Urban Identity in Colonial Tunisia (original) (raw)
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In the twenty-first century, North Africa has emerged as one of the most complex and challenging regions of the world. The aim of this book is to examine a variety of the challenges it offers, looking beyond the media headlines into the complex and interrelated issues of culture and politics, including the politics of performance, governance, and mapping the territory. The book is written from inside the region as well as offering international perspectives. Its essays range over a variety of geo-political issues, each inflected by a personal point of view, and it provides a timely intervention in current debates about the past, present, and future of North Africa.
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The methodological approach chosen for this study, that examines situations pertaining to the nineteenth century in the mirror of longue durée considerations, pertains to a vision of urban history inspired by the historical anthropology of space (Schmitt 2008), by the historical anthropology of urban time (Grossin 1974; Dubar 2014) and by the micro-study of daily life practices (Carlotti 1989; Lepetit 1993; Pispisa 2004; Revel 2011; Salvati 2008). The period under consideration belongs to the Ottoman era in Tunisia, that began in the sixteenth century and ended with French colonization in 1881. The posture of this research is also inspired by the method and tradition of Alltagsgeschichte (Ludtke 1995). Studying daily life (Freitag and Lafi 2011) is intended, in contrast to mechanist interpretations, as a way to unearth traces of spatialized practices of religion or of elements pertaining to religiosity under diverse temporalities. The intent is also to avoid interpreting history as the interaction of undiscussed blocks (space, time, identity, religion). Focusing on all the interstices inside and between such notions (spatial, temporal, identity-related, confessional) is seen as a way to complexify the theorization of the interaction between time, space and religion. Following seminal suggestions by Robert Ilbert, the idea
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This chapter explores the modern history of the North African city through literary portraits of its colonial, socialist, and neoliberal phases. To read this history, the chapter analyzes a body of travel accounts, autobiographies, and novels in both Arabic and French focusing on the urban life of the lumpenproletariat and their interactions with the waqf spaces of Islamic charitable endowments. The first section of this chapter abstracts a general image of the historical Muslim city and investigates the place of the urban poor in its social dynamics and institutions. The second section addresses the theoretical significance of the lumpenproletariat as a political and urban question and the global relevance of their experiences in the neoliberal era. The chapter, then, explores, through the city experiences of the lumpenproletariat, the politics of space in the colonial, socialist, and neoliberal North African city. While reflecting on the pedagogical possibilities of teaching these literary accounts, the chapter argues that these accounts reveal how the violent divisions of colonial space along racial and religious identities are remerging in the neoliberal city along the lines of class.