Abdelkebir Khatibi Research Articles

Moroccan subaltern voices narrated: the historical imaginary of race and the legacy of slavery in Rabbaj’s Le Lutteur [The Wrestler] and El Hachimi’s Dhākirat al-narjis [The Daffodil’s Memory

ABSTRACT Nation in Moroccan historiography writings has traditionally been described as culturally, ethnically and racially homogeneous; an all-encompassing discourse that silences episodes about the historical legacy of slavery and racism in the country, and undermines multicultural Morocco. In fact, the history of Morocco’s blacks of sub-Saharan descent remains fragmented, scattered and undocumented – partly because of the scarcity of archival sources. Recent years, however, have witnessed the revival of an ‘African consciousness’ in Moroccan history and in literature. This is also the case of Maghrebi (North African) and Arabic literature from the Mashreq (the Middle East) and the Gulf. In this paper, we consider how two recent Moroccan novels, Le Lutteur [The Wrestler, in French] by My Seddick Rabbaj (2017) and Dhākirat al-narjis [The Daffodil's Memory, in Arabic] by Rachid al-Hachimi (2018), deal with salient moments of trans-Saharan cultural connections. We argue that the historical and the geographical imaginaries connecting North and sub-Saharan Africa compel a discussion of the ‘decolonial’ as outlined by the Moroccan critic Abdelkebir Khatibi, and enforce a rebound on the concept of ‘significant geographies’. In engaging with the narratives’ concern about the construction of racial and cultural identities in Morocco, we consider how these works resonate with the recovery of the subaltern history of black Morocco, and how gender, rural and ethnic identity inform and imbue the texts with a knot of ambivalent discourses.

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

La bi-langue ou l’(en)jeu de l’écriture bilingue chez Abdelkebir Khatibi

“Quand j ’écris en français, ma langue maternelle se met en retrait: elle s ’écrase. Elle rentre au harem. Qui parle alors? Qui écrit? Mais elle revient (comme on dit). Et je travaille à la faire revenir quand elle me manque” (Khatibi 1978: 49). This statement made by Abdelkebir Khatibi, a Moroccan sociologist, poet and essayist, can clearly be seen in a number of his writings. In this article, we will attempt to examine closely the staging of this inter/trans-cultural experience that the author-narrator designates by a bilangue. Amour bilingue is a text in which romance and autobiography meet providing a suitable example of this peculiar, complex and priviliged situation which prevails in Morocco and on an extended scale, the Maghreb countries. The pro blematic (conceptual order) of bi/multi-lingualism coupled with a di/tri-glossia is treated by Khatibi under a fictional and poetic outlook. The bi-langue is considered by the author-narrated as a “between-two ”, a third language by means of which he succeeded in assuming the coexistence in him of a foreign language (the language of the other which no one still considers as a colonizing language anymore, the instrument of cultural uprooting) and of the mother tongue.

The Other Khatibi: Envisaging Arab Intellectuals after the End of Grand Narratives

: The recent revival of interest in Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) around the English release of his seminal 1983 essay, Maghreb Pluriel represents an opportunity to place this thinker in the inner circle of post-1967 Arab thought. This article argues that most coverage and commemoration of him has been devoted to a glorified side of his trajectory that fits neatly within the framework of ‘postcolonial francophone intellectuals.’ However, this article argues that we must revise the meaning of his seminal book and his call for a ‘plural Maghreb’ to see it also as the demise of his project for a decolonized sociology in Morocco, which was necessary to set his sights toward semiology and his significant literary oeuvre. His example informs us on Arab intellectual strategies after the end of grand ideological narratives, and how to write Arab intellectual and cultural histories without succumbing to the trap of nostalgia.

Review

Review

The Blink and the bilangue: Interstices of the Textual/Visual in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Moroccan Mediterranean

The Blink and the <i>bilangue</i>: Interstices of the Textual/Visual in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Moroccan Mediterranean

“Let’s Take a Leap”

AbstractThis article examines how the Moroccan Francophone writer Mohamed Leftah negotiates a decolonized modernity in his novel Le dernier combat du Captain Niʿmat (2011). This understanding of decolonization is based on Abdelkebir Khatibi’s pensée-autre, a mode of thinking that simultaneously embraces and disavows its constitutive traditions and attempts to formulate its own episteme. Living in Egypt, a queer diaspora for a Moroccan, Leftah employs queer male sexuality in a Sufialist text that tells the story of Niʿmat, an Egyptian retired army officer who pursues a love affair with his young Nubian servant, Islam. Transgressive sexuality, anachronistic gender typology, narrative modes, and historicizing onomastics decenter the metropole of France and articulate a decolonized modernity. Even as it centers male sexual unruliness and invites a queer reading, the text stabilizes other sexual and gender hierarchies, pointing to the need for texts revolving around queer feminist discourse in the Arab world.

DeGroove Is indeMove

<i>De</i>Groove Is in<i>de</i>Move

CULTURAL ALIENATION AND LANGUAGE DISCONTINUITY IN LA MÉMOIRE TATTOUÉE

The question of Alienation is a core subject-matter of human conditioning in the present era. Therefore, it is natural that a controversial issue like alienation should leave such an indelible influence upon contemporary literature. The question of Alienation, in its different manifestations, has been conceptualized and discussed, most importantly, within the existentialistic literary perspective. Due to its historical and socio-cultural conditions, the African as well as the Maghrebian literature could not shy away from the influence of alienation, understood as an identity loss and as a sense of inferiority, experienced either before or after the contact with the Other. The dispossessed personality's search for identity is a commonplace theme in modern fiction. The present paper will discuss the different nuances of the word alienation and analyze this theme in La Mémoire Tattouée (1971), a Moroccan literary text written in French by Abdelkebir Khatibi. The aim is to show how language discontinuity stands as a cause that creates a sense of inferiority, subordination, and alienation.&#x0D; Key words: identity, alienation, inferiority, existentialism, La Mémoire Tatuée, Abdelkebir Khatibi

Chiasmus and après-coup: Andalusia as trauma in Rachid Boudjedra’s La Prise de Gibraltar

ABSTRACTCritical readings of Rachid Boudjedra’s 1986 novel La Prise de Gibraltar have invariably emphasised the text’s fictionalisation of history and its debunking of foundational myths. Yet the novel’s reliance on the mythopoetic trope of al-Andalus has surprisingly received little attention. This article restores the mythical recording and affective resignification of Ṭāriq Ibn Ziyād’s 711 Andalusian conquest to the core of the novel’s take on historicity. Abdelkebir Khatibi’s reflections on the trope of al-Andalus have taught us that all engagements with the Andalusian past bear the indelible mark of trauma. Building on Khatibi’s concept of al-Andalus as ‘traumatic chiasmus’, I trace the deep-time resonance of Ṭāriq Ibn Ziyād’s conquest of Spain through its juxtaposition with the novel’s second traumatic episode – the women’s insurrection against the French in Constantine in 1955, an event that indirectly causes the narrator Tarik’s post-traumatic thyroid-related obesity. Beyond this bodily manifestation, I argue that the novel stages a post-traumatic form of historical consciousness rooted in the wound (trauma in Greek) constituted by the conquest of Gibraltar as ‘phantasme central’ (92). This wounded mode of historical existence produces a meandering aesthetics inflecting Boudjedra’s historiographical model – a mode of writing-in-mourning, whose recording of the past is remarkable for eluding the historical event. Instead favouring the retrospective, affective vision of après-coup (Jean Laplanche), Boudjedra delineates a reflective apprehension of history. This vision hinges on the repetitive concatenation of moments of trauma, which excavates the intrinsic violence of myth and its mystifying ends; it also complicates postcolonial incarnations of time and historical existence.

Rethinking the Maghreb and the post-colonial intellectual in Khatibi’s Les temps modernes issue in 1977

ABSTRACTIn 1977, a group of North African intellectuals produced a special volume for the prestigious French journal Les temps modernes. Led by Abdelkebir Khatibi, they sought to ‘rethink the Maghreb’ as a way to counter the poisoned, divided and belligerent climate of the region, and to offer an alternative to the authoritarian models of the nation-state that took hold after political independence. When read through the lens of Rancière’s concept of the ‘dissensus’ concerning the interplay between culture and politics, this collective volume of Les temps modernes reveals the plight of a generation of post-independence Maghrebi intellectuals who questioned their own purpose in light of their countries’ national projects. This article claims that this group intervened in the public sphere as a way to reconfigure the intellectual’s purpose in their respective societies and political systems. Their case highlights an important chapter in the region’s social and intellectual history and demonstrates how intellectual actors seek re-integration in the national community after a painful period of exclusion.

Love as ethico-political practice: Inventing reparative pedagogies of aimance in “disjointed” times

ABSTRACTThis article draws on the conceptualization of love as ethico-political practice and a nonidentitarian strategy for political communities to present possibilities for thinking pedagogically about what the late Moroccan writer and philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi called ’aimance‘. Khatibis's constructed term for affinity, affection, tolerance and friendship is a powerful concept for invoking love as a force for social change. The article builds on theorization of love as a transformative political concept in critical education to highlight further that aimance offers important new pedagogical openings along two directions: first, the ethical and political concept of aimance allows educators and students to conceptualize and practice a form of ‘de-colonial love’ that recognizes humanity and affinity across difference; second, an ethico-political practice of love as aimance encourages educators to invent pedagogies that are ‘reparative’, that is, pedagogies which attempt to address wound, injury and suffering within a frame that takes into consideration histories of violence, oppression, and social injustice, without falling into the trap of sentimentality. This article asks, then, how a consideration of aimance might enable critical pedagogues rethink the very contours of love as an ethico-political practice in education.

For a Transcolonial Reading of the Contemporary Algerian Novel

ABSTRACTIn 1968, Abdelkebir Khatibi called upon Maghrebi novelists to engage with the rest of the formerly colonized world in order to advance the goals of cultural decolonization. Maghrebi writers would soon heed to this call, turning in particular to the question of Palestine in order to reinvestigate the colonial past and establish anticolonial solidarity against both “classic” and new forms of colonial rule. Taking my lead from Françoise Lionnet and Shu Mei Shih, I call this form of imagination transcolonial, in that it connects heterogenous (post)colonial sites in a critical and comparative exploration of coloniality. As this essay demonstrates, the transcolonial imagination is alive and well today, particularly, I argue, in Algeria. Through brief readings of novels by Anouar Benmalek, Yasmina Khadra, and Rachid Boudjedra, I show that the contemporary Algerian novel continues to excavate traces of the colonial, broadly conceived, in the purportedly postcolonial present, casting the 9/11 attacks, the ensuing war on terror and, most recently, the 2010-2011 uprisings, within a multidirectional and palimpsestic history of the colonial condition writ large.

The Politics and Ethics of Translation in the Works of Abdelkebir Khatibi

This paper examines Abdelkebir Khatibi’s writings on the interrelated poetics, politics, and ethics of translation, which I approach as a transfer or movement between languages and cultures. I first consider Khatibi’s psychoanalytically-inflected account of the origins of Maghrebian linguistic subjectivity, to show how the unique polyglossic, multilingual landscape of the Maghreb gives rise to affective communities that are emphatically not coterminous with any nation. I then consider the poetical and political ramifications of this psycholinguistic experience: one which inaugurates an embodied mode of writing-as-translation that transforms not only the sources from which it draws but also the cultural spaces to which it travels. Finally, I show how Khatibi’s poetics of/as translation make possible new relations governed by what we might call an ethics of the transcultural encounter. Cet article examine les ecrits d’Abdelkebir Khatibi sur la poetique, la politique et l’ethique de la traduction, approchee comme un transfert ou un mouvement entre langues et cultures. Je considere d’abord la discussion de Khatibi a propos des origines de la subjectivite linguistique maghrebine, pour montrer comment le paysage unique – polyglossique et multilingue – du Maghreb donne lieu a des communautes affectives qui ne coincident en aucun cas avec la nation. Je considere alors les ramifications poetiques et politiques de cette experience psycholinguistique qui inaugure un mode d’ecriture- qua -traduction : une traduction qui transforme non seulement ses sources, mais aussi les espaces culturels ou elle voyage. Finalement, je montre comment la poetique de Khatibi – une poetique de la traduction, mais aussi une poetique qui se presente comme une traduction elle-meme – donne lieu a un nouveau type de relation gouvernee par ce qu’on pourrait appeler une ethique de la rencontre transculturelle.

Khatibi as Derrida’s foil: Undermining the last defender of the French language

In Monolingualism of the Other (Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 1998), Jacques Derrida declares: “I have only one language—it is not mine” (Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne). This statement is a near impossible postulation, for how can one speak a language that one does not possess? This essay analyses the antinomy of “I have only one language—it is not mine,” and Derrida's monolingualism in conjunction with Abdelkebir Khatibi's bilingualism; Khatibi is also revealed as the titular Other. For, as this essay will show, Derrida's postulation is heavily dependent on Khatibi's Du Bilinguism, as well as on some of his earlier writings.

Cross-Colonial Poetics:Souffles-Anfasand the Figure of Palestine

From the mid-1960s onward, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have turned to the question of Palestine as a model of political and aesthetic innovation. Taking the Moroccan cultural journalSouffles-Anfasas an early, paradigmatic example of the literary turn to Palestine in the Maghreb, I argue that writers such as Abdellatif Laâbi and Abdelkebir Khatibi used Palestine as a springboard for “cultural decolonization,” reactivating global anticolonial discourses in order to articulate a relational, cross-colonial Maghrebi identity. Focusing on discussions of language, poetic form, and cultural autonomy, I show that Palestine served as a point of reference in debates on postcolonial Maghrebi culture. Without muting the ethical pitfalls inherent in representing a heterogeneous anticolonial struggle in a postcolonial context, I take this example of cross-colonial poetics as an invitation to rethink along multidirectional, transnational lines the way we approach Maghrebi and, more generally, postcolonial literature and culture.

Rethinking “Jews” and “Arabs” through Palestine: Transcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature

ABSTRACT In this essay I investigate an unexplored transcolonial relation: that tying North African writers to Palestine. Examining three sets of texts from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, I argue that, in different ways, Albert Memmi, Edmond El Maleh, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Jacques Hassoun reconsidered the legacies of French colonial divide-and-rule tactics in the Maghreb—in particular those opposing Jews and Arabs—through the lens of Palestine. Whereas in the 1950s Memmi famously analyzed the colonial hierarchies of his native Tunisia, he later endorsed the opposition between Jews and Arabs, giving credence to these categories and proclaiming the impossibility of the “Arab Jew.” To the contrary, the Moroccan Jewish writer El Maleh faulted French minority politics, Zionist discourse, and Israeli colonialism with the destruction of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghreb and beyond, disidentifying with Israel and allying with Palestine in an attempt to restore the link between Jews and Arabs. Finally, Khatibi, a Muslim Moroccan, and Hassoun, a Jewish Egyptian, sought to deconstruct this opposition through philosophical exchanges on the Abrahamic. These diverse examples invite us to reconsider national and postcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature in light of transnational relations connecting the Maghreb to Palestine.

Politics of the Mother Tongue

C'est dingue! It's crazy – the word language (lingua in Latin) is a dialectal variant of dingua, making dingue the original name for ‘language’ in Classical Roman. At its origin (a certain origin –...

Translation and the transparency of French

The history of translation is inextricably linked to the history of reflection on language, both language in the abstract and languages in their local particularity. An influential account of French, current since the seventeenth century, claims that it is a “transparent” translating machine, superior to other languages in its ability to render all meanings in a noiseless transaction. This essay examines the responses of three postmodern/postcolonial writers in French, Édouard Glissant, Abdelkebir Khatibi and Jacques Derrida. All three critique the neoclassical account of French not by denying the centrality of translation to French, but by offering a new understanding of translation as an inherent component of language. For each, translation is key to a utopic, emancipatory project. Ultimately, their revisionary approach to the French language enables us to return to the texts of the past and read them anew in an ongoing dialogue.

Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi by Nasrin Qader

designed to authenticate the facts in the story through references to other works on slavery and the slave trade, and to serve as a polemic against human rights abuses due to the horrors of slavery in general. The presentation by Olds is indispensable for an understanding of the text. In addition to offering important historical, social, literary, and political facts that help to situate this work and offer much food for thought for scholars interested in colonial writing and postcolonial reexaminations of those writings, Olds reminds the reader that this work was published just two years after Duras’s Ourika, providing an opportunity for comparative study. A twenty-first-century reader might feel that Paban’s sentimental tendencies overwhelm the perhaps more interesting details of what was known, at least by the author, of the culture of Benin at the time. There are many interesting questions left unanswered, questions pertaining to the accuracy of those details, and pertaining to the sources for the text, which scholars will be able to investigate thanks to this re-edition. Rider University (NJ) Mary Poteau-Tralie QADER, NASRIN. Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8232-3048-8. Pp. xi+ 238. $60.00. Nasrin Qader argues in this cerebral work that catastrophe is always an effect of language and thought and so is a creation of language itself rather than a simple description of events. Qader’s philosophical style can be dense, if the content of her work is always intelligent and learned. Her claim to sometimes need to argue furiously is perhaps evidenced in the polemical nature of her argument, during which she thoroughly addresses most major theorists of African literature, often disagreeing with them. Qader states in her introduction that African literature has been pushed to the margins of literary studies because of a tendency to treat texts from Africa as documents of a culture, representative of a tradition of “orality” that has not been of central concern to more theoretical approaches to literature in the West. Qader contests this notion, claiming that the relationship between African literary writing and orality is not one of uncomplicated reproduction, but rather one of a complex repetition; that is, retelling in slightly different ways over and over again. Qader’s work incorporates a more traditional focus in African literary criticism, that of storytelling, but from a rather unique perspective, and one that borrows from non-African traditions. For this, the author makes no apology, claiming that African culture has always borrowed from other cultures and that literature, as a product of language, should be approached as somewhat (if not entirely) autonomous of tradition and history. She refutes the idea of African literary works as only cultural texts, and seems to argue for the importance of seeing these as unique works of art in and of themselves. However, this argument about uniqueness is not a complete refusal to recognize the cultural context from which these works emanate. Rather, Qader seems to want to free readers of African literature from the anthropological strait-jacket that they might feel is imposed upon them by some suggested approaches, such as that of Christopher Miller, with whose ideas regarding the ethical importance of the study of the ethnic backgrounds of writers and texts she engages, among others. To reinforce her arguments, Qader refers to notions of the récit, which is 582 FRENCH REVIEW 84.3 associated especially with Maurice Blanchot. For Qader, récit is linked to the idea of catastrophe since both notions involve a distancing between the subject (whose experience is not to be discounted) and the story which (s)he is telling, due to the fact that both involve using language a means of both addressing and turning away from a particular event or set of events. In this way, Qader uses the work of Boubacar Boris Diop, Tahar ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi to present literature as a space that recounts catastrophic events yet allows for the inevitable silence and uncertainty involved in telling such traumatic tales. The fascinating conclusion of this text parallels the “feminine” as a category of excess with that of the slippery...