Abstract
The introduction delineates the questions and research strategies to a project focused on promoting an encounter between narratives about/from the Maghreb and narratives from/about International Relations (IR) and International Relations theory in their attempts at making sense of the world of international and global affairs. What does this attention to the tropes of narrative, voice, and reflexivity as theoretical problems entail to the study of global affairs? What sorts of anxieties and hopes do the turn to narratives both as modes of communicating knowledge to the world and as modes of knowing, (re-)imagining, and thus (re)telling the world bring about in the field of IR?
[W]hat do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity …. Even our imaginations must remain forever-colonized.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments
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- 1.
The challenges to state-centric thinking and to “rationalist theories” in the field of IR date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the notable blossoming of postmodern/poststructuralist, feminist , and postcolonial approaches in IR. See, for example, Darby and Paolini 1994; Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; McClintock et al. 1997; Walker 1993.
- 2.
- 3.
See, for example, Calleya, Stephen C. 2003. Subregional Dynamics in the Western Mediterranean. Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4: 139–157. Celso, Anthony N. 2008. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb: The “newest” front in the war on terror. Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 1:80–96. Zartman, I William. 2011. Why the Maghreb matters – threats, opportunities and options for cross-border cooperation in North Africa. Paix sans frontieres: building Peace across borders, 22. http://www.c-r.org/accord/cross-border. See also Al-Jabri 1985; Hiddleston 2005.
- 4.
In this passage, I drew upon, once again, Certeau’s words as a source of inspiration: “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. In Greek, narration is called ‘diegesis’: it establishes an itinerary (it ‘guides’) and it passes through (it ‘transgresses’). The space of operations it travels in is made of movements: it is topological, concerning the deformations of figures, rather than topical, defining places. It is only ambivalently that the limit circumscribes in this space. It plays a double game. It does the opposite of what it says. It hands the place over to the foreigner that it gives the impression of throwing out. Or rather, when it marks a stopping place, the latter is not stable but follows the variations of encounters between programs. Boundaries are transportable limits and transportations of limits; they are also metaphorai” (Certeau 1984, 130). See also Oliveira 2017.
- 5.
It is by looking at these different claims of belonging and subjective-positions that Alina Sajed (2013), for example, suggests the notion of “translocality” as an alternative topology to understand the webs of relationships conforming France-Maghreb postcolonial encounters and notably the experiences of Maghrebian diasporic individuals in France. Although the Franco-Maghrebian encounter and the “webs of translocal relationships” they constitute are not my main focus here, I am in great debt to Alina’s imaginative and rich explorations of literary narratives from the Maghreb and of the politics of postcolonial encounters in conforming the variety of subjectivities, modes of thought and political claims stemming from the region.
- 6.
I should highlight to my reader that the Moroccan writer Fatema Mernissi can be deemed, at least to a certain extent, as an exception here as once a considerable part of her work was not originally published in French. Although Mernissi’s first books—L’Amour dans les pays musulman [1984] and Les Sindbads Marocains—were written in French, the two emblematic pieces of her oeuvre I chose to engage with in Chap. 6, for example, were originally published in English and have only gained French translations afterward. One of her most emblematic published works, Dreams of Trespass , was translated into more than 20 languages.
- 7.
By “denotative and territorial epistemology”, I am referring, in a broad sense, to the dominant notion of epistemology in a Western logocentric context which emphasizes “denotation” and “will to truth” and is usually blind or indifferent to the geopolitics of knowledge. In a nutshell, Mignolo calls “geopolitics of knowledge … the diversification, through history, of the colonial and the imperial differences” (Mignolo 2008, 227). The will to truth implicit in the assertion “[t]here can be no others” inscribed a conceptualization of knowledge to a geopolitical space (Western Europe) and erased the possibility of even thinking about a conceptualization and distribution of knowledge “emanating” from other local histories (China, India, Islam, etc.) (Mignolo 2008, 227). In Local Histories/Global Designs (2012), Mignolo then tried to open spaces for “enactive” epistemologies—that is, epistemologies “whose will to truth is preceded by the will to transform” that emerges from the experience of colonial difference, which are aware of and sensitive to the colonial difference sustaining the geopolitics of knowledge of (Eurocentric) modernity. I find the tension by Mignolo—inspired by many other names such as Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and Rigoberta Menchú, to name only a few—between “hegemonic epistemology with emphasis on denotation and truth” and “subaltern epistemologies with emphasis on performance and transformation” indeed compelling, but only if this attention to the energies emanating from “border knowledges ” and subaltern positions remains aware of the dimensions of contention and exclusions that these other knowledges and modes of thinking may also contain (Mignolo 2012, 24–26).
- 8.
According to Mignolo, liminal condition refers to the possibility of being or inhabiting in between different local projects, that is, to inhabit two worlds simultaneously. In Mignolo’s words, it is precisely this liminal condition which renders one a privileged position to acknowledge “colonial difference” (see Mignolo 2012).
- 9.
At this point, it is interesting to mention Mignolo’s own analysis of Abdelkebir Khatibi’s book Maghreb Pluriel and how Khatibi’s work (especially his notion of double critique) has inspired the first in his formulation about “border thinking”.
- 10.
Derrida is an exception here since his work is more often read as the work of a French philosopher rather than of an Algerian or Maghrebian writer.
- 11.
There are important omissions here such as Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and a large spectrum of other authors whose works I could not include in this project.
- 12.
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Oliveira, J.d.S.C.d. (2020). Introduction: Making the Case for Re-imagination. In: Postcolonial Maghreb and the Limits of IR. Global Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19985-2_1
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