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Our Civilizing Mission is both an exploration of colonial education and a response to current anxieties about the foundations of the ‘humanities’. Focusing on the example of Algeria, it asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education.
Exploring the concept of ‘colonial cultures,’ this book analyses how these cultures both transformed, and were transformed by, their various societies. Challenging both the colonial vulgate, and the nationalist paradigm, Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco, examines the lesser known specificities of particular moments, practices and institutions in Morocco, with the aim of uncovering a ‘new colonial history.’ By examining society on a micro-level, this book raises the profiles of the mass of Moroccans who were highly influential in the colonial period yet have been excluded from the historical record because of a lack of textual source material. Introducing social and cultural hi...
Until the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the resilience of authoritarian regimes seemed a fundamental feature of regional politics. While economic, political, and internal security policies are most often considered in discussions of regime maintenance, Laurie Brand introduces a new factor, that of national narratives. Portrayals of a country's founding, identity, and bases of unity can be a powerful strategy in sustaining a ruling elite. Brand argues that such official stories, which are used to reinforce the right to rule, justify policies, or combat opponents, deserve careful exploration if we are to understand the full range of tools available to respond to crises ...
The debate on Orientalism began some fifty years ago in the wake of decolonization. While initially considered a turning point, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was in fact part of a larger academic endeavor – the political critique of “colonial science” – that had already significantly impacted the humanities and social sciences. In a recent attempt to broaden the debate, the papers collected in this volume, offered at various seminars and an international symposium held in Paris in 2010-2011, critically examine whether Orientalism, as knowledge and as creative expression, was in fact fundamentally subservient to Western domination. By raising new issues, the papers shift the focu...
This book examines the profound impact of European integration on two North African countries, Tunisia and Morocco. Confronting the theoretical literatures on the "entanglements" of the domestic and international realms, and the intricate role played by the middle-income state in the international arena, White provides the first detailed comparison of Tunisia and Morocco's post-independence political economies, especially in the context of the "Euro-Mediterranean Partnerships" signed with the European Union in the late 1990s. North African states must act, on the one hand, as entrepreneurs seeking to encourage trade and attract foreign investment within the domestic economy, in the process o...
This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers. Entitled 'La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne' ('The New Mediterranean Culture'), Camus's lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression of his so-called 'Mediterranean humanism' or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality. These various interpretations are based on r...
For decades the superimposition of languages in Algeria has had growing cultural and political consequences. The relations between identity and language, already complicated before independence, became all the more entangled after 1962 when the new state imposed standard Arabic as the sole national language. The vernacular brand of Arabic spoken by the majority of the population--as well as Berber, spoken by an important minority--were denied legitimacy. Moreover, French, the colonial language, continued to be important all the while that its position changed. The violence that ensued in the late 1980s cannot be fully understood without considering the politics of language. This timely book ...
Media, Ritual and Identity examines the role of the media in society; its complex influence on democratic processes and its participation in the construction and affirmation of different social identities. It draws extensively upon cultural anthropology and combines a commanding overview of contemporary media debates with a series of fascinating case studies ranging from political ritual on television to broadcasting in the third world.
This book is about power. The power wielded over others - by absolute monarchs, tyrannical totalitarian regimes and military occupiers - and the power of the people who resist and deny their rulers' claims to that authority by whatever means. The extraordinary events in the Middle East in 2011 offered a vivid example of how non-violent demonstration can topple seemingly invincible rulers. Drawing on these dramatic events and parallel moments in the modern history of the Middle East, from the violent uprisings in Algeria against the French in the early twentieth century, to revolution in Iran in 1979, and the Palestinian intifada, the book considers the ways in which the people have united to...
While the Mediterranean is often considered a distinct, unified space, recent scholarship on the early modern history of the sea has suggested that this perspective is essentially a Western one, devised from the vantage point of imperial power that historically patrolled the region’s seas and controlled its ports. By contrast, for the peoples of its southern shores, the Mediterranean was polymorphous, shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment. Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century the idea of a monolithic Mediterranean had either been absorbed by or imposed on the populations of the region. In French Mediterraneans editors Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard off...