Browsing by Subject "Maghreb"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Aesthetics and Aftermath: Algeria 1962-2012
    (2014-05) Treacy, Corbin
    Much in Algeria has remained unchanged since 1962, when the country won its independence from France: the heroes of the revolution are still in power, social inequality is rife, and transparent democracy remains elusive. My dissertation studies Algerian literary works in French that challenge this condition of abeyance through their form, engagement with the political present, and utopian thinking. I analyze novels and short stories that disclose and disrupt a landscape of what I call "permanent aftermath"--a cycle of sameness in the guise of the new. These texts break out of the limiting temporalities and foundational mythologies that have held the country in a state of suspended animation, and they require new interpretive and critical frameworks for making sense of them. Far from illustrating the uniqueness of the Algerian case, these works describe an architecture of the text-nation-reader dynamic that resonates across European and postcolonial literatures, and I analyze the literary responses to aftermath they provide in dialogue with the broader discursive fields of contemporary Francophone and Postcolonial Studies. This corpus points to the continued relevance of the nation and calls us to read closely the specificity of the national context, particularly in a scholarly climate increasingly eager to replace the nation with a post- or trans-national global logic. They adumbrate alternative nationalisms that work to reignite arrested processes of decolonization in Algeria. Read closely for their artistry and with sensitivity to the connection between writers' social relations and the forms and content of their work, these texts invite us to rethink how we consume, discuss, teach and write about postcolonial literature in the twenty-first century.
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    Making Jewish Books in North Africa, 1700-1900
    (2020-05) Sienna, Noam
    Books can be many things, in addition to vehicles for text: they can also be artisanal crafts, commercial merchandise, family heirlooms, illicit contraband, religious relics, and more. Beyond their status as objects, books are also nodes in a social network, part of a complex cultural system that connects people, objects, places, and ideas. This dissertation presents the Jewish book itself as a vital source for Jewish history, showing that the study of Jewish books, and their makers and readers, has the potential to reshape our understanding of Jewish society during the complex and turbulent transition into modernity. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in book history, and the emerging subfield of Jewish book history, I propose a methodology that combines bibliography, material culture, textual interpretation, and social history. In this dissertation, I argue that Jewish books must be studied as both material and social objects, paying attention to how they were brought into being, how they took their particular physical and visual forms, and how they were woven into the everyday lives of individuals and communities. I focus on how North African Jews were involved in the making of books in both manuscript and print, both in North Africa and abroad, demonstrating that book-making was a primary link between Jewish communities in North Africa and their coreligionists in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Examining the material and social aspects of the production of North African Jewish books in the 18th and 19th centuries, I highlight how the Jewish book illuminates the encounter between the world of a text and the world of its readers.
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    Untranslating the Maghreb: reckoning with Gender in literature and film from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia
    (2014-04) Bliss, Greta Katherine
    Orientalist cultural translation remains immanent to the creation and reception of Maghrebi women's fiction. However, recent literary and cinematic texts from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia problematize and critique this dynamic. Reappropriating both the process of translation and the highly charged figure of the Maghrebi heroine, Maghrebi women's cultural production performs a literary, cinematic, and critical intervention that I call "untranslation." Untranslation thwarts Orientalist translation through a variety of mechanisms including narrative deferral, the use of alternative linguistic and religious idioms, the reappropriation of technology and modernity, and the deployment of self-ethnography. Resisting the notion that "postcolonial" or "World" literature and film readily translates a known Other, untranslation calls for a new understanding of Maghrebi women's fiction as participating in its own scholarly and pedagogical productions of meaning.