In 1947, Kenneth Roberts published a work of historical fiction that recycled captivity narratives dating to the Barbary Wars in the early-nineteenth century. In Lydia Bailey, the fictional hero Albion Hamlin finds himself a captive in North African Tripoli and must use his Yankee wiles not only to free himself but also to help end the war between the United States and this Ottoman polity. The publication of this book occurred as the United States emerged from World War II, and as it began its forty-five year Cold War with the Soviet Union. Within this context, the author's celebration of Hamlin's support of William Eaton--an actual historic figure who tried to replace the Tripolitan government with one more friendly to American interests--cannot be discounted as a mere adventure story. In embedding fictional characters in the midst of real events, Roberts explores political issues that were of critical importance to Americans in the mid-twentieth century. In my chapter, I will show how Roberts appropriates nineteenth-century Islamic captivity narratives for a new political purpose. In re-casting the stories of Americans held hostage in the Islamic world, the author raises critical questions about the nature of American government as well as the appropriate objectives to be pursued in the international arena. And so, I argue that Lydia Bailey is a Cold War text encouraging Americans to pursue an internationalist agenda in which the spreading of American values in the Third World--even by military might--is recognized as a legitimate means of protecting the country's strategic interests.

In November 1865 the Regency of Tunis sent an envoy to Washington bearing letters of condolences for the assassination of President Lincoln and of congratulations for the termination of the Civil War. The representative presented a portrait of the bey Muhammad al-Sadiq which still hangs in the State Department. It was a reciprocal act which recognized Tunisia’s own recent experience of civil war in the revolt of 1864. This paper examines understandings of the Trans-Atlantic other during the period of 1861-65, a time of revolutionary change and mutual trauma, through the personal memoirs of the abolitionist American consul Amos Perry, political pamphlets circulating at the time, the chronicle of Ahmad ibn abi al-Dhyaf, and the travel account of Gen. Othman, who led the 1865 delegation. In the years preceding the 1864 uprising, Tunis was an example of state-directed progress, adopting numerous reforms, including the abolition of slavery in 1846, and the first constitution in the Arab world in 1861. In 1862 the question of Tunis’ official admission into the international community was widely debated in the presses of Europe, right alongside the fate of the American Confederacy. The bey of Tunis understood the American experience of civil war refracted through the Tunisian experiment in state building and revolution. The travel writings of the bey’s envoy provide an insightful window to the Trans-Atlantic encounter after a period of deep national trauma. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, in 2011, under that very same portrait of Sadiq bey, Hillary Rodham Clinton unknowingly revived the memory of the 1864 revolt when she congratulated the Tunisian people for having toppled their dictator.

Abdellah Taïa is one of the most interesting writers to emerge from Morocco in the twenty-first century, and he is quickly becoming the best known in the United States. This is so not only because he is the first Moroccan public figure to identify himself as homosexual, nor because he has become something of a media celebrity, nor even because he has inspired a generation of still younger Moroccan writers to find their voice. But his work and the discussion of his career in Moroccan media helps elaborate what it means to consider contemporary Moroccan writing and cultural production in a transatlantic frame. I argue that Abdellah Taïa--as both author, public figure, and literary character in his own writings--makes vivid the circulation of Western models and ideas about sexuality inside Morocco, as well as their limits. Taïa’s career is intertwined with TelQuel--where he has been championed, and which he has himself used to further his literary career—and the way both have leveraged Western models of sexual identity in the effort of opening up Moroccan discussions of personal freedom is crucial. The way Taïa engages Western models of sexuality ultimately detaches those models from the source, even though some of his most ardent Moroccan champions (and certainly his Western ones) have consistently tried to keep him within the discourse of the homosexual, which he selectively adopts as well. Here, Western constructs of homosexual identity jump publics as Taïa both participates in this discourse and then refuses it. This paper emerges from the last chapter of my forthcoming book on the ways in which American literary and cultural forms circulate into Moroccan, Egyptian and Iranian cultural production

Dating back over five centuries, there has existed a legacy of artistic, literary, and political cross-pollination between Latin America, the Maghreb, and the Arab Diaspora. Indeed, 1492 signaled not only the start of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, but also the forging of a link between Latin America and Spain’s Muslim heritage of Al-Andalus. Through an analysis of transnational, trans-Atlantic literary and media cultural production, I trace the musical and migratory routes of Arab culture from the Maghreb to Spain and on to the Americas, where Arab culture is currently being fused and (re)claimed as local. Transnational literary exchanges include Franco-Moroccan novelist Tahar ben Jelloun’s references to Jorge Luis Borges in L’enfant de sable, as well as poetic works such as “In the Shadow of Al-Andalus,” an homage to a shared heritage and a reconstituted sense of ‘homeland’ written by Victor Hernández Cruz, a Puerto Rican who divides his time between Morocco and Puerto Rico. Such literary works recalibrate ‘Arabness’ and ‘otherness’ within a Latin American context. From the perspective of musical traditions, in recent years Latin American artists have notably joined forces with Arab artists to create musical works that reflect a renewed connection with the Arab world. Such blending have even become ‘institutionalized’ in the Margheb, as seen in the numerous Latin American artists who were featured at the 2013 Festival des musiques sacrées in Fès, with the year’s theme of ‘Al-Andalus’. In popular culture, another example is seen in the Brazilian blockbuster soap opera El Clon, which focuses on a Moroccan-Brazilian protagonist, while, in music, we see musical collaborations such as those between Cuban-American rapper Pitbull and Algerian Cheb Khaled. Thus, we can see Latin America as a site where North African legacies are revitalized and deployed anew. My paper seeks to explore the ways in which Spanish Al-Andalus/Maghreb and the concept of ‘Moorishness’ emerge as referents for a shared cultural lineage, as well as a way by which artists activate a uniquely Latin American conceptualization of shared History with the Maghreb.