North Africa and Europe,

1830 to the presentã

The Colonial Encounter

History 301 ~ Spring 2003

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30 to 3:50

Class Listserv: MAGHREB-NET@LISTS.WOOSTER.EDU

Professor Greg Shaya Department of History The College of Wooster Wooster, OH 44691

Email: gshaya@wooster.edu Web: http://www.wooster.edu/history/gshaya Office: Kauke 109, Tel: x2169 Office hours: TBA

The two thousand miles of African coast from Casablanca to the shores of Tripoli are barely known to most Americans, but for the last hundred and seventy years, North Africa and Europe have been intimately (often violently) linked. In this course, we will consider the encounter of Europe and North Africa from 1830 up to the present, an era that stretches from colonial conquest and control to the struggles of decolonization and to contemporary conflicts of immigration, religion and cultural identity. The tangled history of relations between France and Algeria are at the center of this story. We will consider it in detail, looking also on occasion to Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Britain, Spain, Germany and Italy.

Special attention will be given to the ways in which North Africans and Europeans have thought about this clash of cultures in their art, literature and film. Since the early nineteenth century, North Africa has played a special role in the European imagination. It has stood for the exotic, the picturesque, the sensual, and the barbaric. This kind of imagining went hand in hand with a vigorous campaign to dominate and colonize North Africa, an effort led by the French, but common to much of western Europe. North Africans have thus been forced to think about Europe. And they have done so in deeply ambivalent ways, portraying Europe as home to violence, racism, and greed as well as the land of Enlightenment, technological sophistication and high culture.

One of the aims of this course will be to relate these issues of culture and perception to the violence of this colonial history. Is there any connection between GÍrome's portraits of languid Oriental beauties and the French military campaign to dominate Algeria? Is there any contradiction in the use of the French language by Maghrebi writers to articulate an anti-French nationalist agenda? We will multiply such questions. But we shall also seek to explore the aspects of the cultural encounter of North Africa and Europe that cannot be reduced simply to violence or domination. What did Muhammad as-Saffar (Moroccan scholar, emissary for the Sultan) find in his 1845-6 journey to Paris? What did the French painter Delacroix find in his 1832 travels to North Africa? We, as travelers in time and space, will follow them both in order to uncover the worlds they inhabited.

This course is a writing course. It fulfills, in part, the writing requirement for graduation. Short assignments will help you develop the elements of historical analysis. A longer, final paper, to be written in stages, will ask you to do the work of the historian, focusing your attention on one elementãa primary source, an event, a historical figureãfrom the history of the encounter of North Africa and Europe.

This course is: an introduction to the tumultuous history of colonial North Africa; an introduction to the cultural history of colonialism; a practical course on writing about history. It is also a discussion seminar. Aside from occasional presentations offered for background information, class sessions will consist of discussion of the works and issues at hand.

REQUIREMENTS

Ä Attendance at all classes

Ä Careful reading of all assignments

Ä Active participation in class discussions

Ä One or two class presentations

Ä Active participation on email discussion list

Ä Six close reading assignments (1 p.)

Ä One revised close reading assignment (1-2 pp.)

Ä One short analytic paper (3-5 pp.) and revision

Ä One peer suggestion paper (2-3 pp.)

Ä Final paper (14-18 pp.) and accompanying assignments (research proposal and bibliography, secondary source analysis, primary source analysis, outline, draft)

GRADING

Your grade will measure your effort, the level of your thinking and writing, as well as the progress you make across the semester. The following is offered as a very rough guide (and I reserve the right to change it). It assumes a good faith effort on all assignments:

30% of your grade is based on class participation, presentations, and participation
on the email discussion list

5% six close reading assignments

5% one revised close reading assignment

15% one short analytic paper and revision

5% one peer suggestion paper

40% final paper (and accompanying assignments)

DISCUSSION AND CLASS PREPARATION

Most of our class time will consist of discussion. To be successful, it depends upon you coming to class prepared to discuss the topic at hand. At the very least, this requires that youπve completed the reading before class begins. With the more dense readings, you will need to leave time for a quick second reading.

To do more than the bare minimum (and receive more than a barely passing grade on discussion) requires that you spend some time before class thinking, thinking about what youπve read, passages you would like to discuss, questions you would like to ask.

You will receive a grade on your participation in discussion. This is not a measure of how smart you are or how smart your observations are. It will reflect how much you have thought about the readings, how much you contribute to building a class discussion, how well you listen to others, how well you can express your ideas, make connections, and ask questions.

Bring the dayπs reading to class.

EMAIL DISCUSSION LIST

There is an email discussion group for the class listed at the top of the syllabus. Send a message to this address and it will go to everyone in the class. I encourage (and to a degree require) you to post an occasional comment to the group. You may post messages in response to a reading, a film, a class discussion, an event in the news that bears upon the issues weπve been discussion, a connection youπve made with another class, or a comment from a fellow student or the professor that you take issue with. Or anything else that seems relevant to the class. Your participation on the email discussion list will be a significant portion of your overall participation grade.

BOOKS TO PURCHASE

Ä Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History (3^rd ed., Bedford/St. Martinπs, 2001)

Ä Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955-1957 (Enigma Books, 2002; orig. 2001)

Ä Albert Memmi, The Pillar of Salt (Beacon Press, 1992; orig. 1955)

Ä Tahar Ben Jelloun, French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, trans. Barbara Bray (Columbia Univesrity Press, 1999; orig. 1984, 1997)

Ä Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade , trans. Dorothy Blair (Heinemann, 1993; orig. 1985)

NB: Additional reading materials will be provided as a coursepack

CLASS POLICIES

Attendance

Attendance is mandatory. Please be ready to begin at 2:30. There will be a significant grade penalty for missing classes and for arriving late. Please do not let yourself be a distraction to the class.

If you do miss a class, be sure to find out what you have missed and pick up any readings or handouts that were distributed.

Papers and Deadlines

Short paper assignments will be handed out approximately two weeks before papers are due.

The due dates are indicated on the schedule. Late papers will be accepted by permission of the instructor and penalized. Less than 24 hours late: 1/2 grade penalty; one full grade penalty for every day late.

Communication

I will use email to distribute announcements, reading questions, paper suggestions, and more. You are responsible for checking your Wooster email account daily. (Note that you can have your Wooster email forwarded to another email account if that is more convenient.)

What to Do if You are Having Problems

If you have any questions about the class, or if you find yourself falling behind, contact me immediately.

Academic Integrity and Plagiarism

A full statement of the Code of Academic Integrity is printed in the Scotπs Key. You are responsible for reading and understanding it. It is available online at the following web page: http://www.wooster.edu/deanofstd/policies/coai.html. I include the statement of principles below.

If, in any of your written assignments (and this includes the response papers), you use or imitate the words or the ideas of another without attribution, you are committing plagiarism, the academic equivalent of high treason. If you borrow the words of others, you must place them in quotation marks and properly cite the work. Failure to properly cite and quote is plagiarism.

Any student caught plagiarizing or cheating will fail this course immediately and be referred to the Dean of the Faculty.

FROM The CODE OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITYã SECTION 1, ≥PRINCIPLES≤

Under the Code of Academic Integrity, a student will not:

A. give, offer, or receive aid other than that specifically allowed by the professor on any course work or examination;

B. knowingly represent the work of others, including materials from electronic sources, as his/her own; (This includes, but is not limited to, plagiarism, a brief definition of which appears in Appendix II to this Code.)

C. falsify data;

D. submit an assignment produced for a course to a second course without the authorization of all the instructors involved;

E. deny other students access to necessary documents/materials by stealing, misplacing or destroying those materials;

F. giving false reason to a faculty member or Dean when requesting an exam change or an extension on a paper/project;

G. violate the spirit of the Code expressed in the Preamble.