Papers by Idriss Jebari
History of the Present, 2024
Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui’s L’histoire du Maghreb: Un essai de synthèse (The History of ... more Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui’s L’histoire du Maghreb: Un essai de synthèse (The History of North Africa: An Interpretative Essay) (1970) offers a prime example of a former colonized subject’s effort to decolonize the discipline of history. Scholars of Arab and North African historiography have either dismissed it as an ideological text or lauded it as an ambitious attempt to call out French hegemony in its former colonies. This essay offers an alternative reading that underlines its social and political dimensions in the context of Moroccan nation-building in the 1970s. It puts Laroui in dialogue with other intellectual voices of this time to illustrate the originality of his call for the public role of historians of decolonization. The article also discusses Laroui’s political withdrawal in the next decade and his shift from Marxism to liberal state reformism.
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International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2022
The alliance between the leftist movement Perspectives Tunisiennes and university students delive... more The alliance between the leftist movement Perspectives Tunisiennes and university students delivered sustained opposition and repeated protests against Bourguiba's regime in the 1960s and 1970s. This article argues that these groups were driven by the “student question,” a counterproject for Tunisian national development that opposed the vision of liberal bourgeois modernity espoused by Bourguiba's reforms of elitism through education and depoliticization. Instead, the student question was fleshed out in the group's periodical, envisaging the emancipation of Tunisian subjects and their entitlement to citizenship and political participation, and how the struggle of students would sweep the whole country. Drawing on the movement's journal and memoirs of four former Tunisian leftists, I trace how Perspectives navigated the regime's repression in 1968 and 1972–75, and how two successive generations of leftists emerged with different ideological reference points. In so doing, this article takes seriously the political imagination of this group during the global 1960s and 1970s, while conceiving ways to reintegrate silenced memories and histories into the mainstream of Tunisian historiography after the 2011 revolution.
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جدل الهوية والتاريخ . قراءات تونسية في مباحث الدكتور هشام جعيط , 2018
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Middle East Critique, 2021
The recent revival of interest in Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) around the Engl... more The recent revival of interest in Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) around the English release of his seminal 1983 essay, Maghreb Pluriel represents an opportunity to place this thinker in the inner circle of post-1967 Arab thought. This article argues that most coverage and commemoration of him has been devoted to a glorified side of his trajectory that fits neatly within the framework of ‘postcolonial francophone intellectuals.’ However, this article argues that we must revise the meaning of his seminal book and his call for a ‘plural Maghreb’ to see it also as the demise of his project for a decolonized sociology in Morocco, which was necessary to set his sights toward semiology and his significant literary oeuvre. His example informs us on Arab intellectual strategies after the end of grand ideological narratives, and how to write Arab intellectual and cultural histories without succumbing to the trap of nostalgia.
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The Routledge Handbook on Political Parties in the Middle East, 2021
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Franco-German Relations Seen from Abroad Post-war Reconciliation in International Perspectives, 2020
This chapter explores the possibility of reconciliation between Morocco and Algeria, inspired by ... more This chapter explores the possibility of reconciliation between Morocco and Algeria, inspired by the French and German reconciliation model. Mutual mistrust has set in over the past few decades following several crises. Reconciliation efforts are complicated by each side's sense of grievance, among leaders and an increasingly belligerent public. They both now see the status quo as the safest option. Faced with the limits of traditional approaches, the Franco-German model could break the deadlock by binding their destinies together and creating incentives for collaboration. The model owes its success to the ability to overcome multi-generational conflict and distrust through integrative economic measures and symbolic gestures. It jumpstarted European construction, just as this reconciliation could resuscitate the Arab Maghreb Union as a prosperous block that includes Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, and Tunisia. Hence, their reconciliation should overcome the root of mistrust and address the structural incompatibility between the two economies.
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Gorman, Irving (ed.), Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought and Literature, 2020
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Arab Studies Journal , 2020
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Middle East Topics and Arguments, 2018
This article examines the experience of transitional justice and its relation to collective memor... more This article examines the experience of transitional justice and its relation to collective memory of authoritarian repression in Morocco (1965-1992) and the Civil War in Algeria (1991-2002). It confronts and compares to the two states’ therapeutic historical discourse produced to heal the national community after these periods of violence and its impact on the countries’ historians, journalists, film makers, and novelists from 2004 to 2017. The article argues that Algeria and Morocco’s rigorous definition of the “victim” during these two episodes (the imprisoned and disappeared) excluded the way communities suffered during this period and, as a result, has delayed healing, forgiveness, and national reconciliation. This article highlights the limits of two overpoliticized processes of transitional justice in the Maghreb and their limited conception of what it meant to “come to terms with the past.” However, it finds optimism in the ongoing efforts by new historiography and cultural actors to confront the lasting traumatic aftermaths outside of official denitions and on their own terms.
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In 1977, a group of North African intellectuals produced a special volume for the prestigious Fre... more In 1977, a group of North African intellectuals produced a special volume for the prestigious French journal Les temps modernes. Led by Abdelkebir Khatibi, they sought to ‘rethink the Maghreb’ as a way to counter the poisoned, divided and belligerent climate of the region, and to offer an alternative to the authoritarian models of the nation-state that took hold after political independence. When
read through the lens of Rancière’s concept of the ‘dissensus’ concerning the interplay between culture and politics, this collective volume of Les Temps Modernes reveals the plight of a generation of post-independence Maghrebi intellectuals who questioned their own purpose in light of their countries’ national projects. This article claims that this group intervened in the public sphere as a way to reconfigure the intellectual’s purpose in their respective societies and political systems. Their case highlights an important chapter in the region’s social and intellectual history and demonstrates how intellectual
actors seek re-integration in the national community after a painful period of exclusion.
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in Islam, State, and Modernity. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab world. Edited b... more in Islam, State, and Modernity. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab world. Edited by Zaid Eyadat, Francesca Corrao, Mohammed Hashas. Forthcoming 2017.
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L'Année du Maghreb, 2014
In 1974, Abdallah Laroui and Hichem Djaït, two emerging Maghrebi historians and intellectuals wro... more In 1974, Abdallah Laroui and Hichem Djaït, two emerging Maghrebi historians and intellectuals wrote political essays affirming the necessity of re-historicizing the national projects of Tunisia and Morocco. These two countries faced what was framed then as a “crisis of modernity”, at a time when these countries were consolidating national authority. These intellectuals’ participation in the public space was seen as innovative and daring. In this article, we look at their ideas and practices in relation to each other. The article allows us to establish the specific mechanisms of consultation that were put into place between intellectuals, authorities and the public with lasting implications. On the one hand, these essays took on special meaning for these intellectuals whose lives would be marked by disillusionment and alienation resulting from the confrontation of their idealist convictions upon completing their studies in France and the stark realities of the Maghreb of the early sixties. On the other hand, these authors placed history and the historical principle of change at the center of their analysis, thus avoiding any claim that the “crisis” was the product of the intellectual limitations of national political elites. These two axes of study will allow us to frame the issue of the social demand for history in a wider perspective, while arguing that the constituent elements of the historicity regimes in the Maghreb were put in place as early as the seventies.
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Thesis Chapters by Idriss Jebari
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Book Reviews by Idriss Jebari
Serendipities: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences, 2023
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American Historical Review, 2023
Review
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The Journal of North African Studies, 2022
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Canadian Journal of History, 2021
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Journal of North African Studies, 2020
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Papers by Idriss Jebari
read through the lens of Rancière’s concept of the ‘dissensus’ concerning the interplay between culture and politics, this collective volume of Les Temps Modernes reveals the plight of a generation of post-independence Maghrebi intellectuals who questioned their own purpose in light of their countries’ national projects. This article claims that this group intervened in the public sphere as a way to reconfigure the intellectual’s purpose in their respective societies and political systems. Their case highlights an important chapter in the region’s social and intellectual history and demonstrates how intellectual
actors seek re-integration in the national community after a painful period of exclusion.
Thesis Chapters by Idriss Jebari
Book Reviews by Idriss Jebari
read through the lens of Rancière’s concept of the ‘dissensus’ concerning the interplay between culture and politics, this collective volume of Les Temps Modernes reveals the plight of a generation of post-independence Maghrebi intellectuals who questioned their own purpose in light of their countries’ national projects. This article claims that this group intervened in the public sphere as a way to reconfigure the intellectual’s purpose in their respective societies and political systems. Their case highlights an important chapter in the region’s social and intellectual history and demonstrates how intellectual
actors seek re-integration in the national community after a painful period of exclusion.
in the Arab world, Sociology Professor Mohammed
Bamyeh tackles the conundrum of Arab social sciences
today: a seemingly-historically weak field of knowledge that exists alongside richly tumultuous and complex social realities. Five years on from the Arab Spring,
there is enough critical distance to ask how the fi eld of
knowledge has digested these transformations. How does the report depict the challenges faced by Arab social sciences? What lessons regarding public engagement should young Arab social scientists take away from it?
12.05.2017 – 13.05.2017
Friday, 12 May (Venue: Edmund-Rumpler-Strasse 13 - B 117)
(A) REFRAMING OLD TEXTS IN(TO) NEW POWER SETTINGS
13:00-15:00
• Andreas Kaplony: Kitāb "Writ" in Coranic Arabic, Imperial Arabic, and Koine-Arabic
• Sarah Lemaire: The Creation in Yose ben Yose's Piyyut "Atah konanta ʻOlam": a Deliberate Palimpsest
• Julia Strutz: Paradigm Change and its Discontents: Heritage Politics in Istanbul
15:00-15:30 • Coffee break
15:30-17:30
• Talin Suciyan: An Anonymous Mass: The Survivors
• Rocio Daga Portillo: Ibn Taymiyya, a Salafist?: Legal Discourse in Its Historical Context
• Bettina Gräf: Hiba Raʾūf ʿIzzat: The Egyptian Political Scientist Comments on Wael Hallaq’s "The Impossible State" (2012) on Youtube
(B) KEYNOTE LECTURE
18:15-19:00
• Idriss Jebari (Beirut): Thinking the Maghrib as an Epistemological Rupture: The Moroccan Post-Independence Efforts to Decolonize the Social Sciences
19:00-21:00 • Dinner
Saturday, 13 May (Venue: Amalienstr. 52 - K 201)
(C) REPHRASING IDENTITIES
10:00-12:00
• Vevian Zaki: To Speak or Not to Speak in the Other's Language: Two Examples from the Arabic Bible
• Emma Mages: Linguistic Identification in Egyptian Plays of the Nahḍa
• Nevra Lischewski: Sprachreform im multilingualen Kontext
12:00-12:30 • Coffee break
12:30-14:00
• Mehr Newid: Divergenzen und Konvergenzen im neupersischen Sprachgebrauch am Beispiel von Fārsī-ye Tehrānī (FT) und Fārsī-ye Kābolī (FK)
• Vefa Akseki: Aspekte der Herausbildung individueller Einstellungen zu Sprachen
• Final discussion