2013 marks the centennial of the birth of Albert Camus, one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century. Camus is often viewed as a French writer, as THE Western voice of hope and despair during an age in which the old certainties and confidence of the Gilded Age were stripped away. Perhaps no one reflected with greater clarity and honesty the "age of upheavals" that began with the shots fired at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Less well known is the fact that Albert Camus was a Middle Easterner, born and raised in Algeria, the descendent of Europeans who immigrated to Algeria in the 19th century. A member of the privileged pieds noirs minority, Camus nevertheless grew up in poverty. Given Camus's prodigeous literary output, the countless articles and books that have been written about him, and the fact that he died in an automobile accident more than a half-century ago, it is striking how much we have recently discovered about him. What made this discovery more poignant was the simultaneous tragedy of civil war that wracked his homeland of Algeria beginning in the early 1990s. The most important source of this discovery was the long-delayed 1994 publication of Camus's unfinished autobiographical novel The First Man. Having first encountered Camus when I was a college student in the 1960s, having taught English and conducted research in Algeria, and having taught courses on Algeria for decades, I found The First Man to be a Rosetta Stone that suddenly and brilliantly made the pieces of Camus's life fall together. This paper draws its material primarily from The First Man placed within the context of my long relationship with Camus's homeland of Algeria. Its main emphasis is 1) the profound way in which Camus's early years of poverty and cross-cultural interaction shaped his life-long commitment to reconciliation and justice, and 2) the traumatic impact that World War I had on his life, even as it traumatized much of the world between 1914 and 1918. This is brought out poignantly in the description of his cynical and embittered grandmother who ruled his childhood household and who lost nearly every male member of her family, including her son-in-law, Albert's father, during World War I. The quest to find Camus's lost father became a life-long winding road that resonates as much in the 21st century as it did in the 20th.

In this paper, I offer an autoethnographic look at the Moroccan era ‘now and then’ through my grandmother’s autoethnography; a Moroccan woman who was kept out of the Moroccan history. Her life stories, struggles, and resistance haven’t been heard or recorded to be considered as a valid knowledge. Thus, this paper will be a written repertoire for my grandmother and a voice that will record and transmit her story of resistance and survival. To fully understand history, in this case, women resistance against foreign invasion, knowledge should be based on a local perspective through hearing and listening to people with open ears and hearts. Methodological approach Women of color, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (1983), ask people of color to examine the sources of knowledge and transform the process of theorizing. They challenge the traditional interpretations of knowledge and encourage people of color to shift the research lens to one that recognizes their own experiences. Hence, I ground my methodological approach in the realm of theory of the flesh, one where “the physical realities of our lives-our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings-all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity.” (Moraga & Anzaldua,1983, p. 23) As we embark in new ways of understanding communication in postcolonial settings, we must embrace the project of decolonizing the institutionalized and hegemonic theoretical frameworks. In drawing on theories of the flesh, I turn to a performative autoethnography approach; performative autoethnography, as conceptualized by Spry (2011), is a critical method that privileges embodied experiences in connection with a larger context for the purpose of social justice. Or yet, here we “privilege the body as a site of knowing.” (Conquergood as cited in Spry, p.31) Knowledge is created through the concept of a textualized body where the self, the text, and the performance work together to create meaning. Drawing on Spry’s argument that performative autoethnography can be used as a methodology to disrupt normative performances of race, class, gender, nationality, and sexuality, I use embodied performances to call into question the ways bodies of Moroccan women have been treated in the colonial and post-colonial environment. Through personal narratives and performative writing of my grandmother, I textualize our bodies as Moroccan women and create “alternative ways of being through performance.” (p.29)

In the terminal essay of his 1885-86 translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night, Richard Burton says that “le vice contre nature” is popular and endemic in the “Sotadic Zone” namely the Orient – this area stretching from North Africa to the Arabic peninsula. We may want to consider, like Joseph Boone in his 1995 article “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism”, this point to be a popular stereotype of Eastern perversity firmly ensconced in Western imagery. Much has been written on Oscar Wilde, André Gide, E.M. Forster, T. E. Lawrence, Joe Orton and Paul Bowles, but much less space has been given to those “beautiful brown boys” who were the anonymous objects of their lust. Morocco, and more specifically Paul Bowles’ Tangier, served as a hotspot for gay or bisexual writers and artists in pursuit of exotic sexual gratification. Joe Orton wrote about it at length in the Tangier part of his diary, The Orton Diaries (1986), a journal à la Gide. There, he gleefully describes the bargaining that precludes sex with boy prostitutes at his Tangier apartment. These boys “represent interchangeable versions of the same commodity: (nearly) underage sex” as Joseph Boone notes, and Orton even cynically remarks that his partners are inevitably called Mohammed. This Third World Moroccan economy, as depicted by Orton, is based on the availability of casual sex with replaceable partners, who can only be distinguished by the variable quality of their sexual performance, their sizes, ages or the color of their sweaters. The white man has a face and an identity, but his paid partners don’t. When we look at this identical colonialist metaphor, Mohamed Choukri’s hero, in his 1973 novel For Bread Alone, gives a meticulous description of a purely financial transaction. The brief encounter between the teenager and an older Nazarene customer is a low point in Choukri’s autobiographical novel of sexual obsession, familial alienation and poverty. In the text, “deviant sex” is a substitute behavior, while heterosexual sex is always the hero’s desire. The European man’s behavior is incomprehensible to the young prostitute and Choukri shows a colonized subject who is naked and dignified, in control of his heterosexuality within a financial transaction that does not define him. While the young Moroccan man is clearly the hero of the text, the old European man’s sole characteristics are a beautiful car and a clammy handshake.

Italy was the first European country to use radio as a propaganda instrument towards the Arab world. Radio Bari transmissions in Arabic (news, music, talk shows) started in 1934 and progressively intensified until 1943, when the radio was shut down by the Americans. My paper intends to analyse the transcriptions of Radio Bari programs in order to reconstruct the almost totally neglected experience of the radio. More specifically, the paper intends to shed light on the main contradiction that characterised the radio. Theoretically, according to the Fascist regime, the radio was meant to increase Italy’s political, strategic and economic presence in the Arab world. Practically, it ended by conveying a message that was incompatible with Fascist imperialistic politics. In fact, the radio programs became increasingly anti-British and anti-French, as it was intended to challenge the British and French policy in the North Africa and the Middle East, and openly supported Arab nationalism in the region. How could Italy be at the same time a colonial power and an anti-colonial movements supporter? Was Radio Bari aware of such a deep contradiction? How did the radio programs overcome such a problem? The British and French presence in the area was constantly depicted by the radio programs in highly negative tones -as the main cause for the region underdevelopment- while Italy was presented in a completely different way. In particular, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 was described as an intervention aimed at protecting the Muslim minority from the Christian majority violations and abuses. At the same time, the situation in Libya was portrayed in terms of the classical Orientalist stereotype of “civilising mission”, which Fascism allegedly inherited from the Roman Empire. Therefore, my paper also intends to evaluate to what extent Radio Bari conveyed an Orientalist discourse, both in terms of its contents and its feature, i.e. adapting the programs to the supposedly existing Arabic “taste” and “cultural level”, thus engaging with Arab culture with a clear colonialist approach. In terms of sources, apart from the few existing bibliography and some published material (mainly the Italian, British, and French diplomatic documents), my paper will be based on the extensive unpublished documentation that I have been able to identify in several archives, including the Italian, Vatican, British, French, Moroccan and American ones.

In recent years, scholars have increasingly called attention to the role of imperialism in the fabrication of masculine identities. Focusing on the intertwined discourses of race and gender that emerged from colonial experiences, recent works have shown that imperialism was an essential aspect in the construction of Western notions of masculinity (Stoler, McClintock ). Yet, little research has been done on this process as it relates to North Africa or the Middle East. Notions of Arab masculinity all too-often remain shrouded in nebulous and de-historicized statements and they tend to be assumed, rather than critically examined and contextualized. My paper attempts to fill this lacunae by looking at France’s experience in colonial Algeria and its impact on the formation of masculine norms. The starting point of my paper is the assumption that colonial encounters transformed the gendered norms of both French and Algerians through the invention of new practices on the ground. As an integral part of France overseas, Algeria provided a laboratory in which gender identities could be reinvented and reworked. In addition, demographically speaking, Algeria was heavily dominated by men throughout much of the nineteenth century, a situation which favored the development of homo-sociabilities and the rearticulation of masculine identities as men of various backgrounds came into contact and interacted with each other. I argue that French men’s initial encounter with Algeria’s patriarchal culture in the mid-nineteenth century enabled the attenuation of gender anxieties back in the metropole, where European men worried about the softening and effeminizing effects of modern society. Looking both at the writings of colonial administrators in Algeria (such as Eugene Daumas and Charles Richard) and at the reactions of French citizens to the presence of Algerian men in France, I show that throughout much of the nineteenth century, indigenous models of masculinity provided a positive image that helped inspire and redefine what it meant to be a Frenchman. The exotic life of adventure and danger that Algeria conjured allowed men to escape the emasculating effects of French bourgeois society while they re-negotiated the meaning and practice of manhood in a context that evoked a more traditional past. Thus, far from deprecating and effeminizing Algerian men, my paper argues that French men admired, and even emulated some of the practices associated with the chivalrous and adventurous lifestyle of Arabs. Emblematic figures such as the Emir Abd el-Qader became symbols of this celebrated masculinity.