Photo of me taken at the Khalduniyya library in Tunis, named after the famous historian Ibn Khaldun

The dictum “historicise, always” guides my practice in the study of literature. but beyond literary history, I have worked closely with historians, which resulted in three edited books and several essays, mostly involving both shores of the Mediterranean.  

When it comes to literature and history, I am not quite sure which of the two appeals to me more. But perhaps I don’t have to choose. The study of history through literature, and the study of literature as a product of history allow a dialectic vantage point of considerable richness. The exchange between different cultures over time and the movement of peoples and ideas tend to shape and reshape literary production and reception. Relations between Britain and the Maghreb and Inter-Mediterranean exchange have been central to this. I co-edited two books with Abdeljelil Temimi, Britain and the Maghreb: the State of Research and Cultural Contacts (2002) and The Movement of People and Ideas Between Britain and the Maghreb (2003). The first of these can be read in its entirety here (English) and here (Arabic), whilst the table of contents for the second can be read here. A review of the second book, titled “Exeter Conference and its Chronotopes”, which is available in English here.

My directorship of the Centre for Mediterranean Studies in Exeter opened up my mind to the “longue duree” of this intensely contested sea, and allowed fruitful collaborations with Classicists, archaeologists and historians of both shores of the sea. One particularly stimulating collaboration resulted in the widely-reviewed volume Trade and Cultural exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s maritime legacy, which I co-edited with Maria Fusaro and Colin Heywood, which you can purchase here. Conributers include Ottomanists, early modern economic historians, and intellectual historians. The book was recently translated into French by Daniel Verhyde and can be read here.

One nodal point of Mediterranean history is the reversal of roles in the relationship between Europe and North Africa that took place between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a matter which posed new questions to modern Arabic historical literature, such as how to account for this reversal of fortunes, particularly during the nationalist, post-colonial cultural moment. In an essay on historical fiction in modern Maghrabi literature, I argue that this is especially true of the post-colonial cultural climate, a period defined by the intense search for a nationalist historiography, a search for a historical identity around which new polities could coalesce. There has been such a marked interest in the immediately pre-colonial period of North African history before the emergence of European settler-colonialism.

Colonialism, and in particular the kinds of settler colonialism practised in the Maghreb, specifically because they occur within a Mediterranean context, mobilise history and appeal to it in political as well as cultural discourses. My essay “History, Literature and Settler Colonialism in North Africa”, which you can read here, traces the history of settler-colonial thought and identity in Tunisia, but also in Algeria, by focusing on how settlers articulated their identity as North Africans intent on remaining in the country as their permanent home, by adopting historical discourses, in particular that of Roman Africa. Local writers wrote back to stake their own claim on the land in interesting ways.

Unsurprisingly, Carthage emerged as a major contested space in these literatures. Reclalming Carthage from well entrenched History, which stretches to Homer the Roman domination of the Phoenician city is no easy feat. Yet, Francophone as well as Arabophone writers endeavored to “decolonise” Carthage form this appropriation. The work of Faouzi Mellah, about which I have written here, and the essay on settler colonialism mentioned above explore facets of this endeavor. The confluence of history and memory in the study of Carthage can be seen in two short videos from the study day organised with the Institut Superieur des Sciences Humaines in Tunis and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in 2019. The short documentary introducing the day while the other video is recording of my presentation, which was focused on the conflicted significations and representations of Carthage as a place and a history. In it, I ask: whose Carthage is it anyway?

My more recent academic work on the intersection of history and literature has focused both on the ways in which modern literature depicts history in the form of historical novels, and the ways in which history is represented in moments of crisis and change, namely during the Tunisian Revolution.

The aftermath of the revolutionary movements of 2011s authorised a paradoxical situation in which an intervention in history and revaluation of marginalised voices and cultural forms have come head to a head against the systematic annihilation of the human past through the destruction of archaeological sites, repression of historical thinking, banning of “modern” ways of life and repression of literature. This paradox is emblematic of the way that times of revolution make and remake our understanding of our own place in human history and our place in the world and force different people into different, often contradictory ways of thinking and being. In an article for an edited volume concerned with history and memory in Arabic literature, I explore manifestations of these attitudes to history in a variety of sources and reflect on the ways in which the past is remembered and mobilised on both sides; you can read my article here. The work of recovery is mostly pursued through testimonial literature, which you can see under the project Literature and Justice.