmony, as in the musical interplay or counterpoint of the concert performance.  (Lionnet 2012: 404, original italics) 

Whereas Said’s model of contrapuntal reading, first announced at the end of Culture and Imperialism (1993), would seem to betray his excessive concern for “high culture” which would somehow determine what has value for academic research, Khatibi’s understanding of contrepoint, Lionnet points out, takes its lead not from Western classical music, but rather from the work of weaving and sewing, such as that done by Moroccan carpet makers.  While such a claim does have a certain appeal—that Khatibi’s weaving metaphor draws upon local practices while honoring women’s work—Lionnet’s contention here also dismisses what is distinctive about Said’s understanding of counterpoint, namely its capacity to elaborate the very historical processes through which knowledge is “built up” in specific languages but not in others.

Indeed, there are valuable reasons to pursue the kind of argument Lionnet hints at here.  For instance, one could read Khatibi’s insistence on the contrepoint specific to Moroccan carpet making as an invention of technique that would not simply be borrowed from so-called “Western” techniques or procedures of thought (from Nietzsche to Derrida, say).  In this scenario, one might understand the way that Khatibi articulates his thought in relation to the work of Moroccan women who weave carpets not as a mode of filling “foreign” theory with local content, but rather as a way of elaborating a practice of portable reading.  Yet Lionnet does not base her argument on such an interpretation.  Instead, she simply misreads Said’s notion of contrapuntal critique and offers Khatibi’s contrepoint of weaving in its place as a self-evidently superior critical model.  The question thus becomes: are Khatibi’s transversal intersemiotics—developed through readings of carpets, tattoos, literature, calligraphy, proverbs, and jokes from Moroccan and Islamic contexts—only good for reading Moroccan, Maghrebi, minor, or marginal cultural artifacts?  In other words, can Arab(ic), Islamic, or Maghrebi theory travel?  Can it travel to the self-appointed “centers” (the metropole or capital)—and there constitute itself as an exilic territory? (Fig. 1)

While there may be any number of contingent reasons for preferring the contrepoint of a carpet to that of a fugue, I am not entirely convinced that there is anything inherent to a beautiful Moroccan carpet that would necessarily make it a better theoretical model for transnational and transcolonial comparison than a Bach fugue.  The inverse of such an affirmation would also of course be true: namely, that nothing guarantees that the hermeneutic resources of a Bach fugue would be superior to those contained within a Moroccan carpet.  After all, in his text on the intersemiotics of such carpets, Khatibi set out “to study this imagination in the space of the carpet, as one studies a page of Aristotle, with the same seriousness, exposing aesthetic theories dedicated to the imaginary and the symbolic” (d’étudier cette imagination dans l’espace du tapis, comme on étudie une page d’Aristote, avec le même sérieux, en exposant des théories esthétiques, consacrées à l’imaginaire et à la symbolique (Merino 2013: 123-4)).

This constellation of texts points in the direction of a contrapuntal double critique, which would short circuit close reading with distant reading, making selective use of the kind of poststructuralist tools that Khatibi himself develops and repurposes, but would not stop there.  Rather, such a critique would instead continue to listen for the “unheard differences” that are both interior and exterior to the texts and cultural products under consideration.  It is Said, I would argue, even more than Khatibi who prompts us to take this historical step back from the object of our analysis.  A valuable instance of this kind of reading can be seen in Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (2016), which understands Said’s philology as a kind of contrapuntal close reading that emphasizes precisely the processes of historical sedimentation which operate at multiple levels within the text and outside of it.

Taking a contrapuntal double critique seriously would mean examining the textual self-disappropriation that Khatibi discusses, which also animates his experiments with simultaneity, with distance and closeness. It would also mean stepping back to think about the continuing predominance of dispossessed languages and discourses which Said, as well as Khatibi himself, both foregrounded in their work.[1]  So instead of a “bad,” Western counterpoint (Said and Bach) versus a “good,” Maghrebi contrepoint (Khatibi and the Moroccan carpet), we have instead two competing modes of simultaneity.  On the one hand, there is Khatibi’s singular kind of espacement, what he calls “le tissage par la syntaxe” (weaving through syntax), a practice more on the side of superimposition, of interference or static, capable of opening up an exilic form of “hostage” within the text.  On the other hand, we have Saidian simultaneity, which is perhaps more temporally and historically oriented, less about resolution, to be sure, than perpetual disruption. Like exile, the simultaneity of Saidian counterpoint plays along the seams of what he calls an “unhealable rift” (Said 2000: 175), concerning itself with the historical dimensions of planetary relations.  “Exile,” Said writes, “is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew” (Said 2000: 186).

So we might therefore say that Said’s notion of counterpoint is primarily but not exclusively temporal-historical in nature, bound to musical forms of expression, which serve as a theoretical point of departure.  It imagines renewable reading practices that can attempt to account for mobile structures of silencing as well as echo-chamber effects and divergent variations on multiple themes that seem to all be happening at once, although they are in fact each played in accordance with their own distinct time signatures.  This critique—or shape of critique—occurs alongside and at the same time as Khatibi’s somewhat more spatial understanding of counterpoint, perhaps more akin to weaving or sewing, and, in particular, articulated in places in relation to the art of Moroccan rug making.  What, then, might a contrapuntal double critique look and sound like?

Khatibi’s own reflections on exile, francophonie, pseudonymy, and syntax can open up further paths of such future reading.  Let us first consider what he has to say about the linked questions of literary and linguistic forms of hostage, hospitality, and self-dispossession.  In “The Name and the Pseudonym,” Khatibi examines the particular case of “Francophone writers”:

The literature whose name we bear, whatever our origin, citizenship, or nationality, has been forced, through a particular poetic exercise and work, to constitute a territory that belongs to nobody, but which politics seize like private property, and so well that in certain public sessions one gets the rather curious sense that the “Francophones” are a community of hostages.  But who and what holds them hostage? (Khatibi 2008: 115-6)

Francophone writers write under the constraint of the utopian condition of “their” language.  This is a pre-existing condition of so-called “Francophone” literature, which in turn becomes a point of arrival for a philosophical meditation on languages in the plural.  For Khatibi, the Francophone writer is caught in an interstitial space, between the no-where of utopia and the political instrumentalization of languages.  Instead of answering the questions he asks at the end of this passage, Khatibi evokes the “weaving through syntax” that allows him to “widen the space of hospitality” in his “own” text:

It is syntax that is my aim, my point of connection and the wake I leave in the time of each vocable.  Syntax: a unification in movement of the target language.  Thanks to this simultaneous translation, to this process of grafting, I record what returns to me from memory without forced reservation.  In this way, I investigate the forces of silence between languages, the erasure of traces and their rest stops, their becoming ash.  So if I sing the praises of syntax, it is because it widens the space of hospitality where the writer is received in his own text as a guest, in the shadow of the writer. (2008: 116)

For Khatibi, syntax is the privileged site of poetic procedures: internal, simultaneous translation, the grafting of diverse elements, and “the erasure of traces.”  It allows him to bypass the impasses of philological sedimentation and the symbolic politicization of language.  He confesses to feeling “an affinity with a language . . . stronger than the sentiment of belonging” (117), and in general, his work aims to sabotage any deterministic relationship between language and ownership, between language and property, provoking a perpetual rupture in the pact between language and the nation.  Writing in the “language of the other” is always an act of “self-disappropriation” for Khatibi, but also a way of asserting that “language is not property.”  One could say that Khatibi here agrees with Derrida and the notion of “monolingualism” being a “prosthesis” for an origin that is always irrecuperable and lost to memory and language.  But Khatibi describes, performs, and traces the seams that mark the disappropriation of this monolanguage, moving from “monolanguage” to “bi-language” and beyond.

But we cannot stop here, because within the synchronic virtual silences of these texts we find diachronic silences, determined by the historical process of the silencing or accumulation of languages and knowledge practices.  This process is precisely what, in a forthcoming book, I explore under the title of Decadent Orientalisms: a colonial politics that institutes the study of comparative languages and literatures, including those of “the Orient,” under the very sign of these languages’ supposed decadence, and, ultimately, their disappearance.  This kind of Orientalism is both descriptive and prescriptive: an apparatus that functions by breaking down, that integrates only to disintegrate.  The ambivalent nature of this apparatus prompts us to also pay attention to the philological context at work here, even when reading texts as fragmented and radically decentered as those of Khatibi.  The armes miraculeuses (miraculous weapons, Césaire 1970) of the Khatibian text “record” the memory of other languages, and the author “investigate[s] the forces of silence between languages.” The fact that this investigation takes place in French remains a significant element of the inscription of silence in history and in the world that this text performs, however.  Are dialectal Arabic or Tamazight at liberty to circulate in the same global spaces and think according to the same techniques or procedures as can French?  The virtual apparition of other languages and signifying practices in the Francophone text coincides precisely with their marginalization, with their virtualization.  The disappropriation Khatibi writes about is thus haunted by the politics of assimilation and the colonial notion of francophonie as instances of attempts at diversity in French.  The French language remains a world in itself, a “littérature-monde” (to allude to the title of the 2007 book by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud), just as “Global English” or “Anglophone Literature”—rubrics that serve to satisfy the demands for diversity put on the canon.  This means that rendering French heterogeneous and non-identical to itself is inseparable from a homogenization of textual practices and procedures of thought into the “globalized” form of a monolingual “world literature.”  Should we borrow a rhetorical move from Derrida, and boldly affirm that Khatibi is in fact the most “minor-transnational” of all Francophone writers?  (This performatively ironic assertion about Khatibi’s “identity” comes from Derrida’s lecture on “la francophonie outside of France,” published in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, where he declares himself “the most Franco-Maghrebian” of the pair (Derrida and Khatibi), and possibly even “the only Franco-Maghrebian” (Derrida 1996: 29, original italics).)  After all, from the perspective of the hexagon or North American French studies, Khatibi’s texts might be said to satisfy a certain demand for otherness, opening out onto the Arabic language, Moroccan popular culture, and Islamic mystical traditions without requiring any Arabic whatsoever from the critic.  Such a claim is less a critique of Khatibi than of certain critical approaches to Francophone literature in the Maghreb.  Thus the challenge of reading Khatibi today, and, by extension, the challenge for a field such as Francophone studies, is to acknowledge the extraordinary diversity of rhetorical techniques employed in these texts without celebrating this as diversity tout court, without fetishizing this poetic knowledge.  As with Khatibi and Francophone studies, so, too, with comparative literature.

Another way of framing this argument is that Arabic calligraphy, darija, Tamazight, and other local practices (tattooing, proverbs, jokes, etc.)—those things that serve as the poles that Khatibi uses to make French or Francophone practices render their static and generate the opacity or interference of the intersign—may well have a higher redemption value in the “world republic of letters” when uttered in French.  That is, the self-disappropriation that Khatibi transforms into something like a virtue of literary asceticism borders on complicity with the forms of disappropriation that are also still very much operative in the world literary system, albeit in a more brutal and far less theoretical way.  The asymmetrical structures of the institutions of world literature, relating to, among other things, values attached to certain so-called “global” languages, the system of consecration by which an author from the margins must be recognized and praised by writers, critics, and publishing houses at the center (Paris, London, New York, etc.) continue to regulate who reads and writes what and in what languages.  I do not point out the obvious facts of the situation in order to pass judgment on Francophone writers from the Maghreb such as Khatibi.  Quite the opposite: I would say that it is precisely because Khatibi has taken this problematic of language conflict further than any other writer of his generation that we must not stop at a celebratory appraisal of his singular rhetorical inventions—which is a common strategy when reading writers “from the margins”—nor is it advisable to transform this singularity into a theoretical model to follow.

Khatibi himself urges us to do the same.  Likewise, Said did not turn contrapuntal reading into a critical fetish the way that Lionnet wants to do with contrepoint.  One is reminded here of the scarcely hidden Orientalism at the heart of Pascale Casanova’s La république mondiale des lettres (World Republic of Letters 1999), which begins with a discussion of Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet,” which Casanova uses to illustrate the critical revelations that can follow a change of one’s vantage point, yet is cited in a book that repeatedly reinforces the centrality of Paris to the entire planetary institution of literature.  In contrast, Said insisted that counterpoint function as a relational operation one performs on the archive, a means of radically decentering the T-O map of Orientalist faith.  Instead of taking hard-won poetic knowledge as a fixed point of departure for further theorization about the Maghreb, Khatibi and Said prompt us to trace the figures projected onto the Maghreb (by both Orientalist and purportedly anti-Orientalist writers) back to the violence and erasure that these figures simultaneously elide and generate.  Such is one possible path through the epistemological minefield that Orientalist knowledge has left scattered in language and thought.

The kind of “poetic knowledge” that Khatibi offers, then, is a disruptive force that operates according to the relational logic of “survival in transformation” (Khatibi 1983: 17).  Against this, Orientalism does not simply put forth a figure or a set of figures, but rather sets in motion an epistemological apparatus that is constantly adapting to changing conditions of geopolitics and cultural economies of representation and knowledge production.  This is one cause of what I call the decay of Orientalism: it must retain a core set of axioms while at the same time changing its modes and tenor.  Which brings us to perhaps the most urgent point of all: that Orientalism itself must not become a monolithic theoretical model, but must rather be leveraged as a relational tool responsive to adaptations and even cooptations of actors and agents of settler-colonialism and neo-imperialism in an Orientalist mode.  If thinking about Said’s larger project now in relation to the Maghreb reveals the ways that Orientalism itself is a metaphor, it also cautions us to wield the figurative violence it produces without turning it into a fetish.

Measuring the core impulse of Orientalism against the historical mutations it undergoes is one way of renewing the potential of the decolonial project articulated by both Said and Khatibi.  But one may also measure other modalities of relation against Orientalism; Edouard Glissant’s elaborations of the philosophies and poetics of relation spring immediately to mind (1990; 2009), as do other examples, such as Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s Minor Transnationalism (2005), or the transcolonial Maghreb elaborated by Olivia C. Harrison in her book (2016) and her contribution to this dossier.  In its jarring mélange of Marx and Lao Tzu, playing with Sufi metaphors in French, Khatibi’s Class Warrior – Taoist Style engineers a mutually disorienting mode of relation that demonstrates one escape route from the postcolonial impasse of Francophonie haunted by revenant Orientalism.  Bypassing France in all ways but the language of the poem, Khatibi’s verse articulates a perpetual revolt in a language that effects a disappropriation on multiple planes: of French and Arabic poetic traditions, of the committed decolonial writer’s fetishized Marxian verbiage, and of language as a guarantor of identity.  Khatibi’s turn to Chinese Taoism engineers modalities of poetic knowledge that imagine ways of short-circuiting the master metaphors of Orientalism.  In a similar vein, contemporary Moroccan Arabic haiku turn to Japanese poetics to defamiliarize Arabic poetic form while inventing a new ecopoetic idiom.  Both instances take readers into emerging possibilities of a new kind of contrapuntal reading.  The Arabic haiku movement, which has flourished especially in Oujda (Nasri 2017), a city often considered to be on the margins of Moroccan cultural production, represents a contemporary instance of the kind of “poetic knowledge” articulated in Khatibi’s poem.  Haiku by poet Sameh Derouich perform a similar self-disappropriation of Arabic poetics while improvising an ecopoetics of literary, linguistic, and environmental relation.  Derouich’s work is just one example of cultural production in the Maghreb flourishing blissfully beyond Orientalist master tropes and epistemological prisons.

Let me end, then, with two poems by Derouich which resonate, albeit in a quietly vital way, with what Abdellatif Laâbi called the “seismic pathways of freedom” of future poetry (1969: 43).  The first haiku deliberately blindfolds the poet’s eyes to figurative language, and the second intuits something like the political will of the social from falling leaves.

With my metaphor blindfolded           ma‘suba al-majaz

I look at you,                                      anthuru ilayk

Oh almond blossoms!                        ya azhar al-lawz

(2016: 55)

Without authorization,            bidun tarkhis

Autumn leaves                        tatajamharu

Assemble.                               awraq al-kharif

(24).[2]

By disabling poetic figuration and its distortions, Derouich stages the event of poetic knowledge as an elucidation of complex experience, where private and public, familiar and unfamiliar, mediated and immediate, words and things traverse each other.  If the first poem offers a moment of lucidity that is both open to the reader and utterly inaccessible, the second haiku affirms the primacy of this non-figurative lucidity.  Whatever aesthetic or political theory one wishes to milk from the almond blossoms or extract from the autumn leaves, these poems suggest, will necessarily be derivative and secondary.  In this way do Derouich’s poems set flowers and trees native to the Mediterranean into a naturalized poetic form bereft of any sentimental indigenizing theory.

 

David Fieni is Assistant Professor of French at the State University of New York, Oneonta. He is the author of Decadent Orientalisms: Configuring the Decay of Colonial Modernity in French and Arabic (forthcoming 2019) and translator of Laurent Dubreuil’s Empire of Language (2013). Fieni has co-edited special journal issues on “The Global Checkpoint” and on the Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi. His work has appeared in diacritics, boundary 2, PMLA, and Expressions Maghrébines.

 

References

Casanova, Pascale.  1999.  La république mondiale des lettres.  Paris: Seuil.

Césaire, Aimé. 1970. Les armes miraculeuses. Paris: Gallimard.

Derouich, Sameh.  2016.  100 Haiku.  (n.p.): Literary Convoy Publications.

Derrida, Jacques.  1996.  Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine.  Paris: Galilée.

Glissant, Édouard.  2009.  Philosophie de la relation: poésie en étendue.  Paris: Gallimard.

—.  1990. Poétique de la relation.  Paris: Gallimard.

Harrison, Olivia C.  2016.  Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Khatibi, Abdelkebir. La blessure du nom propre.  Paris: Denoël, 1974.

—.  2017.  Class Warrior–Taoist Style.  Trans. Matt Reeck.  Middletow: Wesleyan University Press.

—.  1995.  Du signe à l’image: le tapis marocain, Casablanca: Lak International.

—.  1995.  “Incipits.”  Du bilinguisme.  Ed. Jillal Benanni.  Paris: Denoel.

—.  2010.  “The Language of the Other: Testimonial Exercises,” Introduction by David Fieni, trans. Catherine Porter.  PMLA, 125.4, October (2010), 1006.

—.   2008.  Œuvres de Abdelkebir Khatibi, III: Essais.  Paris: La Différence.

Laâbi, Abdelatif.  1969-1970. “Les singes éléctroniques.” Souffles 16-17.  Casablanca: Editions les croisées des Chemins, n.d.

Lionnet, Françoise. 2011.  “Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir

Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison.”  In A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, 388-407.  Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

— and Shu-mei Shih, eds. 2005.  Minor Transnationalism.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Merino, Leonor.  “Pour Abdelkebir Khatibi: Le visage de la terre est déjà recouvert des yeux de tant de bien-aimés disparus.”  Interview with Abdelkebir Khatibi.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, intersigne, special issue of Expressions maghrébines, David Fieni and Laurent Dubreuil, eds. 12.1 (Summer 2013), 121-4.

Mufti, Aamir.  2016. Forget English!  Orientalisms and World Literatures.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nasri, Chourouq.  2017.  “Poetry as Resistance: An Ecocritical Reading of Sameh Derouich’s Haiku.”  Ikhtilaf: Journal of Critical Humanities and Social Studies. 1 (Fall): 59-69. http://identityanddifference.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Chourouq-Nasri-Poetry-As-Resistance-Nasri.pdf

Said, Edward.  1993.  Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

—.  1979.  Orientalism.  New York: Vintage Books.

—-. 2000.  Reflections on Exile.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

 

This essay includes material that has been translated and modified from David Fieni, “Désappropriation de soi et poétique de l’intersigne chez Khatibi,” Expressions maghrébines 12, no. 2 (2013): 1-17.

[1] One thinks immediately, for example, of Khatibi’s essay on Jacques Berque, “L’Orientalisme désorienté” from 1976, two years before Said’s Orientalism.

[2] The haiku in this collection appear in the original Arabic alongside translations into French, Spanish, and English.  Mourad El Khatibi, Abdlekebir Khatibi’s nephew, did the translations into English.  I have slightly modified the first translation and kept the second poem as published.

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

by Susan Slyomovics

Il fut pendu l’ethnologue-espion, writes poet-novelist-anthropologist Habib Tengour, En ce temps-là nous étions un peu sauvages (1976 : 131).[1] Tengour’s sly voicing of the violent indigene consigning ethnology to the gallows asks us to rethink authority and expertise in the social sciences. Tengour was born in Mostaganem in 1947, a town he registers in rhymed Algerian Arabic as vingt-sept makla we sket, “zip code twenty-seven food and silence” (2012: 36). His father Mohamed Tengour was a member of the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) and head of the Organisation secrète (OS) for the Mostaganem region, both crucial entities to the formation of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Twice arrested and imprisoned for nationalist political activities, Mohamed Tengour was banished from his home region. Forced to relocate to France, he resumed activities on behalf of an independent Algeria and brought his family to Paris.[2]

Raised and educated between Algeria and France, Habib Tengour will crisscross the Mediterranean Sea calling himself Ulysses, another consummate ethnographer whose life depends on fieldwork and literature in a quest for a restoration to homeland and identity (Yelles 2012): “My name is Ulysses I am 22 years old and I am doing sociology because I failed law” (Je m’appelle ULYSSE j’ai vingt-deux ans je fais de la sociologie parce que j’ai echoué en Droit) (9). He returns to Algeria in 1972 to complete military service, then becomes director of the newly established Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Constantine. He resigns in 1975 in opposition to proliferating provincial university graduate programs created in the absence of trained social sciences professors, each new one producing “a parody of Lin Biao! Encircling the cities by the countryside. That’s a little how the University of Algiers was gradually encircled by provincial universities” (1995: 71-72).

A year before Tengour’s homecoming, Mohammed Seddik Benyahia, a member of Algeria’s first provisional government and minister of higher education and research from 1971-77, declares that ethnologie, “contaminated by colonialism,” must be “submitted to a process of decolonization.”[3] A forerunner document to Benyahia’s call was the Tripoli Plan of 1962 elaborated by the National Council of the Algerian Revolution (CNRA) on the eve of independence. Dismantling former European settler colonial structures called for more appropriate post-independence measures of redress and reconstruction than ethnology imparts:

French colonialists undertook, by war, extermination, looting and confiscation, to systematically destroy the Algerian nation and society. More than a mere colonial conquest to ensure control of the country’s natural wealth, this enterprise sought, by all means, to substitute foreign settlement for the autochthonous people. (Colonna 1972: 260)

The French conquests of Algeria in 1830, Tunisia in 1881, and Morocco in 1912 also resulted in France establishing journals, institutes, scholarly organizations and universities instigated by metropolitan exigencies over its overseas colonies. France was the preeminent social scientific model for the Maghreb and the Maghreb contributed to shaping French social sciences (Slyomovics 2013). The Commission Scientifique de l’Algérie (1839-41), modeled on Napoleon’s scientific expedition to Egypt, was created to map Algeria’s culture and geography, as were the 1904 Mission Scientifique to Morocco and the creation of the French institute in Cairo in 1909. In 1925, the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris established by Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Paul Rivet arrived on the social science scene at the apogee of close to one hundred years of research on the native following in the wake of military officers and colonial civil servants whom Bourdieu calls ethnologues spontanés, “spontaneous ethnologists” (Mammeri 1985: 8). Engaged in ethnology, folklore, and collecting on behalf of metropolitan museums, Tengour’s legions of ethnologist-spies were effective in spoliating native material and intangible cultures.

Anthropology, according to Talal Asad (who prefigured Edward Said’s critique of the West’s Orientalism), is an intellectual agent of colonialism inevitably embedded in hegemonic and imperial power relations because “the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it” (1973: 12). And that ethnographic world of inquiry ended, dissipating the colonial regime of Francophone scientific researchers in the Maghreb enraptured by North African ethnology (Slyomovics 2014). It is not surprising, therefore, that postcolonial theory owes a debt to Maghreb-based thinkers. Among them on any list are Abdelkebir Khatibi, Albert Memmi, Abdelmalek Sayad, Paul Sebag, Abdelkader Zghal, Habib Tengour, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Frantz Fanon, all “provincializing” Europe (Chakrabarty 2000) from the Mediterranean’s North African shores.

Following Benyahia’s call to boycott ethnology, debates swirled around a post-independence anthropology inquiring, in fact, what is to be done? Would linking the identity of the indigenous social scientist to the discipline of anthropology produce more relevant, less universalizing, unbiased “Arab social science”? Or another intellectual path, should Islamic and Arab sources reanimate social theories derived from the fourteenth-century Maghrebi thinker Ibn Khaldun? (Morsy et al. 1991: 81-115). What if decolonizing the social sciences in Algeria became the means to hijack and manipulate the path of Arabization (ta’rib), thereby blocking progressive movements such as student or Berberophone rights, as Tengour suggests? (1995: 68) In contrast to tortuous attempts throughout the Arab world to reconcile nascent academic social sciences with Western Orientalist anthropology, at least on the official level, Algerian authorities said no. Ethnology was banned outright at the twenty-fourth International Conference of Sociology in Algiers in March 1974:

Ethnology fully participated in the colonial system. Created by colonialism, it accepted its presuppositions. You might even say it served as an ideology for this system. . . . Decolonization has scientific aspects. The rejection of ethnology as a discipline of study specific to developing countries is one of them. As a method and an ideology, it has developed a logic and thus it constitutes a scientific danger, an ideological screen between the social reality of third world countries and those who want to study them. (L’ethnologie a participé totalement du système colonial, dont elle est la création et dont elle a accepté les présupposés. Elle tenait même lieu à la limite d’idéologie à ce système. . . . La décolonisation a des aspects scientifiques. Le rejet d’ethnologie comme discipline d’étude propre aux pays en voie de développements en est un. . . . Comme méthode et comme idéologie elle a développé une logique et par là même elle constitue un danger scientifique, un écran idéologique entre la réalité sociale des pays du tiers monde et ceux qui veulent les étudier. (Mammeri 1989 : 18))

 

A Detour

It is worth recalling that one of the largest colonial resettlement programs occurred in wartime Algeria (1954-62), merely a dozen years before Benyahia spoke out. To dismantle peasant support for independence fighters, approximately one quarter of the indigenous rural population was displaced. The French military process of forcible removal was overseen by the army’s Specialized Administrative Sections (Sections Administratives Spécialisées, SAS). Officers apprenticed in so-called Muslim sociology were charged with the study of villagers before and after resettlement. Social science was implicated, as early as Émile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society that depicted an Algerian traditional Kabyle society frozen in premodernity: “The Hebrews remained in it [segmentary social organization] to a late date and the Kabyles never passed beyond it” (Durkheim 1997 [1893], 175-178). The French army, attentive to lessons in Durkheimian sociology on tribal solidarities, imbibed Orientalist perversions of fourteenth-century thinker Ibn Khaldun in which forced sedentarization and relocation consolidated their state power (Mamdani 2017). French Algeria’s wholesale destruction of a rural agrarian world through land dispossession was updated to align with wartime scorched earth policies, then cynically relabeled modernization. A significant portion of Algerian society endured internal exile and immiseration on a vast scale as victims of controlled experiments to discover the viability of the so-called pacification programs in regroupement camps that were never more than outdoor prisons (Omouri 2001; Henni 2018). The recurring figure of the embedded anthropologist within the military is not new. Moreover, it could be said that Benyahia was operating well within Durkheimian paradigms: in France, ethnology and sociology were intertwined, thus eerily presaging Benyahia’s judgments about ethnologie versus sociologie despite Durkheim’s attempts to distinguish sociology as meta-theorizing from ethnology’s empirical data-driven practices:

The customs, beliefs, institutions of peoples are matters too profound to be judged like this, so lightly. This is why sociology must focus its research primarily on societies that can be studied from genuine historical documents, while ethnographic information should be used only to corroborate and, to a certain extent, illuminate precedents. (Durkheim [1895] 1975, 1: 76-81)

Presciently, this Algerian post-independence rejection of ethnology, understood by Benyahia as a body of knowledge predicated on the colonizer’s description to better police the population, had been foretold by Albert Memmi. Refusal is a rite of decolonization:

We then witness a reversal of terms. Assimilation being abandoned, the colonized’s liberation must be carried out through a recovery of self and of autonomous dignity. Attempts at imitating the colonizer required self-denial; the colonizer’s rejection is the indispensable prelude to self-discovery. That accusing and annihilating image must be shaken off; oppression must be attacked boldly since it is impossible to go around it. After having been rejected for so long by the colonizer, the day has come when it is the colonized who must refuse the colonizer. . . . Henceforth, the colonizer adopts a negative approach. . . . He does without tobacco if it bears the colonialist’s stamp! These are pressure methods and economic sanctions, but they are, equally, sacrificial rites of colonization. (Memmi 1965: 172-173)

Benyahia maintained an equipoise between rejecting colonial ethnology and establishing a comprehensive pedagogical program from kindergarten to conservatory and an advanced research institute for the study and preservation of Algeria’s magnificant heritage of Arab-Andalusian music. His advocacy for “decolonizing the social sciences” along with the rise of critical reissues of colonial-era ethnography, which led to reassessing Algeria’s colonial-era anthropology, cast Bourdieu, whose Algeria writings continue to be published posthumously to this day, as a key figure. Bourdieu founded an Algerian association of research in demography, economy and sociology; he collaborated and coauthored important studies with his colleague Abdelmalek Sayad; and his military experiences in wartime Algeria for the information services of the French army and the French government statistics office in Algiers led to discussions about instrumentalizing ethnographic research. Bourdieu and Sayad’s angry depictions of French Algeria’s wartime forced dislocations resulted in a publication ban of their book, Le déracinement (The Uprooting) that lasted until after the Algerian War of Independence. They describe the pauperization of Kabyle farmers herded into “regroupment” camps by the French military, “as if the colonizer instinctively found the ethnological law in which the reorganization of the habitat, a projection of the most fundamental structures of culture, leads to a generalized transformation of the cultural system. . . . The politics of regroupment, a pathological response to the deadly crisis of the colonial system, brings to light the pathological intent that inhabits the colonial system” (Comme si le colonisateur retrouvait d’instinct la loi ethnologique qui veut que la réorganisation de l’habitat, projection des structures les plus fondamentales de la culture, entraîne une transformation généralisée du système culturel. . . . La politique de regroupement, réponse pathologique à la crise mortelle du système colonial, fait éclater au grand jour l’intention pathologique qui habitait le système colonial (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964 : 26-27)). While describing the army’s strategies to coerce, supply, and rehearse informants in camps, Bourdieu takes note of the natives, perennially under investigation, who resisted their French questioners despite an “atmosphere of police inquisition and psychological action” (Bourdieu 1963: 261). Defying the social scientist under colonialism transforms into a fixation against ethnology.

Bourdieu himself began as an ethnologist later announcing a switch to sociology. Reductively speaking, physical anthropology was “anthropologie” while empirical fieldwork research in the human sciences was “ethnologie” in France, its analogue in England “social anthropology” and “cultural anthropology” in the US. In many Anglophone academic environments, the latter two melded into “sociocultural anthropology.” Even in France, Georges Balandier, among the founders of the Centre d’études sociologiques (Center for studies in sociology) in 1946, called for more convergences (Balandier 1948; Siebaud 2006).

 

“The Poetic Discovery of the Real”

If the terms ethnology, sociology, folklore and anthropology are often deployed interchangeably, in turn, Tengour’s poetic discovery of the real (1985: 13) and deadpan black humor play with the overlapping homophony of the word “social.” In This Particular Tartar 2 (1997–1998), his sociologist persona is mistaken for a social worker by a Tartar stranded in Paris. The Tartar, a recurring protagonist in the Tengourian corpus, becomes the exonym for Western social science in its petty bureaucratic actualizations; he is coded the migrant perennially flooding Europe like his fierce ancestral hordes, “invaders from the East whom they called, without distinction, Tartars” (2010: 122):

The city planning bureau asked me to interview him in the context of a study on gypsies and other travelers.

This particular Tartar distrusts sociologists. I think he confuses us with social workers.

My interview was limited to brief questions/answers.

I didnʼt succeed in getting a serviceable life story out of him.

I had read up on the Tartars beforehand, to help me establish contact.

He didnʼt appreciate my empathy. (130)

Unlike long-standing Orientalist studies from anthropology, folklore and ethnology about so-called “primitive” non-European peoples, languages and customs, sociology in Algeria was considered less tainted by the colonizer’s cultural depredations (Ben Naoum 2002). Mobilized on behalf of practical socioeconomic and political orientations and marching to state-inflected parameters on proletarianization, pauperization, unemployment, and shantytowns, post-independence Algerian sociology was brought to bear on topics such as development, detribalization, migration, newly launched agricultural programs, urbanization and industrialization (Madoui 2007).

In 1985, the year Tengour obtained a French doctorate in ethnology, Algeria was in the midst of state-mandated programs ensuring university teaching in Modern Standard Arabic, MSA (al-‘arabiya al-mu‘asira), no one’s native tongue and as yet linguistically lesser in the face of Algerians’ trilingual usage of Algerian Arabic (darija), French, and Amazigh/Berber languages. More government interventions followed the ban on ethnology and mandated Arabic in university social sciences faculties. Algeria’s Minister of Higher Education Abdelhak Rafik Brerhi, following a recommendation of FLN chief Mohamed-Cherif Messadia, proposed an addendum to mandated FLN party membership for state employees. A 1985 directive added a provision that professors disrespecting the regime’s political choices were liable to court actions and lawsuits, followed by decrees not only mandating MSA’s preeminence but attempting to substitute English for French. Although research conducted within Algeria has never been isolated from Western paradigms, political sociologist Lahouari Addi concludes that because university critics of the regime like himself were either in exile or teaching outside the country, government strictures on political and linguistic allegiances became moot in the face of the brain drain of Algerian intellectuals (Addi 1991 and 2002: 71-77 and Ayoub 2000).

Likewise, ethnographic studies of the tribe were taboo in Algeria during decades of the FLN single-party state (1962-89). Although tribal values were admired, the tribe as a social institution was deemed archaic and divisive. Research on Algeria’s tribes shows that despite interventions through mass education and compulsory army service, the tribe is not in opposition to the Algerian state but remains an important sociopolitical entity, hence a worthy object of study (Hachmaoui 2012; Ben Hounet 2008; Tengour 1980: 1985). In his own way, Tengour intervenes in the debate about what is to be done with ethnology in his doctoral thesis on the Beni Zeroual tribal confederations of the Chlef plain surrounding his Mostaganem home region. His ethnological propositions move away from static social science categories about la tribu towards a complex story of doubled and parallel origins, one in which the Beni Zeroual tribe’s history counterintuitively does not reside in the powerful eponymous founding ancestor figure. Unlike Algerians in Paris whose connections to any tribal group solidarity has melted away in the world of the banlieues (housing projects on the outskirts of French cities where migrant workers were concentrated), Tengour’s hypothesis is instead that, in Algeria, this fabled past was and is sustained by the local patron saint, the marabout. As Tengour unfolds generations of tribal formations, he recounts the inevitable subdividing of the tribe (qabila) into the fraction (ferqa), then further devolving into sub-fractions, clans and extended households. For him, only the last stage exhibits genuine value in terms of economic, social, and affective kinship. This means that if the tribe exists in name through reference to their eponymous ancestor Zeroual, it does so primarily to attach descendants to imagined Arab and Arabian peninsular origins. Intervening disruptive factors in the Maghreb’s history were long-standing, fluid pre-colonial affiliations and cross-border tribal movement frozen by subsequent French colonial insistence on naming, registering and refashioning tribal structures (1985: 139-142). Such factors lead Tengour to place the tribe’s memory, history, and very soul in the hands of the non-tribal marabout. These saintly spiritual leaders, whose descendants to this day transmit the tribe’s written history orally, are uniquely able to trace origins to Arab progenitors and wandering Sufi adepts, all the while ministering to the Beni Zeroual, who are in fact not Arabs, according to Tengour, but rather Arabized Berbers (1982). Taken to its conclusion, Tengour’s thesis reconfigures the marabout as an imaginative storyteller, religious leader, and tribal ethnologist, the one who does not belong to the tribe, irrespective of the tribe as imaginary traditional system or colonially distorted institution. The marabout does so by preserving written history, thereby keeping alive publicly and orally for the tribe its own genealogy and origins. Finally, the question is not if tribal lineages are socially imagined and culturally invented, but rather who tells the tale of segmenting lineages and who listens. Writing and history, story and voice, tribe and tribal memory, storytelling and identity are structurally and productively inverted. Most of all, nothing memorable is lost in Gens de Mosta, Tengour’s hometown chronicles where his concept of cultural memory is on offer to his younger, skeptical narrator by another storyteller, Allal, the venerable mujahid, communist, and International Brigade fighter:

Open your ears wide and remember what you are told. And learn to tell a story … a people never forgets what’s essential to its being. No people can be fucked all the time! Memory is a very complicated thing. In fact nothing ever is really lost. Memory works in the shadows. It loves secrecy. Apparent forgetfulness is its refuge during hard times. It waits for its hour to come and while the stomach is rumbling it does not stop digging. There isn’t only what’s written down that remains. Spoken words also leave traces. (2011 [1997]: 214)

Collective embodied forms of recognition, acceptance, and transmission that are performatively enacted by the storyteller need not entirely align with official social worldviews of the Algerian nation-state, but artfully circumvent them while giving narrative pleasure to the listener.

 

Doubling and Exile: Both Ethnologist and Novelist

Tengour turned back to France in the early nineties to teach at the University of Evry until his retirement in 2017, believing that “there exists a divided space called the Maghreb but the Maghrebian is always elsewhere. And that’s where he makes himself come true” (2011: 262). His departure from the Algerian academy coincided with the onset of the “Black Decade” (decénnie noire) and internal strife beginning in the early 1990s. Tengour’s “elsewhere” highlights cultural hybridity and ambivalence, métissage and dichotomy, rupture and orphanhood, schizophrenia and doubles that continue to bind and underpin those who engage simultaneously in literary and ethnographic writings about the Maghreb. Such doubling and multilingual heritages are historically conjoined to displacement and exile for Algerian writers. As Maghrebi intellectuals move between the homeland and the metropole of the former colonizer, familiar tropes of splitting and separation emerge: Malek Chebel invokes “Algerian schizophrenias” (1995: 287) reminiscent of Albert Memmi who, three decades earlier, picked at the “painful discord within oneself” (le douloureux décalage d’avec soi), a cleavage that measures the self in relation to a colonizer forever deemed the model or its antithesis (1965: 140). Abdelkebir Khatibi seems to solve these conundrums of the formerly colonized writer from the Maghreb region by evoking an initial positive role as producers of the “ethnographic novel. . . . The novel as a witness to its era, in a period of oppression and the absence of a free press, the novel plays the role of informant” (le roman ethnographique . . . un témoignage sur une époque ; en période d’oppression et en l’absence d’une presse nationale non officielle, il peut jouer le rôle d’informateur (Khatibi 1968 : 28)). While Khatibi sees the ethnographic novel genealogically as a necessary early literary stage, Réda Bensmaïa argues powerfully against any continued tendency to view Maghrebi works not as literary creations worth considering for their innovative style and language but as “ethnographic evidence” extraneous to some hypothetical French literary canon (Bensmaïa 2003: 7). For literary critic Zineb Ali Benali, it seems that the evident richness of post-independence studies in linguistics, sociology, and history from and about the Maghreb results in studies that do not reach beyond local North African university circuits to wider publics. Consequently, “the novel is more than an informant” writes Ali Benali returning to Khatibi’s famous formulation, “it is the nation’s archivist. . . . We can then say that fiction is a sort of an archivoir for a story not yet, or insufficiently, unlocked” (Le roman, cet archiviste de l’histoire. . . . On pourra alors dire que la fiction est une sorte ‘d’archivoir’ pour une histoire non encore, ou insuffisamment, déverrouillée (Ali Benali 2003)).

Does that mean that literary realism is the vehicle for the native just as scientific inquiry into the life of the native is for European ethnographers? Through poetry, performance, and prose as well as anthropology, Tengour belongs to a stellar lineage in which generations of Algerian novelists and poets consider contemporary social science topics even as they conduct fieldwork in ethnology and oral literature. Assia Djebar, for example, appears as an ethnologist of the intimate, everyday interior worlds of women, visually documenting stories, festivals, and songs of women in her film, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua) (1977). Other notable ethnologist-novelists are Mouloud Mammeri and Mouloud Feraoun. A recent literary phenomenon is Amara Lakhous, novelist and anthropologist trained at the Sapienza University of Rome. His book, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio was originally published in 2003 in Arabic, Kayfa tarda min al-ziba duna ‘an tawdak (How to Be Breastfed by a She-Wolf Without Being Bitten). Recast by the author into Italian, it is now widely read in English translation (2008). When asked about his writing process, the multilingual self-translating Lakhous explains how he moves from right to left on the page just as he maintains a south-to-north cross-Mediterranean presence:

I wrote the first version of Divorzio all’Islamica a viale Marconi (Divorce Islamic Style), which was published in 2010, in Italian (I work on multiple versions — for example, Clash of Civilizations . . . had about twenty versions). When I finished — as you know, in Arabic you write from right to left — I divided the file and made two tables: Italian text on the left and Arabic text on the right. I have a multi-language keyboard, so I can go from one language to the other. And I would look at the Italian text, and write in Arabic, and if I found something that seemed more convincing as an image in Italian, I would change it. So the two texts were born together, and published within a month of one another: the Arabic text was published in August and the Italian text in September. They’re twins. (Ray 2014)

 

Ethnographic Surrealism

Looking back thirty years on a career in ethnology and literature, Tengour reflects on his “taste for fieldwork” and “listening to the other” combined with “poetic impetus” and “discipline and rigor essential to grasp things”: “Je me suis spécialisé en anthropologie par goût du terrain et aussi pour être à l’écoute de l’autre. Il y a dans la posture de l’anthropologue un maintien qui permet l’élan poétique tout en obligeant le regard à une discipline et une rigueur indispensables à la saisie des choses” (Agour 2008). His lifelong engagement with anthropology emphasizes local and historical terrains that do not confine him to the role of informant or mere chronicler of his Algerian interlocutors. He navigates the spaces of social science with exceptional autonomy and surrealist subversion, by turns wildly innovative and corrosively comic. Tengour’s influential manifesto “Maghrebin Surrealism” (2011 [1981]: 261-269) is intertextually alive to surrealist antecedents. He layers a “homage” to André Breton embedding the latter’s definition of surrealism in italics in his own text to guide him to “the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (Breton 1924 in Tengour 1981: 269). This practice finds echoes in anthropology exemplified in the concept of “ethnographic surrealism” as defined by James Clifford:

To state the contrast schematically, ethnographic humanism begins with the different and renders it (through naming, classifying, describing, interpreting) comprehensible. It familiarizes. A surrealist practice, on the other hand, attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. The two attitudes presuppose one another; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other (1981: 562).

Tengour’s ethnographic attitude is shaped by surrealism and shapes it in turn. Consider that his initial fieldwork and teaching forays were framed by Benyahia’s illocutionary speech act against ethnology. That an academic field was made off limits is surely as surrealist as any Breton manifesto. Beyond ill-conceived, widely disregarded nation-building diktats by higher education bureaucrats, Tengour’s arguments about ethnographic participant-observations are infused with “the unbearable limits of a dailyness so difficult to bear.” Besides, he notes that given Algeria’s post-independence trajectories, who needs writers to chase after fictional madmen to populate their Maghrebi novels?

I council the reasonable man to go sit by the river and he will see pass by all the madmen he ever wanted to meet; provided that he live long enough. All Maghrebians know the subversive power of madness; their artists (with rare exceptions) know it less well than they do, as shown by the sugary and lukewarm use they make of it in their works trying to compel the unbearable limits of a dailyness so difficult to bear.

The madman, the mahbûl, the medjnûn, the dervish, the makhbût, the msaqqaf, the mtaktak, etcetera, belongs to folklore, alas. This reduction reveals the narrowness of the outlook. . . . The Algerians in particular — are seduced by the image of the madman: he is thought to speak what had been silenced. In most cases we are dealing with postcard-madmen (colonial exoticism was fond of this sort of postcard), boring and pompous. (Tengour 2011 [1981]: 263)

Tengour follows through with a multitude of research and writing projects in which Maghrebi Sufism is where “surrealist subversion asserts itself . . . there where the exterior observer sees only heresy, sexual dissoluteness, coarse language, incoherent acts, etcetera.” All that might be labeled spiritually heterodox or ethnographically unworthy – the particularity of North African Sufism, the textures of his childhood Tigditt Mostaganem neighborhood, Algeria’s magnificent gut-wrenching rai music – these are Tengour’s fields of inquiry. While Breton’s manifesto ends with “existence is elsewhere,” Tengour’s remake of a modernist rhetorical genre will posit “that despite my perverse attachment to art, it is ‘elsewhere’ that I hope to sojourn,” a narrative flourish that enticed him toward ethnography. 

Susan Slyomovics is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her current research
project is on the fates of French colonial monuments in Algeria. She is editor of several
volumes and the author of How to Accept German Reparations (2014), The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005), and The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998).

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Ben Hounet, Yazid. 2008. “Gérer la tribu ?” Cahiers d’études africaines 191: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/11982

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Bensmaïa, Réda. 2003. Experimental nations, or, The Invention of the Maghreb. Translated by Alyson Waters. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1963. “Étude sociologique.” In Travail et travailleurs en Algérie by Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet, Claude Seibel, and Pierre Bourdieu, 253-562. Paris: Mouton.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad. 1964. Le déracinement: La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Breton, André. 1972 [1924]. Manifestoes of surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Chebel, Malek. 1995. “Schizophrénies algériennes,” Peuples Méditerranéens 70-71 : 287-92.

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Colonna, Fanny. 1972. “Une fonction coloniale de l’ethnographie dans l’Algérie de l’entre deux-guerres: La programmation des élites moyennes,” Libyca 20: 259–67.

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—. 1985. “Spatialités maghrébines traditionelles, Étude d’un cas: les Béni-Zéroual.” PhD dissertation, University of Paris VII.

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—. 2010. “This Particular Tartar.” Translated by Marilyn Hacker. Virginia Quarterly Review 86, no. 3: 122–31.

—. 2011. “Exile is my Trade”: The Habib Tengour Reader. Translated by Pierre Joris. Boston: Black Widow Press. https://issuu.com/pjoris/docs/exile_is_my_trade

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[1] For texts not translated into English, translations are mine. Otherwise, in-text references are to English translations by Pierre Joris (Tengour 2011) or Marilyn Hacker (Tengour 2010), neither year reflecting Tengour’s original publication dates.

[2] Habib Tengour, personal communication with the author, July 1, 2018, and Archives nationales d’outre-mer, 5H1 106 Oranie.

[3] Until E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949), Anglophone anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa had been equally castigated as “folklorism and trait distribution surveys of a more naïve anthropology” (Slyomovics 2013: 9).

by Olivia C. Harrison

In his path-breaking book Orientalism (1978), Said does not mention the Maghreb by name (al-maghrib, “the place of the setting sun” in Arabic, a region designating northwest Africa, and in particular the French former colonies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), even though French Orientalism and imperialism play, alongside their British and American counterparts, a lead role in producing what Said calls “the Orient.” Said is deliberately vague in delimiting the contours of this much fantasized region. After all, the Orient is not a place, but rather “an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary,” as he was continuously at pains to explain (Said 2003: 4). And yet the absence of even an imagined Maghreb in Said’s account of Orientalism – Delacroix’s paintings, Théophile Gautier’s sketches and stories, Malek Alloula’s collection of “harem” postcards – is all the more striking by virtue of the fact that the vast archive he mobilizes, beginning with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and the “takeover of North Africa” that ensued, is in large part a French colonial one, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Pacific shores of Indochina (Said 2003: xxii). As wryly noted by an otherwise sympathetic critic, “an Algerian . . . could not possibly have written a study of Orientalism and neglected completely, as Said neglects, the French relation to North Africa” (Musallam 1979: 22). And although Said does not detail what he calls “the dialectical response” to imperialism in Orientalism (2003: 104), anti-colonial writings from France’s colonies, and in particular from the Maghreb – by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Abdelkebir Khatibi, among others – have been seminal to the development of the field Said’s work helped launch in the English-speaking world: postcolonial studies.

Said in part redressed this imbalance in his sequel to Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, a book that supplements his analysis of imperialist representations – including Albert Camus’s Algerian writings – with a renewed focus on “resistance against empire” by the likes of Aimé Césaire, Fanon, and Abdallah Laroui (1993: xii). And yet the Maghreb remains peripheral in Said’s work, symptomatic not only of the vicissitudes of biographical origins and itineraries, but also, as Françoise Lionnet has suggested, of “the long imperial history of conflicting Anglophone and Francophone spheres of political and cultural influence in relation to the Arab civilizations of the Maghreb and the Mashriq” (2011: 399). Said’s Palestinian and Egyptian background, and his location in the English-language academy, partly explain his critical orientation toward the Arab east (al-mashriq). With the exception of Laroui, whom Said cites at several points, and a brief if admiring mention of “the decolonizing literature of the time, whether French or Arab – Germaine Tillion, Kateb Yacine, Fanon, or Genet” at the end of his long analysis of Albert Camus’s Algerian writings, there is little evidence of a sustained engagement with Maghrebi literature and theory in Culture and Imperialism (Said 1993: 185).

It is not our task to fault Said with yet another critical lacuna on empirical grounds. Much ink has been spilt on the absence of the German, Russian, Spanish, etc., empires in Orientalism, despite Said’s explicit insistence that his focus was on methodology rather than exhaustiveness (Said 2003: 4). Our aim, rather, is to imagine what conclusions Said might have drawn had he more fully engaged with Maghrebi anti-colonial literature and theory. What can the Maghreb teach us about Orientalism, and Orientalism? In turn, and equally important, Said’s work continues to ask crucial and difficult questions of Maghreb scholars. In light of his deconstruction of naturalized areas of study, what are the stakes of our ongoing commitment to an area studies model born out of Orientalism and the Cold War era shift to American ascendency? What does the Maghreb, as frame of analysis, enable, and what does it foreclose?

For those of us who work on the Maghreb, one of the most important lessons of Said’s Orientalism is what he called “methodological self-consciousness”: the call to interrogate, denaturalize, and historicize the borders of the regions we study (2003: 326). If Said was not the first to draw attention to the colonial production of areas of study – Mohamed Sahli, Laroui, Mohammad Abed Al-Jabiri, and Khatibi are some of his Maghrebi predecessors – Orientalism has had by far the greatest impact in terms of global reach and academic dissemination, a feature of the unequal translation and distribution of intellectual capital, no doubt, but also of Said’s preternatural capacity to synthesize an encyclopedic amount of scholarship into forceful, and often polemical, argument. Translated into more than thirty languages, Said’s best-known work has become an unavoidable reference for students of the Maghreb, from Colombia to Japan – and this despite the fact that Orientalism overlooks the Maghreb in locating the stretch of European imperialism “from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to Indochina and Malaysia” (41).

In this dossier, we ask what it would mean to think the Maghreb after Orientalism, forty years after the publication of a work that invites us to denaturalize our disciplinary formations and areas of specialization. “After” is here both a marker of the time that has elapsed since the publication of Said’s watershed book, and an acknowledgment of the debt owed in Maghreb studies to Said. With a nod to Ali Behdad’s 1994 special issue of L’Esprit Créateur, “Orientalism after Orientalism,” we also seek to supplement, expand, and critique some of the tenets of Orientalism. As a number of scholars working in the wake of Said have shown, the Maghreb is in a number of ways exemplary of the colonial condition, from the production of ethno-racial identities in the colonial laboratory (Lorcin 2014, Anidjar 2003, Hochberg 2009) to the occlusion of the colonial past (Stora 2005, Shepard 2006) and the transfer of legal and discursive practices of governmentality from colony to metropole (Hajjat 2012, Le Cour Grandmaison 2010). Since Said’s untimely passing, the Maghreb has come into view in spectacular fashion. In the wake of the mass popular movements ignited in Tunisia in 2010 and the refugee crisis still unfolding before us, how might a renewed focus on the Maghreb allow to us to revisit and update Orientalism? Expanding our focus yet further, what might Said have made of the shift of geopolitical gravity away from Europe and the United States – a shift he already acknowledged in Culture and Imperialism, without elaborating upon its consequences for our understanding of cultural imperialism (1993: 284)? The essays published in this dossier seek to explore the critical role of the Maghreb in understanding, and undermining, the political, military, and epistemic forces that Said bracketed under the term Orientalism.

Said was not the first to expose the imperial workings of what Moroccan poet Adbellatif Laâbi called “colonial science”: the disciplines that make up the field of Orientalism (1967: 3). In her essay, Susan Slyomovics uncovers a rich archive of efforts to decolonize the social sciences in the Maghreb, from official appeals to ban ethnology in Algeria and Pierre Bourdieu’s damning sociology of colonial Algeria, to the playful writings of Habib Tengour and the literary criticism of Khatibi. David Fieni takes up Khatibi’s essays and poetry to offer a Saidian model of “portable theory.” Against the idea that theoretical paradigms originate in a particular place (Europe, say, or the Maghreb), Khatibi’s “transversal intersemiotics” become an invitation to think across colonial cartographies – metropole and colony – without losing sight of the power differential that produced them as discrete sites. This transcolonial methodology animates Olivia C. Harrison’s essay, which turns to Khatibi’s writings on the Maghreb as a “horizon of thinking” and Said’s notion of Palestine as “utopia” to elucidate a neglected dimension of Orientalism: Said’s attachment to decolonization as an ongoing process, one that requires anti-colonial critique in the present.

The next two essays in the dossier take up a medium that is absent from Orientalism, but was nevertheless important to Said: film. Brian T. Edwards tracks the coincidence of American ascendancy and Orientalist representations in Hollywood, starting with the 1942 film Casablanca, which ushers in new forms of Orientalist representation even as it rescripts classic tropes. Madeleine Dobie elaborates on Said’s paradoxical relationship to the Maghreb in her essay on the iconic film of the Algerian revolution, Battle of Algiers. If the Maghreb is absent from Orientalism, Said’s public comments on Gillo Pontecorvo’s film make clear the importance he attached to Algeria as both model of decolonization and admonition against unrestrained nationalism.

Algeria is, in this sense too, a figure for Said’s Palestine, even though he did not locate the separation of the twin figures of the Semite – the Arab and the Jew – in the Maghreb. Reflecting on Hélène Cixous’s and Jacques Derrida’s notion of “the cut” that separates Arab and Jew, Gil Z. Hochberg concludes this dossier by reading the “impossible figure” of the Arab Jew into Orientalism to supplement, and complicate, Said’s critique of colonial discourse.

Written forty years after Said’s field-defining book, the essays in this dossier reflect a deep engagement with his thinking, sketching in broad strokes several areas of research on “the Maghreb after Orientalism.”

 

Olivia C. Harrison is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (2016) and co-editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (2016). Her manuscript-in-progress, Banlieue Palestine: Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France, charts the emergence of the Palestinian question in France, from the anti-racist movements of the late 1960s to contemporary art and activism. Her most recent article, forthcoming from diacritics, examines the recuperation of minority discourses by the French far and alt right.

 

References

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Behdad, Ali. 1994. “Orientalism after Orientalism.” L’Esprit Créateur 34 (2): 3-11.

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Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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