Post-Orientalism and Colonialism: A Critical Mapping of Maghribi Studies (1951-2000)

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On November 30, 2005, French National Assembly passed a law hailing the “positive role of colonisation,” especially in North Africa. This official French reproduction of colonial ideology is not an aberration, but a strong trend that dominates the field of Western scholarship on North Africa. In 1996 a British historian asked me a question that shocked me. “Why are Libyans so paranoid about Italian colonialism?” he said, following a presentation I had given at the London School of Economics on the social origins of Libyan resistance to Italian colonialism. My questioner was a fellow panel member specializing in Libyan colonial history, and I asked him what he meant by “paranoid.” Somalians, Ethiopians, and Eritreans had a positive view of Italian colonialism, he claimed. The period of Italian colonialism represented a modernizing stage of Libyan history, despite the fact that half the Libyan population perished and thousands were displaced and pushed into exile. I answered that the Libyan people, like other humans oppressed by brutal settlers, had every reason to hate colonialism. That encounter, combined with my generation’s disillusionment with the nationalist regimes in the Maghrib, led me to consider a critical examination of orientalist, colonial, and nationalist theories of the Maghrib.

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies