In their analyses of the origins al al-?ah??w?’s notion of wa?an, scholars have offered divergent interpretations. For some, al-?ah??w?’s perception of “homeland” was, notwithstanding its various geographical origins, uniformly land-bound. While some argue that his perspectives about national community and identity were mainly gained from his experiences in France, others contend that these ideas were not an imported political imaginary, but were rather rooted in Arabic and Islamic concepts and especially in ethics of adab. On a different front of the debate, and in less cardinalized language, scholars argue that al-?ah??w?’s intellectual intervention lie somewhere between Europe and North Africa, in the trans-Mediterranean space of ideas. In this paper, I take the Mediterranean Sea as the very site whence the concept of wa?an is formed in al-?ah??w?’s thought. Examining al-?ah??w?’s maq?mah-inspired 1850 translation of Francois Fénelon’s 1699 Les Aventures de Télémaque, the paper reveals a pattern of homology between the Arabic genre and Télémaque. Towards that end, I proceed over three stages. First, I focus on the maq?mah, not only as an “insular” literary product, the result of a self-reflexive process that coincides particularly with how islands are aesthetically and functionally produced, but also as a genre that does take islands as its subject matter. Second, with the insular form in mind as an analytic tool, I draw on the history of cartography in early modern France to argue that the French text of Télémaque needs to be read in relation to particular cartographic practices that also represented islands on “portolan charts,” a specific genre of maps that pre-dated the contemporary discourse of sovereign state territoriality. Ultimately, examining al-?ah??w?’s later 1869 work, The Methodology of Egyptian Minds with Regard to the Marvel of Arabic Literature, I argue that the metaphorics of insularity subtending the text of Télémaque as well as the maq?mah extend beyond their formalist and aesthetic reach to inform al-?ah??w?’s Egypto-nationalist and imperialist discourse, what may be referred to as “nesological modernity.” With its political drive, this form of modernity works simultaneously to foreground a centripetal pull of the insular territoriality of Egypt while subjecting the Sudan to the centrifugal energies of Egypt’s expansionist worldliness.

(Post)Modernism and Morocco: Narrating the Tanjawi in Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude How has the shared historical and political past of colonization, globalization and mass migration played out in its cultural context? How has it avoided mere imitation by the East or appropriation by the West, suggesting instead a more nuanced relationship and one that challenges hegemonic Othering? L’IMA’s 1999 “Le Maroc de Matisse” exhibition offered one possible way to present the relationship between France and Morocco, framing the show not as an Orientalist moment in Morocco’s history, nor a postcolonial refutation of Matisse’s Orientalism, but rather as moments of collaboration, making a strong, if implicit, case for (re)considering Matisse as a Moroccan artist. Hassan Najmi’s 2014 postmodern novel Gertrude (originally published ??????? in Arabic the same year) offers another way to envision this relationship. Its preface begins with an excerpt (in the original English) from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in which she writes the following, “[w]e had taken on a guide, Mohammed, and he had taken a fancy to us.” The novel builds on this reference to a Moroccan guide in Tangier, constructing a romance between Gertrude and Mohammed that is framed by a contemporary story of the narrator and his own American girlfriend. Najmi imagines the voice of Mohammed (in a technique familiar to readers of Djebar and Mernissi) expanding his story to becoming an intimate in Stein’s life in Paris, and a friend of other Modernist writers such as Anaïs Nin. While Mohammed of the novel is a failed writer, too entangled in Stein’s art and life to create his own, his story is preserved in written form by the narrator of the novel, who helps the dying Mohammed by inscribing “the silent archive within him.” This paper will explore Mohammed’s silenced archive in which this non-elite voice formerly “robbed of agency” contributes to, disrupts and displaces elitist and Eurocentric narratives, using theoretical concepts of “history from below” (Subaltern Studies and Gramsci) as well as considering Najmi’s novel in the context of others such as Amin Maalouf’s 1983 The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (which challenges hegemonic Christian narratives, deconstructing and rewriting history) and Fatima Mernissi’s (1990) Forgotten Queens of Islam (which through an act of feminist recovery writes the stories of women whose voices have been silenced by patriarchal hegemonic narratives of the past), and if it suggests a non-binary and non-hegemonic shared cultural (his)story.

This paper examines a previously-undiscussed literary relation between the Maghreb and Japan. European and American scholarship has primarily understood Maghrebi literature in relation to former European imperial powers, mainly France. Recently, scholars have begun to draw attention to other circuits of influence and circulation that Maghrebi cultural production has taken throughout its modern history, from Shaden Tageldin’s argument that the Maghreb was not isolated from the Arabic nah?a while under French rule to Brian Edwards’ rereading of Maghrebi avant-gardes’ engagements with the United States and others beyond postcolonial binaries. As understandings of Maghrebi literature’s place in the world expand, thinking on a global scale should not forget about boundaries at other scales. The Journal of North African Studies began 2018 with a special issue devoted to “A postcolonial Maghreb without borders”, an image the editors call “utopic”, but warranted to enable comparative work on representations of political violence across the region. Ultimately, however, only these violent practices of political control circulate freely, restricting the movement of those subject to them. Discovering new connections also reveals additional boundaries that regulate circulation of bodies and texts. Not unlike how Ottoman modernizers had looked to Japan as an alternative model to Europe (Michael Laffan, Ahmed Riza, Renée Worringer), the Moroccan novelist and philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi (Ombres japonaises, 1988) and the Franco-Tunisian writer Hubert Haddad (Le peintre d’éventail, 2013) have turned to Japan to reconceptualize literary history, emblematized by the Kit?b Alf layla wa layla, as well as the relation between artistic creation and territory writ large. Khatibi’s essay reflects on the 1977 French translation of a Japanese work from 1933, itself meditating on Western views of Japan. The protagonist of Haddad’s novel is a master painter who must restore and pass on his life’s work after it is nearly destroyed in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. These texts stage the challenge of writing about a place their authors have never been without falling into the same kinds of exoticizing practices to which the Maghreb has often been subjected. I argue that their Japanese interlocutors allow them to explore the processes of the formation and transmission of artistic traditions at an additional remove. They explore nested encounters with difference and erasure that are folded back onto each other like frame stories and retellings, calling attention to the structure of storytelling as a high-stakes sites for determining the borders of cultural and political imaginaries.

For Christmas in 1894, Nehemias Tjernagel (1868-1958) traveled to the Holy Land. A quarter century later, for Easter in 1922, Ola Johann Særvold (1867-1937) took a journey to the same region. Both men were Norwegian-Americans who went on to write accounts of their travels which they subsequently published, in Norwegian, in Minneapolis. This study examines their accounts, entitled Fotturer i Ægypten og Palæstina (Trips by Foot in Egypt and Palestine) and Reisebreve: fra Østerlandene (Travelogue: from the Eastern Lands) respectively, to analyze changing perceptions of people in Palestine on the part of two authors whose own identities as Americans of Norwegian heritage were in flux. The study contributes to the transnational history of travelers who were simultaneous both Nordic and American. Thus, the accounts of Tjernagel and Særvold are hybrid cultural productions, which emerged at the intersection of a migratory flow that linked Norway, the United States, and the eastern Mediterranean region during this period. In addition to offering fascinating accounts of multiple migrations, these two texts offer intriguing insights into the ways the Holy Land was viewed in the eyes of Tjernagel and Særvold. Both men include political and social commentaries that portray their views of the colonial realities in the region. This commentary is, however, filled with Orientalist tropes and anti-Semitism. Yet, the narratives are distinct from one another. Both men were Lutherans, and thus express a certain disdain for Muslims, Jews, and “Eastern Christians” (and sometimes non-Lutheran “Western Christians”). However, their feelings towards local Arabs (Christian, Muslims, and Jews), as well as towards newly arrived European Jews are remarkably different in the two travelogues. I thus argue that, while historical circumstances undoubtedly played some role in shaping their thought, their attitudes also demonstrate the divergent outlooks towards the Middle East that prevailed among members of the Lutheran Norwegian-American community.

One definition of ethnography is “The recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution” (Coleman & Simpson, n.d.) There is an evident connection with travel writing, as discussed by Altheide (1987), Grgurinovi? (2012) and others. Although the traveller’s purpose is likely to be more personal than scientific, the resulting works nevertheless provide first-hand observation of the countries visited and comments on their peoples and cultures. Many travel writers intuitively follow an ethnographic approach in their journeying and subsequent records in terms of cultural interpretation, albeit without a systematic framework. Fetterman (2010) comments that ethnographers’ views are “shaped through a holistic perspective” using emic (insider) and/or etic (outsider) approaches, and the same could be held true of travel writers. Wilfred Thesiger, Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy are examples of twentieth century Western travellers to Arabia who have not only displayed sympathy to their host cultures but imply a measure of preference for them over their own cultures. The degree of immersion in the target cultures helps to determine the depth and accuracy of their accounts from an ethnographic standpoint. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a British travel writer who has risen to prominence in the 21st century following, among other publications, his trilogy of books describing his travels in the footsteps of the 14th century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, is one example of how a combination of research and immersion in a culture provides ethnographic data together with an account of a personal quest to explore a past life. This paper will examine Mackintosh-Smith’s writings in order to discuss the question of how awareness of ethnography can contribute to travel writing and extend its scope and how in his case East-West understanding may be enhanced. He can be considered an ethnographer by default through his records of interactions with a country’s inhabitants as well as his research into documents, inscriptions and other records. The study will explore such aspects as the stated aims of his journey, the nature and extent of his assimilation with the cultures encountered and the narrative techniques that record his experiences. Through this example it is posited that developing an awareness of ethnographic practices can be advantageous for contemporary travel writers in that recognition of the cross-cultural implications of their explorations will facilitate further insights and comparisons.