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Abrahamic Tongues: Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida

Olivia C. Harrison

in Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization

Chapter Five begins by examining Abdelkebir Khatibi’s 1974 pamphlet, Vomito blanco. A violent polemic against Zionism, this treatise is markedly different in tone and genre from Khatibi’s later ... More

Chapter Five begins by examining Abdelkebir Khatibi’s 1974 pamphlet, Vomito blanco. A violent polemic against Zionism, this treatise is markedly different in tone and genre from Khatibi’s later writings, and in particular, his exchanges with the Jewish Egyptian psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun and the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida on the topic of “the Abrahamic,” the tie that binds Jews and Muslims in spite of colonial/Zionist efforts to separate them. Revisiting Khatibi’s fiction in light of his Abrahamic reflections, this chapter argues that he deploys bi-langue—the in-between language he is compelled to practice as a result of the imposition of French—to resist not only assimilation, but also the separation between Jews and Arabs. The crossed reading of Khatibi and Derrida further reveals that the latter’s little known writings on Palestine and Israel are rooted in his experience of French colonialism in Algeria.Less

The ‘Souverainement Orphelin’ of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Writings: Sociology in the Souffles Years

Andy Stafford

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

One of Morocco’s most important sociologists, and certainly one of the first following Independence, Abdelkébir Khatibi occupied an unusual place in the new, developing discipline of post-colonial ... More

One of Morocco’s most important sociologists, and certainly one of the first following Independence, Abdelkébir Khatibi occupied an unusual place in the new, developing discipline of post-colonial sociology. Both a poet and a novelist, Khatibi was also interested in history, philosophy and cultural theory; and this wide-ranging set of interests served him well when, barely thirty, he became editor of the Bulletin économique et social du Maroc. Here began a literary as well as sociological adventure which, little known in his œuvre, took Khatibi from Marx and Gurvitch to Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann. As well as leading research into sociological topics in Morocco and North Africa such as women’s sexuality, young people’s opinions or radical theories of social explanation, Khatibi began a study of the Moroccan class system in a synthetic analysis stretching back to earliest makhzen periods, using Ibn Khaldun, Marx and Durkheim to account for the açabiyya tradition of male lineage in tribal rulers. It is in this context that Khatibi wrote his Tattooed Memory in 1971, his sociology of the post-colonial self.Less

Tireless Translation: Travels, Transcriptions, Tongues and the Eternal Plight of the ‘Étranger professionnel’ in the Corpus of Abdelkébir Khatibi

Alison Rice

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

In Féerie d’un mutant, Abdelkébir Khatibi creates a dialogue in which one of the interlocutors declares that he is an “étranger professionnel,” a recurring expression in the Moroccan writer’s work ... More

In Féerie d’un mutant, Abdelkébir Khatibi creates a dialogue in which one of the interlocutors declares that he is an “étranger professionnel,” a recurring expression in the Moroccan writer’s work that isn’t easily translated from French into English because of the multiple meanings of the first word: “étranger” is most often rendered as either foreigner or stranger, though these terms carry decidedly different connotations for Anglophone readers. This very resistance to translation may be what inspires the individual in the aforementioned textual exchange to specify that this self-description does not refer to a profession, but instead constitutes “a mobile position in the world” that entails “crossing borders: between languages, civilizations, markets.” (Féérie d’un mutant 2005, 38-39). This way of approaching the planet brings the “étranger professionnel” to embrace a stance that stands out in stark contrast to nationalist and xenophobic sentiments: “A foreigner, I must attach myself to all that is foreign on this earth.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The ever-moving, ever-adjusting position that Khatibi extolls has consequences on multiple levels, affecting the body and the relationships of the “étranger professionnel,” but the effects are perhaps most evident on the use of language, which is never taken for granted or considered to be a “given”: “Language belongs to no one […] Hadn’t I grown up, in my mother tongue, as if I were an adopted child? From one adoption to another, I believed I was being born to my own language.” (Amour bilingue 1983, 11). The constant rebirth into language that characterizes Khatibi’s written work involves tireless translation in texts that depict travel as synonymous with self-creation and linguistic innovation that benefit from transnational perspectives that render all things foreign, in complicated but fruitful ways.Less

Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Mediterranean Idiom

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Through its focus on decolonization, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s oeuvre has revealed the Maghreb’s intrinsic plurality—a legacy of intercultural contact that encompasses, yet extends beyond, the trauma of ... More

Through its focus on decolonization, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s oeuvre has revealed the Maghreb’s intrinsic plurality—a legacy of intercultural contact that encompasses, yet extends beyond, the trauma of European colonialism. Drawing on the fluctuating principle of the Mediterranean as method, this chapter extends the purview of Khatibi’s “double critique” of any stable concept of origins to include other moments of trans-Mediterranean contact between the Maghreb and the West—moments preceding the watershed of colonialism and conveying other logics of interaction than European domination. Khatibi has written that his core concept of bi-langue functions as a means “to enter into the telling of forgetting and of anamnesia […] ‘I am an/other’ i[s] an idiom that I owe it to myself to invent” (“Diglossia” 158). This chapter probes the form that this anamnestic idiom is to take, beyond Manichean visions of being and belonging, in the density of the Maghreb’s marge en éveil—as the point of inception of a transcultural heuristic tethered to the contiguous space of the Mediterranean Sea and its manifold, multi-directional histories. In the vertiginous space of the interlangue (the point of contact between two languages, here conceived as “the space between two exteriorities” [ibid.]), the revised conception of bi-langue that this chapter proposes concerns itself with the resurrection of an alternative, deep-rooted idiom, one incommensurable to the languages in which writing occurs. This post-traumatic, Mediterranean form of expression moves beyond melancholia to open the bi-langue to the pluri-langue and disseminate it beyond the strictures of the colonial relation. By taking account of the “historical churning of between people, between civilizations” (ibid.) in the embracing space of the Mediterranean, this discourse gives shape to a revivified Maghrebi memory in all its sedimented density.Less

Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Transparency of Language

Assia Belhabib

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

A key topic in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s works is undeniably the way in which different parts of the social body do interact, intersect, ignore or even reject each other. A forerunner of postcolonial ... More

A key topic in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s works is undeniably the way in which different parts of the social body do interact, intersect, ignore or even reject each other. A forerunner of postcolonial thought in Morocco, Khatibi explores this challenging question in his essays, more specifically Maghreb pluriel, Du bilinguisme, Chemins de traverse, but also in his dialogues with Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Hassoun and Rita El Khayat. Khatibi’s vision cleverly scrutinizes human relationships, as well as links between societies that cannot be conceived of independently from group relationships. Playing skillfully with words, Khatibi highlights the importance of language in the formation of social barriers. A vigilant and insightful intellectual, Khatibi questions in his rich and complex work the language of Francophone writers since independence.Less

Khatibi and Performativity, ‘From where to speak?’: Living, Thinking and Writing with an ‘epistemological accent’

Alfonso de Toro

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Focusing on the work, that is located at the productive and innovative interfaces between of the Epistemai of Islam and Christianity, of Orient and Occident, this article will describe Khabiti’s ... More

Focusing on the work, that is located at the productive and innovative interfaces between of the Epistemai of Islam and Christianity, of Orient and Occident, this article will describe Khabiti’s ‘performative’ thinking and praxis in relation to the actual theory and praxis of ‘belonging’, ‘hospitality’, and ‘identity’ that are always dependent on language, on one’s own chosen language, and which are inserted into the body and steered or driven by emotion. The concept of “cultural performance” and the idea of a “performative identity” or of a “performative diaspora” are at the centre of Khatibi’s thinking and writing and generate the reinvention of the Self and a radical individual and democratic system. Khatibi represents one of the best examples of this phenomenon, but located in a “cosmopolitanism” and “cosmo-humanism.” Living in Rabat he became at the same time a cosmopolitan and a great cosmo-humanist at the very moment at which he began to deal as well with Western and Oriental cultural systems. He began to navigate in and to travel through many diverse systems of thinking, of literature, of culture and sciences – his erudition, his privileged sensibility and intelligence made him a cosmopolitan and cosmo-humanist. It developed his way of placing himself in the world, and of reading and writing about the world. His life was a “worlding-life,” his literature a “worlding-literature” within the interface of deconstruction, as well as of the Occidental and Oriental logoi. This article will describe his cultural location and find his voice through a triple act of “translatio” on the base of the axis of a “double critique” and of the “pensée autre”. He becomes an “écrivain-voyageur infatigable”, a “voyageur cosmopolite”, “voyageur ou migrant professionnel” of diverse worlds. The article will also describe Khatibi’s ‘accent’, his polyphony of voices, his thought, working, and writing in the fissure.Less

Khatibi and the Transcolonial Turn

Olivia C. Harrison

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

The Palestinian question has played a seminal if neglected role in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s writings, from the central notion of a “plural Maghreb” to his musings on language, colonialism, and ... More

The Palestinian question has played a seminal if neglected role in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s writings, from the central notion of a “plural Maghreb” to his musings on language, colonialism, and “pensée-autre,” an expression he initially coined in response to the massacre of Palestinian fighters by Jordanian troops in 1970. This chapter examines the central importance of the Palestinian question in Khatibi’s writings, from his 1974 polemic Vomito blanco to his exchanges with Jacques Hassoun and Jacques Derrida in the 1980s and 90s, and argues that Khatibi was a precursor in what we might call the transcolonial turn.Less

Segalen and Khatibi: Bilingualism, Alterity and the Poetics of Diversity

Charles Forsdick

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Like the Martinican thinker and writer Edouard Glissant, Abdelkébir Khatibi engaged throughout his career with the work of Victor Segalen. This is evident in a variety of texts, ranging from a key ... More

Like the Martinican thinker and writer Edouard Glissant, Abdelkébir Khatibi engaged throughout his career with the work of Victor Segalen. This is evident in a variety of texts, ranging from a key reference to Segalen’s Polynesian cycle in La Mémoire tatouée to the significant reflection on the author underpinning Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française. The chapter will consider the implicit, achronological dialogue between the two authors that emerges from Khatibi’s writing, ranging from the early exploration of decolonization and acculturation in these readings of Les Immémoriaux, to a reflection on the links between the Segalenian exote and Khatibi’s voyageur professionnel. I suggest that the genealogy of Khatibi’s deconstruction of dichotomies (Occident/Orient; authentic/inauthentic…) in a text such as Maghreb pluriel and the elaboration of his creative practice in a novel such as Amour bilingue can be usefully read in the context of works by Segalen, including the Essai sur l’exotisme and Stèles.Understanding Segalen as an interlocutor with Khatibi not only illuminates the Moroccan thinker’s own reflection on translation, transnationalism and the aesthetics of diversity, but also (and equally importantly) invites a rethinking of Segalen’s own early twentieth-century work in a postcolonial frame.Less

Khatibi and Derrida: A ‘Franco-Maghrebian’ Dialogue

Dominique Combe

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

In his article “Décolonisation de la sociologie” (Decolonizing sociology), published as early as 1974 and later reproduced in Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi draws on Derrida to relate the necessary ... More

In his article “Décolonisation de la sociologie” (Decolonizing sociology), published as early as 1974 and later reproduced in Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi draws on Derrida to relate the necessary decolonization of thought to deconstruction, against logocentrism and ethnocentrism. A few years before the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1979, Khatibi calls to “décentrer en nous le savoir occidental” (decenter in ourselves Western knowledge), and “nous décentrer par rapport à ce centre, à cette origine que se donne l’Occident” (decenter ourselves from this centre, this origin that is the West). The dialogue between Khatibi and Derrida would continue over time, from one article or a book to another, since the collective volume Du bilinguisme in 1985 to “Point de non-retour” (Point of no-return) in the Colloquium of Cerisy in 1992, and to “Variations sur l’amitié” (Variations on friendship) in Cahier de l’Herne in 2004, as well as Jacques Derrida en effet in 2007. This article sets out to read Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (1996) in the context of this close dialogue between Khatibi and Derrida on language(s).Less

Maghrebian Shadow: Abdelkébir Khatibi and Japanese Culture

Nao Sawada

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Abdelkébir Khatibi, who was seduced by the land of the Rising Sun, left us a few texts on Japan and its culture such as Japanese Shadow and “Tanizaki Revisited” in which he refers, in particular, to ... More

Abdelkébir Khatibi, who was seduced by the land of the Rising Sun, left us a few texts on Japan and its culture such as Japanese Shadow and “Tanizaki Revisited” in which he refers, in particular, to the great Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki. These texts indeed present a dual interest: on the one hand, they allow us to discover unknown aspects of Abdelkébir Khatibi – his deep attraction for Japanese culture, not only for literature but also calligraphy and other fine arts – and, on the other hand, his subtle and brilliant reading of Tanizaki's text, which gives us another insight into Japanese culture. In these two texts, we can identify several elements that Khatibi discovers in Japan via Tanizaki: exoticism beyond the simple exotic, eroticism, and ‘exophony’. We therefore examine Khatibi's Japanese culture, as inflected through the lens of Junichiro Tanizaki, following three problematics: exoticism, the body and languages, and Eros/Thanatos. Far from separate, all these elements are intertwined for Tanizaki as well as for Khatibi. In other words, this is a phenomenon, as the Moroccan writer points out, of ‘intersemiotics’.Less

Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi: From the Body to the Text

Rim Feriani, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, and Debra Kelly

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the ... More

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms, in his introductory essay ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Bessure du Nom propre, ‘l’intersémiotique’, migrant signs which move between one sign system and another. Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Koran, from the body to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to a mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns of Khatibi with which he develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, the chapter goes on to propose new readings of a selection of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. These are writers working with and through that heritage – and importantly, as for Khatibi, including the Sufi heritage – and whose writing is also resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project concerned with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic.Less

Abdelkébir Khatibi: The Other Side of the Mirror

Lucy Stone McNeece

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Despite the considerable acclaim that Khatibi’s work has received, critics are frequently challenged to describe it. It is often considered « hybrid, » because it cannot be contained by the genres ... More

Despite the considerable acclaim that Khatibi’s work has received, critics are frequently challenged to describe it. It is often considered « hybrid, » because it cannot be contained by the genres and categories of thought that we associate with Literature. I will argue that Khatibi’s work is less hybrid than « hermetic, » and that the difficulty felt in classifying or even analyzing his writing, is due to the presence of echoes and traces of archaic traditions. Khatibi devoted years of his life to studying other cultures as well as his own, finding that it was a rich fabric of varied influences, just as he found that other cultures bear material traces of many buried encounters. The influences present in Khatibi’s writing include Sufism, the traditions of Asia, such as the Tao and the Vedas, but also the esoteric sciences originating in Mesopotamia and Egypt that found their way to Greece, and which were revised and translated by Arabs and Eastern Christians. These entered into Europe from Andalusia and also through Italy, under the sponsorship of the Medicis, and contributed substantially to the revolution in the arts and sciences of the Renaissance. These cultures entertained a different relation to signs and images than that which has predominated since the Enlightenment in Europe. They also had a less binary and hierarchised conception of the world and man’s place in it. They imagined the universe as the space of a continuous transformation of diverse elements, a view opposed to that of the rational individual as master of his environment. Ostracized by the Church and the State, they remained in shadow, treated as heresies. I will try to show that many of the unorthodox traits of Khatibi’s thought and writing can be attributed to the influence of these archaic traditions, whose poetic and ethical values have much to teach us in the modern world.Less

The Carpet as a Text, the Writer as a Weaver: Reading the Moroccan Carpet with Abdelkébir Khatibi

Khalid Lyamlahy

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

“One must look at a beautiful carpet as one reads a page by Aristotle, that is, with the same acute attention”. For Khatibi, the Moroccan carpet is not only a decorative piece that reproduces motifs ... More

“One must look at a beautiful carpet as one reads a page by Aristotle, that is, with the same acute attention”. For Khatibi, the Moroccan carpet is not only a decorative piece that reproduces motifs of Islamic art and combines sophisticated techniques of dyeing, tattooing and painting. It is also a living text, an intricate narrative that requires a specific approach to unravel its hidden symbols and meanings. In From Sign to Image: The Moroccan Carpet, a collective art book written with Moroccan anthropologist and museologist Ali Amahan, Khatibi explores the aesthetics of the Moroccan carpet in relation to ornamental patterns, spatial composition and oral culture. By combining a wide range of references to Islamic texts, Arabic appellations, Berber alphabet and Western writings, Khatibi offers a dynamic conception of the Moroccan carpet as a multifaceted space where artistic creation hinges on the interlacing of coded, fragmentary and imaginary signs. Khatibi’s reading of the Moroccan carpet as a lexis of “intersigns”, which he developed in a conference in 1985, offers a striking illustration of how Moroccan art informs his own process and theory of writing. The circulation of signs in the Moroccan carpet, which is mirrored in the kaleidoscopic composition of Khatibi’s and Mahan’s volume, is enriched with a compelling reference to the idea of desire in creation and reading. Based on a close-reading of this volume in relation to Khatibi’s works, this chapter demonstrates that the Moroccan carpet can be read as a metaphor for Khatibi’s aesthetics that fosters the encounter and weaving of forms, languages, and cultures.Less

The Artist’s Journey, or, the Journey as Art: Aesthetics and Ethics in Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux and Beyond

Jane Hiddleston

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Khatibi’s notion of the ‘étranger professionnel’, well known for its conceptualisation in Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française and for its dramatisation in Un Eté à Stockholm, is a ... More

Khatibi’s notion of the ‘étranger professionnel’, well known for its conceptualisation in Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française and for its dramatisation in Un Eté à Stockholm, is a compelling signifier for his commitment to transnational thinking. This chapter will explore how his later, and perhaps most accomplished novel, Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux, gives fuller expression to the association between travel, creativity, cultural dialogue and free thinking that runs throughout his work. Based on the life of the author’s grandfather, the narrative traces the sculptor’s journey of pilgrimage to Mecca as well as his continued journeying around Morocco and through life. The artist’s aesthetic vision is explored throughout through his encounters with other cultures, through his reflections on history and on religion, and through his relationships with women. All the multiple dimensions of Khatibi’s previous works come to play in this novel, from anticolonialism to the critique of theocracy, and from transnationalism to spiritual communality, but it is significant that it is art – a figure also for Khatibi’s own literary writing – that shapes and enhances the protagonist’s mode of apprehending these issues. The text can be read in many ways as a synthesis and elaboration of Khatibi’s multiple philosophical preoccupations, which at the same time are reunited here in the work’s depiction of the creative vision.Less

Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Blessure du nom propre (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1974)

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Both experimental intersemiotics and double critique define the scope of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s La Blessure du nom propre (‘The wound of the proper name’). Published in 1974, this work presents the ... More

Both experimental intersemiotics and double critique define the scope of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s La Blessure du nom propre (‘The wound of the proper name’). Published in 1974, this work presents the distinctive way that Khatibi intervenes simultaneously in North African cultural studies and in French semiotics. The two excerpts here include the book’s introduction “The Text’s Crystal” and an excerpt from the chapter on calligraphy, “The Calligraphic Trace.” Translated into English for the first time, these excerpts exemplify Khatibi’s pioneering effort to reimagine Moroccan and Arab/Arabic cultural formations outside of both the colonial anthropological frame and the retrenched theocratic forms of national culture ascendant in the postcolonial world after decolonization. Also, in “The Calligraphic Trace,” Khatibi sets out to formulate an Arab/Arabic theory of the sign that, implicitly, can compete or contrast with European models of the same.Less

Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun, Le Même Livre (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 1985)

Olivia C. Harrison

in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

In 1985, the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Egyptian Jewish psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun published an epistolary book, Le même livre (‘The same book’), excerpts of which are translated ... More

In 1985, the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Egyptian Jewish psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun published an epistolary book, Le même livre (‘The same book’), excerpts of which are translated here for the first time. Playing on the Arabic notion ahl al-kitab, the people of the Book common to Jews, Christians and Muslims, Le même livre centres round the twin figures of the Semite – the Jew and the Arab – as they have been articulated in theological, political and poetic discourses in order to question, and move beyond, the opposition naturalised in the expression ‘Judeo-Arab conflict’. Previewing the dialogue Khatibi would have with another Francophone Jewish exile, Jacques Derrida, in the 1990s, Le même livre is a deconstruction of identity, be it religious, ethnic, cultural or linguistic. Against sameness, Khatibi and Hassoun offer an ‘exercise in alterity’ written in the pages of The Same Book.Less

Andalusia as Trauma: The Legacies of

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

in The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean

This chapter explores the multiple and conflicting reappropriations of al-Andalus—as both historical moment and mythopoetic trope of coexistence. Assessing Abdelkébir Khatibi’s hypothesis of an Arab ... More

This chapter explores the multiple and conflicting reappropriations of al-Andalus—as both historical moment and mythopoetic trope of coexistence. Assessing Abdelkébir Khatibi’s hypothesis of an Arab “traumatic chiasmus” that followed the Spanish Reconquista, it argues that this entwined yet symmetrical bond is colored by reflective nostalgia (Boym) for an imagined transnational, transconfessional, and multilingual community. In light of Juan Goytisolo’s “Andalusian legacy,” it examines cultural and literary representations of al-Andalus produced in Spain and the Arab world as a product of historical truncation and traumatic memorialization. Khatibi’s restoration of contemporary Spain to the Arab imaginary appropriates the Andalusian past to rethink Morocco’s claim to historical agency beyond French and Spanish colonialisms. In contrast, Nabile Farès’ dystopian “virtual” Andalusia (Deleuze) gives in to the influence of politically unconvincing nostalgia. The chapter ends by revealing how Jewish-Tunisian writer Colette Fellous appropriates Andalusian convivencia to engage Jewish-Muslim relations in Tunisia and current debates about Mediterranean history. Willfully deserting the political arena, Farès and Fellous embody a fundamental sense of belatedness that casts the Mediterranean as a mythical refuge averse to historical realization. They offer a powerful counterpoint to the kind of allegorization performed by Kateb at the apex of nationalism.Less