In dialogue with Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida speaks of himself as ‘Franco-Maghrebian’, as an Algeria-born, French-speaking Jew with precarious French citizenship, revealing a ‘trouble d’identité’. This lecture extends the notion of troubled identity to troubled memories as explored in A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean (2023), a collection – or recollection – of Jewish memories stretching across North Africa and the Middle East.
Edited by Franco-Algerian writer Leïla Sebbar, this anthology of autobiographical essays, originally published in French (2012), includes narrative accounts of pre-exilic Jewish memories spanning Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey. These micro-autobiographies trouble colonial ideologies, fixed identities, and competing nationalisms. Drawing from Jewish studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies, the lecture examines the ways in which French-speaking Jews in Muslim-majority countries across the Mediterranean negotiated the ‘triple coexistence’ of Jewishness, Arabness, and Frenchness. It concludes on a tentative and fragile note of hope, gesturing towards a forgotten future of coexistence.
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About the Speaker
Rebekah Vince is a lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London and editor of the bilingual journal Francosphères. She co-edited Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France (Liverpool University Press, 2020; 2023) and Colonial Continuities and Decoloniality: From Nostalgia to Resistance (LUP, 2024). She also contributed to the open access, collaborative translation A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean (UC Press, 2023).
