France’s conquest and destruction of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers in 1830 inaugurated more than a century of French colonial rule in what is now universally known as the “Maghreb,” covering the ever expanding territory of Algérie française, and then extending to the neighboring Moroccan Sharifian Empire and the Ottoman Regency of Tunis.1 Abdelmajid Hannoum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, has been an incisive, trenchant critic of France’s Algeria-centered colonial project for more than two decades.2 Here he builds on his earlier work, tackling “the French invention of the region as the Maghreb” (24). In so doing, he convincingly demonstrates the depth of the cognitive transformation imposed on the societies of the region by French colonial modernity, which “was undoubtedly creative, but also tyrannical in its ways of transformation, destruction, and ultimately imposition of its truths” (243). Its legacy, he rightly emphasizes, still shapes the region today in profound ways.Hannoum’s approach has a clear point of view: it is post-positivist, deconstructionist, and anti-nationalist. At the same time, its laser-like emphasis on the powerful cognitive impact of France’s colonial project occasionally drifts into giving short shrift to the underpinnings of precolonial societies and the continued relevance of their historical legacies. It also fails to acknowledge, let alone sufficiently explain, the newly emerging field of Amazigh studies that is challenging received wisdom in unanticipated ways.The Invention of the Maghreb straddles two categories. The first is the “invention” genre. Four decades after Hobsbawm and Ranger’s classic volume,3 the genre has produced a host of books of varying quality seeking to deconstruct allegedly “natural” and long-lived categories of nations and states. Somewhat surprisingly, Hannoum fails to include Ramzi Roughi’s Inventing the Berbers4 in his sample of the genre or address any of its salient points.The second category is that of the Maghreb itself: twenty-five years ago, L. Carl Brown, one of the doyens of modern North African studies, built on the work of an earlier luminary in the field, Abdallah Laroui, to ask: “Why do we speak of the ‘the Maghrib’ as if it were an accepted term, not requiring further definition?”5 Brown acknowledged that the French had appropriated and redefined the term to promote their agenda but argued that the concept was still a valuable one, if used appropriately. More recently, a special section on the Maghreb in the Arab Studies Journal sought to “show the Maghreb for what it is—a multilayered space with indigenous and transnational significance the examination of which requires the mobilization of a multilingual and interdisciplinary scholarship.” This approach is part of what Brahim El Gouabli calls “leftovers scholarship,” that is, a “methodical effort to revisit questions and sources that we might consider exhausted and overstudied in order to develop novel ways to approach them differently.” On one level, it implicitly follows Hannoum’s call to understand and undermine the colonial “Maghreb” paradigm and its nationalist offspring. But it also goes beyond him in foregrounding a “poetics of affirmation,” one that “accounts for Amazigh indigeneity and Tamazgha’s multilingualism.”6What does Hannoum mean by “invention”? His perspective is phenomenological, in line with Benedict Anderson’s now classic Imagined Communities:7 “neither a false fabrication against a true order of things nor a distortion of an objective reality. All realities are constructed . . . [and] every invention is necessarily a reinvention and not something ex nihilo. Rather, “it is a creation out of systems of meaning that existed before the act of invention itself. . . . What we call the Maghreb has been constructed by a systematic production of texts, geography, cartography, historiography, archaeology, linguistics, ethnography and literature.” This resulting “ensemble of texts . . . was endowed with great discursive power” (24–25), “constituting a system of references that generate themselves through a variety of cultural forms. . . . At the end, this life of texts and discourses springing from within the colonial structure of power emerged as a geographic entity with a history of its own, a culture of its own, a set of maps of its own, all unified by the very colonial governmentality that made these aspects possible in the first place” (243).Chapter 1, “Geographic Imagination and Cartographic Power,” examines the maps employed to help create and visualize the Maghreb. In the 1700s, European cartography―made possible by mathematics, geometry, and science―marked the beginning of institutionalization of knowledge of the region, in the service of the French monarchy in particular. Napoleon’s conquest and mapping of Egypt in 1798 marked the beginning of a new age with new technologies of mapping. Thirty years hence, they were passed along to the officers of France’s Armée d’Afrique in Algiers. Knowledge gleaned from Greek, Roman, and Arab texts about the region was employed to categorize the region in ways that made sense to Europeans, and numerous atlases were eventually produced to disseminate the spatial, historical, and racial imaginings being produced. Three different individuals played especially significant roles in the geographical cultural production of the region: Ernest Carette, Eugène Daumas, and Émile-Félix Gautier.Chapter 2 examines how colonial authors invented the history of the region. The developing science of archaeology was combined with narratives emphasizing Greco-Roman heritage and the origins of Christian Europe to fashion a history that enabled France to see itself as the natural and legitimate heir to Roman and Byzantine rule, while painting Arab Muslims as unworthy interlopers. Local narratives―Punic, Berber, Arab, and Islamic―were minimized or reconfigured to fit colonial needs. As he and others have emphasized, all of this was intimately bound up with the creation of a national culture and history for France itself. The establishment of a historiographic state in Algeria and naturalization of the Maghreb as a single unified historical and cultural space owed much to the work of people like Stéphane Gsell, Charles Tissot, and Louis Chatelin. At bottom, Hannoum emphasizes, we tend to forget that realities are constructions of the mind and do not exist outside of us.Chapter 3 focuses on the role that language played in defining the concept of race and the place of colonial populations on the colonial map. The racial diversity of Algeria posed a problem to the clear-cut theories of race that dominated European thinking in the nineteenth century and up until the Second World War. But this was subsumed by a simple dichotomy―Arab vs. Berber, with language becoming a central factor in their definition. To that end, the mostly unwritten Berber language had to be “constructed, normalized and institutionalized by colonial powers”, that is, “colonized” (133), in opposition to Arabic. In doing so, they denied the historical reality of intense language contact between Arabic and Berber speakers. Hannoum views the various forms of Berber speech as languages and not dialects belonging to a single overarching language: they are as different from one another, he states, as Hebrew is from Arabic, and Arabic is from Aramaic (137). Colonial linguists did not hold this view. Nor do most contemporary Amazigh scholars of linguistics.With Chapter 4, one arrives at the actual process of naming the territory in question ―the Maghreb. In Hannoum’s words: “This is not a genealogy of a name as much as it is an exploration of the politics of naming. For naming is not only part of a strategy of knowing but also, more importantly, of appropriating, of transforming, and ultimately of inventing” (172–73). Given Hannoum’s own referencing of Ibn Khaldun and other early Muslim geographers’ labeling of the region―al-Maghreb al-Aqsa, al-Maghreb al-Awsat, Ifriqiya―the reintroduction of “Maghreb” hardly seems like a revolutionary, transformative act. Nonetheless, the journey through the politics of naming over the course of the centuries―Barbary, Berbérie, Afrique antique, Afrique septentrionale, nord de l’Afrique, l’Afrique du Nord et la Lybie, l’Afrique blanche, ultimately settling on Maghreb by the end of the 1920s―illuminates the ways in which these names were entrenched in colonial narratives. As many have noted, the French version of Ibn Khaldun’s mammoth fourteenth-century sociological study was crucial to the entire discursive tradition that was being propagated. The definitive outcome was fashioned by Gautier: the Maghreb was a region in a premodern, pre-European stage, defined by its racial conflict (Berbers vs. Arabs), racial inferiority, and hence its political incapacity. It could only be saved by accepting the French civilizing mission; the Berbers, by virtue of their presumed European ancestry and sedentary mode of existence (as opposed to the Arabs’ alleged nomadic one), possessed the aptitude to change and progress and could thus, if properly guided, eventually be a very junior partner in the enterprise.The book’s remaining two chapters, conclusion, and postscript, focus on how the hegemony of the colonial discourse and its power dynamics shaped, and continue to shape, the responses of the colonized. The national discourse that began emerging in the 1930s thanks in large part to Salafi ʿulama in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia has a colonial genealogy, even as it affirms itself “against that which discursively obliterates its existence” (209). An Arab Maghreb narrative grew out of the French Maghreb one: ironically, Maghrebi nationalism would narrow to competitive nation-state nationalism, in which the new states of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia would contest the ownership of the dynasties that ruled the region in medieval times. To help make his point, Hannoum critically engages with Laroui’s promotion of a decolonized, national history of the Maghreb, “the most authoritative of the post-colonial era” (220).8 Even though Laroui’s critique is oppositional, it is not decolonizing, says Hannoum. For it to be so, Laroui would have had to either (a) become epistemologically able to ignore the colonial, an impossible task, or (b) deconstruct colonial discursive practices in order to show how they continue to catch the national subject in its webs (225). In other words, the relation between national and colonial is one of continuity, not rupture (226). Histories of Moroccan and Algerian nationalism confirm this point in various ways―for example, the vital role played by the French protectorate in strengthening the institution of the monarchy and the stigmatization by nationalists of Berbers as “collaborators,” placing them at an extreme disadvantage that they are still struggling to overcome.Overall, Hannoum makes a compelling and erudite case for the continuing cognitive power of coloniality and the book constitutes an important contribution to the field. Still, the surety that he exudes needs to be examined critically. Does an invention always supersede previous inventions, denuding them of any remaining power of creation? (31). Shouldn’t local perceptions, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial, be given greater attention, instead of being downplayed or ignored? Surely, Hannoum is well aware that Muslim historians and rulers during the seven centuries of al-Andalus were obsessed with determining the Berbers’ origins. Yet, he calls the category of origins a colonial one (222). To say that the Maghreb was invented racially suggests that racial (and ethnic) differences were not at all relevant in precolonial times, an overstatement, at the very least. In discussing the linguistic mixing of Berbers and Arabs, he concludes, without evidence and against everything we know about accents and speakers of languages that are not mother tongues, that they could not be distinguished from one another when they spoke either Arabic or Berber (138). And his treatment of contemporary Amazigh realities is a bit dismissive and dated. The intellectual Berberist discourse may be francophone in origin (and thus fatally tainted with the poison of nationalism, in his eyes), but it is no longer completely cut off from the day to day reality of the Amazigh populations (269).9 The life of Berber languages is no longer almost exclusively oral. And his assertion that there is no evidence that they are waning (138) is incorrect: the process of language loss has been well documented and was part of the impetus to bring Tamazight into the public sphere as a written language.Oddly, Hannoum concludes with the “so-called Arab Spring, a revolution in and of itself.” He is correct in pointing out that the rolling wave of protests across the MENA region in 2011 demonstrated the continuing connections between the “Maghreb” and the “Mashreq,” ties that colonial France had sought to cancel. However, he goes too far in emphasizing the common “Arabness” of the region. For him the term connotes a common cultural heritage and set of values produced throughout the ages in Arabic, “by Arabs, Kurds, Jews, Amazigh and so forth” (285). To be sure, the Maghreb is far more diverse and culturally rich than the dichotomies advanced by colonial modernity. Unity in diversity is a noble value and a cause worth promoting. Hannoum’s wish for a post-national way of being (“where nationalism is overcome and humanism is espoused not as an ideology of an elite, but as a praxis, as a way of life for people”; characterized by “new discursive possibilities,” “more cognitive sovereignty,” and “maybe also new ways of living”) is sincere, if unspecified (28, 286). But privileging the category of “Arabness” (what happened to the rich Persian and Turkish heritages that shaped the heritages of at least some of the aforementioned communities?) and imposing it on peoples who identify themselves differently carries a whiff of the kind of patronizing that Hannoum so rightly rails against when it comes to France.