Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
“Modernity in Question: Retrieving Imaginaries of the Transcontinental Mediterranean”
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Abstract
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My project aims to retrieve transcontinental vernacular representations of the Mediterranean in the literature produced in the 1930s and 1940s by Mediterranean subjects of all origins and religions within colonial North Africa. In a Mediterranean colonial context, modernity was presented as a monolithic paradigm, one that obliterated all emergent, non-exclusive alternative visions of what it meant to be modern. Notions of progress and assimilation inscribed inequality at the heart of colonization, thereby annihilating any possible Mediterranean partnership between the Northern and the Southern shores. I aim to investigate the vernacular recuperation of Mediterranean symbols and loci appropriated by European discourses of modernity- modernist literature and, in a related fashion, nationalistic, fascist discourses of conquest. I will analyze how, through “Mediterranean” writings of that period, this region is reconfigured as the transcontinental space of exchange and communication that it has historically been. Although such alternative imaginative views have fallen into oblivion, it seems judicious to recover and analyze them in order to draw a complete picture of Mediterranean relations at the apex of modernity and, thereby, to provide a much-needed revision of reductive, exclusionary notions of European identity. I will be interested in assessing the adjustments that such a transnational vision of the Mediterranean imposes on our postcolonial understanding of colonial society and, more importantly, of postcolonial relations, in particular in the context of global immigration and North-South antagonism and exploitation.
The awarded funds will be used to subsidize an extensive stay in Southern Europe during the summer of 2007. From mid-June to August, I intend to visit several archives in the South of France (Fonds Roblès-Patrimoine Méditerranéen, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier; Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence; Fonds littéraire Méditerranéen, Marseille) as well as the Biblioteca Nacional Española in Madrid, Spain. I expect to gather sufficient materials regarding the cultural production by Muslims, Jews, and Northern Mediterranean immigrants in French Algeria and Tunisia, Spanish Morocco, and English Gibraltar to substantiate my argument in a variety of contexts.
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