The Transcontinental Maghreb

Critically engaging the concept of the Mediterranean as a “liquid continent” (Gabriel Audisio), the book argues in favor of a “transcontinental” heuristic model that rests on the transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb within the millennia-old relation that has materially and culturally bound it to multiple Mediterranean sites. Studying a Mediterranean-inspired body of texts from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Gibraltar in French, Arabic, and Spanish, the book delivers provocative analyses that complicate the dichotomy between nation and Mediterranean, the valence of the postcolonial topos of nomadism in the face of postcolonial trauma, and conceptions of the Mediterranean as a mythical site averse to historical realization. The book substitutes a trans-Mediterranean reading of Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma as allegory of the Maghreb’s long-standing plurality for Albert Camus’ colonialist Mediterranean utopia. Through this adjusted Mediterranean genealogy, it reveals the intersection of these Mediterranean imaginaries with Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized. Attuned to both the perpetual fluctuation of the Mediterranean as method and the political imperatives specific to the postcolonial Maghreb, the transcontinental reveals the limits of models of hybridity and nomadism oblivious to material realities. Through a sustained reflection on the potential and limitations of allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean successfully decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and mediates the nomadic subject’s reinsertion into a revised national collective respectful of heterogeneity. These far-reaching adjustments to our readings of the Maghreb and the Mediterranean help us rethink not just the space of the sea, the hybridity it produced, and the way it shaped historical dynamics (globalization, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism) but also the very nature of postcolonial histories and identities along its shores.