MOLG - Modern Languages (MOLG)

Issues of current interest to the comparative study of French, Italian, Spanish, or Latin-American civilizations. Varying topics focus on region, periods and aspects of these cultures.

This interdisciplinary course seeks to introduce students to the modern history, politics, literature and culture of North Africa during the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries, and their interconnections. The course will further connect such contemporary formations of the modern nation states of the Maghreb to the “the Arab Spring” of 2011. The course examines the colonial and postcolonial experiences of North Africa in the context of the region’s close connections to Europe, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Readings will cover 6 countries: Egypt (also considered as part of the Middle East), Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania as well as their relationships to the history of French, Italian, British and Spanish colonialisms. While the period of sustained European imperial control over North Africa began as early as 1830 in Algeria and as late as 1911-12 in Libya and Morocco, decolonization was almost complete in the region by the early 1960s. Throughout the semester, we will look at responses to colonial presence, the collusion of ideas, histories and traditions by testing the thesis that this “colonial moment” had far-reaching implications not only for postcolonial North African societies, but also for the European countries that imposed colonial rule, and how such an encounter and movements of migration generated new waves of Mediterranean cultural evolutions. We will also explore the interconnectedness of economic, political, and cultural phenomena in North African history, e.g., the implications of labor migration, the development of new musical forms, and the interplay of religion, politics and language in the construction of national identities, and the impact of the most recent political and cultural transformations happening as a result of popular protests in North African countries since the Arab Spring. Finally, we will consider the ways in which portrayals of history and culture have been politically charged and hotly contested in both colonial and postcolonial contexts.

This course explores the topic of migration across the Mediterranean Sea from multiple perspectives. It focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century narratives and theories of the multiple dimensions of Mediterranean identities and the multiple representations (literary, critical, filmic/documentary and musical) of the experience of physical and cultural displacement. We will discuss film, music, and study texts by and on novelists, poets, theorists, philosophers, essayists, musicians who have written about migration, exile and diaspora, or whose work and background represent such sensibility. One overarching theme seen through Amin Maalouf’s novel, Leo Africanus (1986) is the idea of encounters among people coming from different hybridized cultures, faiths, religions in the Mediterranean to form new spaces of meaning and create new opportunities for cross-cultural conversation.