The Southern Shores of the Mediterranean and its Networks

The majority of scholarly conceptions of the Mediterranean focus on the sea's northern shores, with its historical epicentres of Spain, France or Italy. This book seeks to demonstrate the importance of economic, political and cultural networks emanating from the Mediterranean's lesser-studied southern shores. The various chapters emphasize the activities that made connections between the southern shores, sub-Saharan Africa, the lands along its northern shores, and beyond to the United States. In doing so, the book avoids a Eurocentric approach and details the importance of the players and regions of the southern hinterland, in the analysis of the Mediterranean space. The cultural aspects of the North African countries, be they music, literature, film, commerce or political activism, continue to transform the public spheres of the countries along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and beyond to the whole of the European continent. In its focus on the often overlooked North African shore, the work is an innovative contribution to the historiography of the Mediterranean region. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.

Patricia Lorcin is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA. She is the author of Imperial Identities and Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia, four edited or co-edited volumes, two special issues and numerous articles. Her present project is tentatively entitled The Cold War, Art, Politics and Transnational Activism in the era of Decolonization.

Introduction 1. The elegant plume: ostrich feathers, African commercial networks, and European capitalism 2. The trans-Saharan slave trade in the context of Tunisian foreign trade in the western Mediterranean 3. Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti and his Islamic critique of racial slavery in the Maghrib 4. A Timbuktu bibliophile between the Mediterranean and the Sahel: Ahmad Bul'araf and the circulation of books in the first half of the twentieth century 5. Full circle: Muslim women's education from the Maghrib to America and back 6. The diaspora and the cemetery: emigration and social transformation in a Moroccan oasis community 7. Beur/Maghribi musical interventions in France: rai and rap