Majid Hannoum: The Invention of the Maghreb. Between Africa and the Middle East

HUMA Book Launch

Author: Majid Hannoum (University of Kansas, US)  

Introduction: Under French colonial rule, the region of the Maghreb emerged as distinct from two other geographical entities that, too, are colonial inventions: the Middle East and Africa. In this book, Abdelmajid Hannoum demonstrates how the invention of the Maghreb invention started long before the conquest of Algiers and lasted until the time of independence – and beyond to the present. Through an interdisciplinary study of French colonial modernity, Hannoum examines how colonialism made extensive use of translations of Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts and harnessed high technologies of power to reconfigure the region and invent it. In the process, he analyses various forms of colonial knowledge, including historiography, anthropology, cartography, literary work, archaeology, linguistics, and racial theories. He shows how local engagement with colonial politics and its modes of knowledge were instrumental in the modern making of the region, including in its postcolonial era, as a single unit divorced from Africa and the Middle East. See the book: The Invention of the Maghreb (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

About the author: Majid Hannoum, PhDs (Sorbonne, Princeton University), is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. He is the editor of Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance in Africa (2016) and author of The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East (2021), Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City (2020), Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (2010) and Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (2001). He was a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Study at Harvard, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, a Senior Fulbright Fellow, and a Senior Fellow at the Aga Khan Center in London.