Competing Temporalities in Decolonial North African Fiction
Embracing an interdisciplinary, transnational, and bilingual approach, this project explores North African fiction in Arabic and French. It aims to comparatively examine the literature of a region whose cultural heritage is often categorised in the university research landscape as either Romance studies or Arabic studies. The project is inspired by the tendency of modern Maghrebi fiction to reference early modern figures and texts that shaped conceptions of the region’s literature, historiography and “imagined geographies” (Edward Said). It departs from the hypothesis that by choosing certain intertextual references over others, Maghrebi writers contribute to decolonial literary histories from within. Indeed, many authors engage with early modern personalities who shaped how the history of the Mediterranean is remembered today. Returning to travelling intellectuals like Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) and Ibn Battuta (1304– 1377), they reach back to a time before imposed nation-states restructured the regional order in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on this observation, my book project investigates the correlation between intertextuality and temporality. Which (literary) histories do texts from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco narrate? How does their relationship to temporality manifest itself in choices of intertextual and historical references? How do these choices change throughout the 20th century, and in the beginning of the 21st century?