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Nationalism in the Maghreb

Experimental Nations Or, the Invention of the Maghreb
Réda Bensmaïa
Princeton University Press
2003

Reviewed by Richard Bartlett

Since the mid 1980s two areas of study in the broad field of humanities have come to hold increasing importance in the university: nationalism and post-colonial studies. And often the two meet.

Experimental Nations is one such meeting, and what makes it all the more significant is that the post-colonial in question is not the British Commonwealth.

It is no secret that the study of post-colonial theory is very much a literary phenomenon, that has concentrated most of its effort on the world of Anglophone literature, so it is pleasing to see literature of one of the other post-colonial empires forming the subject of an academic study.

The book is a series of essays previously published by Bensmaïa, who is professor of French and Comparative Literature at Brown University in the USA. They were published in journals such as World Literature Today, Research in African Literatures and Yale French Studies, which should give you an idea of their ‘weightiness’, so if you’re looking for some light reading or an introduction to nationalism in North African literature, look elsewhere.

"It is pleasing to see literture of one of the other post-colonial empires forming the subject of an academic study"

As with most collections of articles or papers that are later collated, with an introduction and conclusion added, there is an element of artificial cohesiveness, of disparate themes forced to co-habit, which cannot be overcome by the mere addition of a prefix and a suffix.

But first, what is Bensmaïa’s intention with this collection:
"…to bring…to light the originality of the literary strategies deployed by postcolonial Maghrebi writers to reappropriate their national cultural heritage, to regain their idioms, and to reconfigure their history, territory, and community." And in that intention he does succeed. At one important level.

The concept of nationalism is one fraught with myriad experts and their divergent opinions, and this is even more so when the arts and nationalism are uttered in the same thesis. Bensmaïa’s articles, as a collection, take the study of art in nationalism from a very narrow perspective – not narrow in the sense of limited but rather in the sense of personal, or individual. There is a sense of individual understandings of the nation through use of creative outlets, and not much of understanding the concept as collective identity made malleable through art.

Some examples. In examining how Maghrebi writers reclaim the space of the Medina, their city, he shows how the depiction of the city through the texts of travel writers has been completed reappropriated. The city is not longer something to be observed, it is something that is lived, a space that exists despite what any Eurocentric expectations of a city might be.

Bensmaïa’s analysis of Amour Bilingue by Abdelkebir Khatibi is a close examination the language of love and more significantly of the divide of language, the problem of writers in a multilingual nation. So thorough is his examination that much is made of the binding, the cover and the calligraphy that leads a reader into the book, and how this plays a role in our monolingual reading of a multi-lingual text.

The emphasis of this book on close readings of individual texts allows an goes some way to understanding what Bensmaïa is trying to achieve with the concept behind the title ‘Experimental nations’. In the introduction he states: "My nations are experimental in that they are above all nations that writers have had to imagine or explore…countries to invent and to draw while creating one’s language."

In this journey of discovery Bensmaïa follows every step, internalises every gaze of the writers (and film directors) whose work he studies. Yet I was left feeling that there should be much more to the nation, to any nation, that what an individual creative genius imagines it to be. He concentrates on the virtual nation, on the nation in the imagination rather than on the imagined nation.

Ultimately the concept of nation in Experimental Nations lacks context. This is not to say that Bensmaïa’s analyses are flawed; they are challenging and they are intimate, but certainly not flawed. What is flawed is that this book is about citizens as invisible recipients of nationalist ideology rather than citizens as creators of nationalist imagination.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but another failing of this book is its audience. It is written for intellectuals, yes, but more than that. It is written for fellow academics more narrowly. This is not a fault in itself, after all, academics all over the world indulge in bouts of journal jousting. But. Bensmaïa introduces his article "Postcolonial Nations" with a quote on the topic by Fredric Jameson, one written when postcolonial studies was "still in the first stages of theoretical elaboration". Bensmaïa then goes on to criticise it at length. With so many other critiques of the topic having been written over the past 17 years, I can only think that the reason Bensmaïa chose the 1986 Jameson article is that Jameson is a colleague worth impressing. After all, he is also a professor of French at a University in the USA.

Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books.