As the liberal Kingdom of Italy conquered the Ottoman provinces that would become Italian Libya in 1911, thousands of Libyan combatants and non-combatants alike were swept up and sent to penal colonies on small islands surrounding Italy. Many died during the voyage, and many more while confined in overcrowded chambers on the islands. Today, a marked mass grave located behind the catholic cemetery of the island of Ustica in Sicily is one of the few remaining traces commemorating the deaths of 130 of those deportees. This commemoration came out of the prolonged work of the Libyan Studies Center, which was founded by Muammar Gaddafi in 1978 to obtain colonial reparations from Italy by means of historical research and oral history collection. Reparations were in fact obtained in 2008 through the treaty of Friendship, Partnership, and Cooperation signed between Italy and Libya, and reinstated in July 2018. But while the treaty sought to compensate Italy’s former colony for the violence inflicted on the aforementioned deportees, it also formalized the policing of the Mediterranean border and reproduced a similar infrastructure of confinement and deportation now used against migrants passing through Libya. This paper is concerned with the historiographical division that distinguishes liberal colonialism from fascist colonialism in Italian Libya, and what this division obscures about the linkages between liberalism and fascism, or the passage from one to the other. What do violent forms of colonial conquest and discipline under liberalism tell us about the formation and rise of fascism in the metropole? Might “fascist colonialism” be a misnomer in that it recenters the metropole and refracts changes in its governance onto the colony, rather than tracing how the racial violence of the colonies boomerangs back onto Europe? And how do the international frameworks regulating reparations, which are bounded by nation-states and seek to mend the exceptions to liberalism rather than its constitutive aspects, such as war and expansionism, allow for renewed instantiations of fascism, as with the 2008 treaty? This paper draws on research conducted in the Italian imperial archives of confinement and deportation and in the Libyan Studies Center, and argues that to understand the crisis forming at the border between Libya and Italy, periodizations and naturalized national formations ought to be rethought. Without that reordering, a vision of what requires “repair” along the borders suturing and separating Africa from Europe will fail to fully come into view.

For over forty years, Iran’s expansive southwestern oil resources were the exclusive domain of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today BP P.L.C., or British Petroleum). Possessing the world’s biggest oil refinery, the AIOC was Britain’s largest and most important foreign asset; it facilitated Britain’s international predominance by providing fuel for British war efforts, imperial enterprises, and domestic needs. Much scholarly work has been devoted to political and economic analyses of the AIOC’s power in Iran, detailing numerous instances of economic exploitation and political maneuvering by the oil company as it worked to secure its ascendant position in the country. Less attention, however, has been focused on the AIOC’s extensive social programs, which, while initially restricted to the company’s European employees, were later extended to its Iranian staff and laborers as well as the residents of surrounding areas. This paper examines three main aspects of the AIOC’s social programs in Khuzestan: its construction and financing of primary, secondary, and technical educational institutions; its provision of medical care and implementation of public health programs; and its erection of social clubs and sporting facilities and concomitant encouragement of company employees to participate in athletics and other leisure activities. In the mid-1930s, as the AIOC commenced with hiring a greater number of Iranians following a mandate from the Iranian government, the company began to invest in social programs for Iranians. While company propaganda presents the implementation of these programs as evidence of its benevolence, this paper argues that such programs were integral components of the AIOC’s civilizing project in Khuzestan. This civilizing project aimed, through the promotion of education, physical health and fitness, and various forms of discipline, to transform southwest Iran’s pastoral-nomadic and sedentary tribal peoples – regularly described in AIOC documents as “savages” – into a class of industrial laborers and to also cultivate a cadre of loyal, efficient, and able-bodied Iranian employees who would be capable of working in clerical, technical, and even managerial capacities for the company. Relying on primary sources from the British National Archives and the BP Archive – such as annual company reports, medical correspondences, propaganda pamphlets, and the oil company’s monthly magazine – this paper contends that the AIOC, by implementing wide-ranging social programs as part of a civilizing project, assumed the character of a modern colonial state in southwestern Iran.

As established and practiced in the Anglo-American academy, postcolonial theory has largely inhabited political as well as academic comfort zones. Despite the “gains” of the postcolonial turn, the postcolonial approach of analysis seems to impose a form of provincial epistemology of an “Orient” irreducible by its themes, contents, methodology, and intellectual achievements that may not participate in unnerving the “foundational” premises of western humanities. On this account, postcolonial theory may be unmindful of non-western articulations of self-critique. How does one move from the critical limits and political correctnesses of postcolonial theory on the Islamicate world into a genuinely interdisciplinary treatment of non-western humanities especially in the field of Islamic and Arab thought? What is it that alienates Islamic knowledge and a knowledge of the Islamic Arab world from shaping and remapping new directions in the postcolonial debates about Middle Eastern humanities? In this presentation, I shall investigate to what extent the critical revisions done on Islamic and Arabic—mainly classical humanities—by Mohamed Arkoun and Mohamed Al-Jabir?—two important North African intellectuals, may respond to this process of redirecting non-western/ Middle Eastern humanities as part of the pedagogical and political concerns of postcolonial theory. Arkoun and Al-Jabir?’s interventions in what they respectively called “Applied Islamology” and “Critique of Arab Reason” suggest a counter chronological, “self-deconstructionist” terrain of interpretation that brings nuanced and new (albeit problematic) methods of humanistic analysis mostly excluded in postcolonial debates. My aim is to demonstrate that reorienting an alternative conceptual framework of what may called “Critical Islamology”—the study of the Islamicate worlds in light of recasting classical knowledge as well as expanding intellectual projects and realities of democratizing Arab thought from the inside—should mean that we must redefine the relationship between the fields of postcolonial studies and Islamic or Arabic studies. I argue that the work of these two Arab humanists underscores the necessity to bring these conversations and methodologies of “radical” and decolonizing critique together. Ultimately, such comparative crisscrossing of multiple and global humanities represents an alternative epistemology of liberation that pushes for a more global, democratic, interdisciplinary production and circulation of humanistic knowledge about the Islamicate world.