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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
A Jew born in Tunisia, Memmi (1920–2020) rose to fame with The Colonizer and The Colonized, prefaced by Sartre. Educated in Tunisia, Algeria and France, he settled in Paris, where he wrote novels and essays alike. His main topics include colonialism, the Jewish condition and Tunisia.
An early theorist of decolonization, he used a sociological approach, getting to psycho-sociologist, working through portraits—the orignal title of the book is Portrait of the Colonized, Preceded by Portrait of the Colonizer—trying to describe "rendings of the spirit" as "introjections of social conflicts", according to Sartre in his preface.
Published in 1957, this work aims to shows the interweaving of the colonizer's and the colonized's mind, clearly sketched out by the binary structure of the essay.
Memmi starts with the economical aspect of colonization, describing how the fundamental inequality of colonization gives the colonizer a much more favorable material situation. One of his key thesis is the interdependence of the colonizer and of the colonized, trying to go beyond Marxism and psychoanalysis. He characterizes the consciousness of the colonizer through three discoveries: "profit, privilege, and usurpation". To this duality, he adds several third parties: nationals of other countries, assimilated minorities, Jews, colonized participating in the colonial administration, etc, giving a vivid account of the entanglement between both subjectivity and objective structures, and colonizer and colonized.Comment: Memmi is a good complement to a class on colonization as he brings in a specific North-African Jewish point of view. His influence on existentialist philosophy also makes him appropriate for political philosophy. Can go with readings of Sartre, Said or Fanon.
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Added by: Björn Freter & Marc GwodogAbstract:
From the writing of her first book, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society in 1975, Mernissi has sought to reclaim the ideological discourse on women and sexuality from the stranglehold of patriarchy. She critically examines the classical corpus of religious-juristic texts, including the Hadith, and reinterprets them from a feminist perspective. In her view, the Muslim ideal of the silent, passive, obedient woman has nothing to do with the authentic message of Islam. Rather, it is a construction of the 'ulama', the male jurists-theologians who manipulated and distorted the religious texts in order to preserve the patriarchal system. Mernissi's work explores the relationship between sexual ideology, gender identity, sociopolitical organization, and the status of women in Islam; her special focus, however, is Moroccan society and culture. As a feminist, her work represents an attempt to undermine the ideological and political systems that silence and oppress Muslim women.Comment (from this Blueprint): Fatima Mernissi’s works provide an insight into the debate on the place of women in Muslim societies. This book is interesting in that it shows how the male-female dynamic was built on a particular interpretation of the Qur'an and how this ideology organized and regulated social roles according to gender. It also provides an understanding of how male-female interactions are affected by the processes of modernization in Muslim societies.