The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean by Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (review)

In this wide-reaching, well-researched book, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev provides innovative perspectives on what she has evocatively termed 'the Mediterranean-infused Maghreb' (p. 5), bringing together in unprecedented ways the complementary but disparate disciplines of francophone and Mediterranean studies. The articulation of a 'transcontinental Mediterranean' as 'eminently connected, relational, and contiguous' (p. 191) gives focus to this ambitious study that is 'detached from the inflection of a diasporic frame of reference and recentred on the contiguous, connective space of the Mediterranean Maghreb through the consideration of centuries of common history' (p. 24). The author draws from her knowledge of a range of texts dating from different moments of Maghrebi history, by writers from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Gibraltar. In a nuanced and elaborate set of arguments, she homes in on literature in Arabic, French, and Spanish to elucidate how allegory and critical melancholia complicate postcolonial nation-building efforts and lead to more fluid identities. Talbayev proposes a way out of 'binary anticolonial and national storylines' (p. 20) through greater attention to 'relational routes' akin to those that she adopts in the chapters of her book. She conceives of various Mediterranean sites as points of movements and contact, of adaptation and connection, that are in continual flux just like the waters they surround. Whether it is a question of early nationalism in Algeria, the nostalgic trope of Andalusian co-existence, or illegal migration from Africa to Europe, the author carefully teases out the ways in which the eponymous transcontinental Maghreb, located across the Mediterranean, opens up to a multitude of possible points of intersection and interaction that disrupt any facile identification with or definition of a nation. Located beyond binaries, outside the 'strait-jacket of dichotomous reading methodologies' (p. 35), the reading she both enacts and encourages is aware of the necessity of 'endless renegotiation of the fraught (and yet inescapable) relation between nation and transnation' (p. 5). One of many compelling examples of this renegotiation is found in the analysis of Malika Mokeddem's N'zid (2001), a novel featuring an individual whose 'nomadism of the sea' entails 'connectivity within the expansive framework of the Mediterranean' (p. 141), which leads to reconfigured understandings of the collective; like this character, others who have suffered from exclusion benefit from the 'power of the Mediterranean' 'to "work through" the lingering trauma of past marginalization with the felicitous result of writing diversity back into the nation' (p. 32). Such insights are convincingly conveyed in this scholarly study, which is at once highly informative and theoretically inventive, and written with immense precision and attention to detail that make it accessible to readers who do not have a background either in these creative works or these fields of intellectual enquiry. Talbayev's familiarity with the literature and the scholarship of the Maghreb allows her to assess a variety of texts in ways that have implications beyond any singular tradition, whether linguistic or disciplinary, and to contribute to new views of the Mediterranean as a space of tremendous transcontinental potential.