The purpose of the roundtable is to discuss two books published in 2024 in terms of their respective approaches to the visual anthropology and material culture of Tunisia and Algeria. Both books are concerned with forms of visible artistic production by Tunisians and Algerians – urban wall paintings by Tunisian women and public monuments in Algeria despite the well-known historical fact that oral histories and memories of the French colonial era note the invisibility of the so-called native, notably where Europeans dominated in urban centers. My presentation poses a series of open-ended questions about the two books: How do these two books provide a lens on settler spaces in the Maghreb, on colonizing power, destruction, and preservation, on patrimony and presumed ownership, on memory and history writing? How do post-colonial Tunisians and Algerians knowingly borrow and mix concepts and models of either statuary or of public architectural decoration to achieve self-determination and reconceptualize the independent Maghrebi self? How to these two books describe French-North African aesthetic entanglements? Which artistic forms do their authors deem resilient and which are embedded in habits of privilege or in those of acquiescence? How do these public art projects – Tunisian wall art and Algerian monument-making -- often add something to the experience of the present by never ignoring the past violence? How and when does the colonial patrimony become an anticolonial resource?

As a scholar of historic and contemporary architecture with a background in classical archaeology, I am excited to join this conversation about developing visual archaeological methodologies in the Maghrib. My own interdisciplinary work is based on archival research and close explorations and documentation of built environments in Tunisia. I have also studied similar contexts in Algeria and Morocco, so I am well versed in the region’s history of colonialism and postcolonial practices as related to buildings, monuments, and heritage preservation. As one who makes use of not only architectural plans and related correspondence, but also photographs, postcards, and journalistic media in my work, I wholeheartedly support the consideration of all types of visual documentation in an effort to ‘excavate’ design and construction processes, the function, and the diverse interpretation of physical objects in the urban realm. To this roundtable conversation I bring a transhistorical perspective that emphasizes both continuities and ruptures as manifested in built environments. So much can be gleaned from close examination of extant structures and spaces, so I am an advocate for on-site research and what some might consider “archaeological” or “slow” looking. Of course photographic images tell only partial stories, so site visits are essential means for really understanding a place and how it has changed. Lines of inquiry I might raise during the conversation relate to allegory and colonialist monuments, the repurposing of monuments and buildings for postcolonial purposes, heritage management and identity formation, and contemporary neocolonialist practices. I am an advocate for comparative methodologies for the study of colonial and postcolonial built environments across state and imperial boundaries, so I might also be able to help facilitate a portion of the conversation on Algeria and Tunisia regarding the Maghrib’s historiography that could potentially open additional avenues for critical thinking and understanding.

Within the broader frame of this workshop's themes, this presentation will lay out the scale, character and richness of mural painting in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Tunisia, with a special focus on the city of Qayrawān. Through a series of pictorial case studies, the talk will reveal the extraordinary degree to which mosques, shrines and walls were covered at this time with "amuletic" and other religio-magical marks which served to protect indigenous peoples from novel and punitive forms of European governance. It will ask why these vast paintings have hitherto found no place in history, wondering whether their likely production by women and their valorisation of local, African, trans-Saharan accounts of Islam placed them in the category of the forgettably "non-normative" for both colonial authorities and post-independence scholars of the Maghreb. Drawing on the workshop's broader themes, the presentation will then go on to consider the political, aesethetic and religious potential of these artworks in our present, asking how they might be re-presented in Tunisia and in wider north African and Islamic worlds. This will then lead into a discussion of the ethics of so-called "visual archaeology," asking what role scholars from the global North ought to play in seeding or producing anticolonial histories in the region. In so doing, the paper will also connect with the group's wider consideration of the broader Maghreb, briefly introducing some of the scores of other unstudied art movements from this moment in Algeria, Tunisia ad Libya.

Dónal Hassett As a historian of colonial commemorative culture and postcolonial heritage, I am excited to join this interdisciplinary conversation that explores new approaches to the visual anthropology of the Maghrib. My own research has drawn on both archival sources and close explorations of public monuments and their afterlives in Algeria and France, as well as close readings of colonial and postcolonial heritage discourse as reproduced in museums and curated sites of memory. This work has been grounded in a much wider engagement with both specialist scholarship and broader public debates around the creation, curation, and management of colonial heritage in a changing postcolonial world. I am confident that the proposed discussion will help reaffirm the significance of the Maghrib’s experiences of grappling with the heritage of colonialism and the coloniality of heritage, all too often marginalised from these discussions. It will also, I hope, highlight new ways of engaging with these histories and their resonances in the present by moving away from the hegemonic focus on the high politics of commemoration and heritage and considering instead the diversity of popular and artistic interactions with and representations of key sites of memory. Lines of inquiry I would hope to pursue in this conversation include the relationship between the official discursive goals of monuments and heritage sites and their quotidian uses by the populations who live around them, the extent to which both colonial and postcolonial authoritative heritage discourses have permeated popular understandings of what constitutes heritage, and the way hierarchies of gender, race and class have been reproduced and challenged through contested representations of the past and its presents. The proposed inter-disciplinary, comparative and transnational approach to exploring these and related questions has the real potential to transform how we engage with heritage in the history of the Maghrib, while also underlining the region’s relevance to the much wider debates around colonial and postcolonial heritage that are increasingly prominent in scholarship and public discourse around the globe.

As a seasoned historian of visual culture, cities, and architecture of North Africa and the Middle East, my contribution to the issues raised by these two important books will include the following questions (in no prioritized order). What kind of public monuments provoke later engagements? How important is the location of the monument? What kind of monuments have historically frozen meanings? Can a monument stay dormant for a while and then catch attention again? When and how meanings associated with monument change? How does the political climate effect the interventions to monuments? What role do history and memory play? Do history and memory support each other? Can they occupy oppositional positions? Can a historically and politically charged object lose its associations? Is it possible for the formalistic power of an object to provoke new dialogue? How helpful is it to define a colonial era chronologically? How do pre-colonial monuments come into the picture? How do “high art” and vernacular interventions engage with each other? I hope to open up these issues in some specificity, capitalizing on the theoretical and empirical contents of the two books at the center of our discussion.