Description: Under French colonial rule, the region of the Maghreb emerged as distinct from two other geographical entities that, too, are colonial inventions: the Middle East and Africa. In this book, Abdelmajid Hannoum demonstrates how the invention of the Maghreb started long before the conquest of Algiers and lasted until the time of independence, and beyond, to our present. Through an interdisciplinary study of French colonial modernity, Hannoum examines how colonialism made extensive use of translations of Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts and harnessed high technologies of power to reconfigure the region and invent it. In the process, he analyzes a variety of forms of colonial knowledge including historiography, anthropology, cartography, literary work, archaeology, linguistics, and racial theories. He shows how local engagement with colonial politics and its modes of knowledge were instrumental in the modern making of the region, including in its postcolonial era, as a single unit divorced from Africa and from the Middle East.
Brief description: Abdelmajid Hannoum is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. He is the editor of Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance in Africa (2016), and author of Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City (2020), Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (2010) and Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (2011). He was a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Study at Harvard, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, a Senior Fulbright Fellow, and a Senior Fellow at the Aga Khan Center.
Review Quotes: 'Employing evidence from maps and archaeological reports to dialects and notions of nationalism, Hannoum provides an insightful analysis of how the different lands and peoples of north Africa became 'the Maghreb' - how the name and the concept emerged from a complex of modern colonial, racial, and knowledge constructs. Brent Shaw, Princeton University