Browsing by Subject "North Africa"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Bridging the Strait: The Shared History of Iberia and North Africa in Medieval Muslim and Christian Chronicles
    (2021-06) Snowden, Emma
    This dissertation examines Arabic, Latin, and Ibero-Romance historical chronicles written by Muslims and Christians from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries to investigate connections between Iberia and North Africa on two levels. The first is the historical, considering the extent to which Muslim and Christian chroniclers across the Strait depicted their histories as related, writing about the same people and events. The second is the historiographical, exploring the extent to which chroniclers borrowed from one another directly, and wrote within a common cultural and intellectual framework. I argue that chroniclers on opposite shores of the Strait saw their histories as intrinsically connected, but did not always view all the individuals and populations in the region as participants in a larger community. Perceived differences were frequently rooted in religious identities, but also in ethnic and geopolitical ones. Despite these differences, I present evidence that chroniclers drew upon and elaborated a co-produced and mutually colonizing historical framework, employing similar narrative strategies and invoking a common past in an effort to resolve the ideological problem of competing North African and Iberian claims to power over the same territory. Individual chapters detail how historians across the Strait employed ethnonyms for one another that undermined claims to regional belonging, constructed a shared cultural archive of legendary, apocalyptic, and gendered elements to stake territorial claims, and invoked a rhetoric of emptying and elimination that I read through a settler colonial lens.
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    Examining the Link Between Women's Political and Economic Empowerment: A Comparative Analysis of Success Case Studies and the MENA Region
    (2023) Betancourt, Zoe; Booker, Lily; Huber, Olivia; Lee, Kathleen
    In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, women’s empowerment is improving in some aspects, but examining the relationship between women’s political and economic empowerment is essential to the creation and implementation of future female engagement strategies. Although women’s empowerment continues to evolve in the MENA region, common themes of concern that jeopardize its progress are still present and are found in the form of harassment and discrimination due to patriarchal systems and customs. This report seeks to evaluate the linkage between political and economic empowerment and concludes that political empowerment is the leading factor in closing gender gaps. Conducting further research, our case studies investigate the countries of Bangladesh, Namibia, Rwanda, Argentina, and Iceland, where the rates of women’s political and economic empowerment are high. The research findings are broad and address key issue areas such as unpaid care, education, land ownership, inheritance, and civil participation. Additionally, it emphasizes that male support is necessary to promote successful campaigns of equality on both the political and economic fronts.
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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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    Ornate visions of knowledge and power: formation of Marinid Madrasas in Maghrib al-Aqsâ.
    (2011-05) Latif, Riyaz Mansur
    Decoding the cultural lives of monuments and the many meanings that accrue to them in time has been vital to art historical inquiry. In this framework, this dissertation explores the composite meanings constructed around the 13th-14th century madrasas (theological seminaries) commissioned by the Marinids (1269-1465), primarily at Fez in Morocco. As independent built-forms, these institutions emerged conspicuously late in the Maghrib (western North Africa), and thus, their emergence under the Marinids raises vital questions about their social, ideological and visual meanings. Fusing these madrasas' historical incidence with nuances of their visual formation in the social, cultural, and political realm of 14th-century Maghrib as well as the Mediterranean, the dissertation seeks to attend to the wider implications of their presence, and place these structures in the domain of their concurrences with and departures from the visuality of similar educational institutions in other Islamic cultures. At the outset, addressing the relatively unusual presence of a madrasa in the Marinid dynastic necropolis of the Chella near Rabat by suggesting that the Marinids aligned themselves with the consecrated aura of this ancient site, the dissertation subsequently moves to understand the emergence of the Marinid madrasas, not only in light of the cultural and political aspirations of the Marinid sovereignty, but also in relation to issues of the urban topography of Fez, and the economy of waqf (endowment) and water which is inscribed in their formation. In exploring the madrasas' spatial, decorative and inscriptional schema, the dissertation seeks to understand their architectural embellishments as a visual archive geared for transmission through the art of memory. Also, the correspondences between the functions and the visuality of these madrasas can be understood as a symptom of the power-knowledge nexus involving the Marinid state patronage. Probing the visual formation of the Marinid madrasas on several levels, the dissertation raises pertinent queries about these madrasas' transformed visual meanings over time, foregrounding the implications of colonial modernity for scholastic engagement with the art and architectural production in the Islamic west.
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    Resurrecting Carthage: Mapping Memory and Identity in the Landscape of the Roman Colony, c. 146 BCE – 200 CE
    (2023-06) Saladin, Christopher
    The ancient city of Carthage is best remembered for its infamous end. Following a century of struggle with Rome in the Punic Wars, the flourishing North African city was violently destroyed and abandoned in 146 BCE. For centuries, Roman authors wrote of the city as a cautionary tale of Rome’s destructive power. Even today, popular culture erroneously remembers Carthage as a ruined city sown with salt. This image of a desolate Carthage stands at odds with the reality of its resettlement as a Roman colony and subsequent growth into the leading metropolis of Roman North Africa. This dissertation investigates the intersection of memory and identity within the Roman city of Carthage from its Augustan colonization in the late 1st century BCE to its urban boom under the Antonine and Severan emperors in the late 2nd century CE. Examining limited textual references alongside spatial analysis of the archaeological record, I argue that residents of Roman Carthage consciously preserved, erased, or reframed sites of Punic memory in the urban landscape to express locally situated civic identities. The negotiation of memory at Carthage is indicative of larger processes of identity formation in provincial Roman cities. Faced with the realities of imperial rule, Rome’s subjects found creative ways to express both imperial unity and local difference. Provincial populations challenged a singular definition of “Roman-ness” through regional variation in material culture and the active maintenance of local traditions. Carthage’s infamous destruction makes it an extraordinary place to witness such pre-Roman survivals. By tracing the influence of the Punic city on its Roman successor, I rewrite expected narratives of Roman cultural identity and propose a framework for studying the role of memory in colonial urban landscapes.