Author Archives: AB

Archive: Jan Vansina and Libya

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Jan Vansina was a Belgian historian who taught in the US for many years and is considered by many to one of the major figures of African history in the 20th century, pioneering the use of local oral traditions as important historical sources.

In the 1970s he became involved with Libyan scholars and played an important role in setting up what is now the Libyan Studies Center and designing its large-scale project to collect oral histories from participants in the resistance to Italian colonial rule and survivors of the Italian concentration camps. The connection to Libya was undoubtedly through his being on the PhD committee of Mohamed Jerary, one of the founders and long-term director of the Center (thanks to a comment on this post for the tip).*

Although Vansina did not end up writing much or anything about his work with the Libyan oral histories projects and time in Tripoli, the Jan Vansina Papers, held at Northwestern University, contain notes and information about his participation, including some interview designs and trainings he offered to Libyan historians:

Research Notes Libya: Oral History of the Italo-Libyan war (1911-1933)-boxes 2-3: This section contains research methods, procedures, and the interview tool used to collect the oral histories. Also included are maps, general information on the Libyan Studies Centre, and related essays on Libya.

The archive also contains lots of other material about his teaching and research, and exploring it may shed some light on how he became connected with the fledgling Center and helped shape their field research program.

There are also some photos from Libya taken by Vansina held in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Digital Collections.

*Jerary’s PhD thesis was on the ancient history of Libya, not on oral traditions.

Translation: Excerpts from novels by three Libyan women

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Words Without Borders just published a short collection entitled Political Fictions: Contemporary Novels by Libyan Women, with translated excerpts from three recent novels—Box of Sand by Aisha Ibrahim, The Colonel by Kawther Eljehmi, and Concerto by Najwa Bin Shatwan.

The traditional stereotypical narrative about the Arab world tends to exclude the participation of women in the progression of the nation’s politics. This collection presents excerpts from three novels by women writers grounded in Libyan political history.

Film: The Colonel’s Stray Dogs

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I have been meaning to post for a while about this documentary, as The Colonel’s Stray Dogs is one of the most insightful and moving documentaries about Libya. Made by Khalid Shamis and released in 2021, it follows the trajectory of Ashur Shamis (the father of the filmmaker), one of the leaders of the resistance against the Gaddafi regime and one of its most serious enemies, and the regime’s efforts to hunt down and assassinate opponents both within Libya and abroad. It is really worth finding and watching, especially given that the various Libyan resistance movements against the regime are so little documented.

The film also has a great score by Tiago Correia-Paulo, available on Bandcamp and worth listening on its own.

Article: No-Fly Zone: In and out of Libya in the Sanctions Century

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Leila Tayeb, “No-Fly Zone: In and out of Libya in the Sanctions Century,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 20/3 (2024), pp. 382–387.

In 2011 I traveled by bus from Cairo northward to the Mediterranean coast and across the land border from Egypt into Libya. Sometime later, I flew the cross-country distance from Benghazi into Tripoli. A few weeks after that, my cousins drove me west through the Ras Jdir border crossing into Tunisia, from Ben Guerdane all the way up into the capital city. These circumstances were extraordinary, in a period of revolution, and to deal with the burdens of long-distance land travel struck me as unsurprising. I was unaware at the time that the impossibility of air travel during this period echoed the early and mid-1990s, when international flights could not land in Libya. I could not have known that, as the result of the ongoing war, this year would preview the decade to come.

Article: Italy, Libya and the EU: Co-dependent systems and interweaving imperial interests at the Mediterranean border

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Alessandra Ferrini, “Italy, Libya and the EU: Co-dependent systems and interweaving imperial interests at the Mediterranean border”, in The Entangled legacies of empire Race, finance and inequality, edited by Paul Gilbert, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven & Johnna Montgomerie (Manchester University Press, 2023), 197–207. Open Access.

Abstract: The picture at the opening of the chapter portrays former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi greeting Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi as he arrives in Rome in 2009. The meeting celebrated the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya and the signing of the Bilateral Agreements that have led to the current racialization of the Mediterranean border (through Italy’s right to send migrants arriving by sea back to Libya, where they are incarcerated in detention camps that severely violate human rights). Pinned to Gaddafi’s chest was a photograph of the Libyan anticolonial leader Omar al-Mukhtar in chains, taken before he was executed by Mussolini’s army in 1931. This gesture sparked outrage in Italy, as it was perceived as a mockery of Berlusconi’s earlier visits to Libya where he presented formal apologies and reparations for the Italian occupation of Libya (1911–43) as part of the Treaty. Yet, Berlusconi’s politics of apology was motivated by Italy’s need to reach agreements with Gaddafi on the control of migration across the Mediterranean, as well as agreements on commercial deals – from the supply of oil and gas to the creation of a free market zone in Libya for Italian companies. Thus, colonial reparations were accompanied by a reinforcement of neocolonial relations.

Book: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya

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A new book by artist Alessandra Ferrini, entitled Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya with contributions from a number of artists and writers (including yours truly), has just been published by Berlin-based Archive Books.

Featuring Ferrini’s long-term research on the colonial and neo-colonial relations between Italy and Libya through a critical engagement with the Italian ‘archive of coloniality’ and its structural violence. The book includes documentation of Ferrini’s major project Gaddafi in Rome, whose last iteration is currently exhibited at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa, as well as a series of works reflecting on positionality, censorship, and the erasure of the genocide perpetrated by the Italians in Libya.

Building on the artist’s interest in writing, translation, and collaboration as forms of resistance practice, it brings together different voices and visual materials, putting forward a reflection on the ethical dimension of cultural work. As a result, the book includes original contributions, reprints, and translations by writers, scholars, curators, and practitioners pivotal to the development of Ferrini’s work and thinking.

Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality Across Italy and Libya includes a preface by Bassam El Baroni and contributions by: Tewa Barnosa, Adam Benkato, NiccolòAcram Cappelletto, Chiara Cartuccia, Sarri Elfaitouri, Amalie Elfallah, Khaled Mattawa, Maaza Mengiste, Barbara Spadaro, Daphne Vitali.

Article: The Emancipatory Strategies of Black Tunisians and Libyans

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Houda Mzioudet, “Yearning for Freedom, Reclaiming Agency: The Emancipatory Strategies of Black Tunisians and Libyans” in Mediterranean Mobilities: Between Migrations and Colonialism ed. Gabriele Montalbano (viella, 2024), pp. 175–184

The history of Black people in Libya and Tunisia remain shrouded in mystery and historical ambiguity; little is know with regards to their origin, movement and settlement in North Africa, and the slavery connection remains the quintessentially legitimate historical reason for this settlement. While more anthropological and historical work has been done since the 1980s by scholars such as Jouili, Bahri, Mrad-Dali, Montana, Jankowsky and Taleb on slavery and post-slave Libyan and Tunisian societies, numerous murky areas remain in the narratives of disenfranchised Blacks, alongside a lack of accounts where Blacks are no longer mere recipients, passive actors who lacked agency in building a Black North African history. In this chapter, I attempt to weave my arguments around Mrad-Dali and Montalbano’s historical and anthropological research on Libyan immigrants to Tunisia and enslaved Black Libyans who developed a web of solidarity to escape slavery in eastern and western Libya, all while stressing these marginalised groups’ activity as agents of change and of self-emancipatory action.

Archive: British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies

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The British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies (BILNAS), formerly known as the Society for Libyan Studies from 1969 to 2022, supports research, scholarship, and collaboration relating to the history, archaeology, culture, art, and literature of Libya and Northern Africa.

The BILNAS Archive. Photograph by Design Services, University of Leicester.

The BILNAS Archive has been housed at the University of Leicester since 2012. It holds a number of documents, photographs, drawings, maps, plans, and a great deal of unpublished data relating to archaeological projects in Libya from the early 20th century onwards undertaken mainly by British scholars, sometimes in collaboration with Libyan colleagues, in sites such as Sabratha, Lepcis Magna, Ghirza, the Fezzan, Tocra, Cyrene, Sidi Khrebish, and El Merj. The archive can be browsed online, where it is mostly organized by person or by excavation. Materials can be consulted in-person at the University of Leicester.

The materials from some of the major excavations are regularly being digitized and made openly available via Archaeology Data Service. So far, material from the Sabratha excavations of 1948-51 are online.

BILNAS has also made an extensive collection of photographs from its archives available online at FLICKR. The photos are historical as well as more recent.

Article: Photography, Media Uses and Emotions during the Italo-Turkish War in Tripolitania (1911–12)

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Pierre Schill, The Brutalised Bodies of a Colonial Conquest Before the Court of Global Opinion: Photography, Media Uses and Emotions during the Italo-Turkish War in Tripolitania (1911–12). History of Photography 47 (2023), pp. 315-343

Photographer unknown, ‘French War Reporters in Tripoli’, 23 October 1911 (Montpellier, archives départementales de l’Hérault (Vigné d’Octon papers), 1 E 1149). See the article for full details.
This article analyses the global circulation of around fifty photographs taken at the end of October 1911 at Shar al-Shatt, near Tripoli, by journalists documenting the mass execution of civilians by Italian soldiers. By attending to the interaction of text and image, and to the layouts of visual spreads in the global press, the article demonstrates how photographs of these dead bodies were imbued with a range of political meanings, variously protesting and legitimising such forms of extreme violence. The article explains how the emotions aroused worldwide by these images prompted the Italian authorities to create a visual counter-narrative by publicising photographs of the bodies of their own soldiers mutilated by a ‘bestialised’ enemy. The dissemination of visual evidence of brutality committed by both sides constitutes an early example of a ‘contest of images’ whereby press photography was used to mobilise antagonistic affective communities: variously pan-Islamic, anti-colonial, and trans-imperial. The diversity and inventiveness of the visual politics of persuasion implemented during the conquest of Tripolitania and the intensity of the reactions that this imagery produced reveal the emerging centrality of photojournalists in bearing witness to mass violence in the twentieth century.

Essay: Ein Meer überreifer Kirschen

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A nice essay on observing the Libyan revolution entitled “Ein Meer überreifer Kirschen [A Sea of Overripe Cherries]” by Ghady Kafala appeared, translated from Arabic to German, in the collected volume In der Zukunft schwelgen: Von Würde und Gerechtigkeit und dem Arabischen Frühling. Essays aus Nahost und Nordafrika [To bask in the future: Of Dignity and Justice and the Arab Spring. Essays from the Near East and North Africa], edited and translated by Sandra Hetzl (transcript verlag, 2022) The whole volume is freely accessible online.

Excerpt: Seltsam, dieses Libyen. Alle Krankheiten der Welt gibt es dort und jedes Heilmittel dagegen. Hormongesteuert ist es, launisch, da sind wir einander ähnlich.Keiner weiß, was von ihm als Nächstes zu erwarten ist. Etwas Wunderbares, etwas Schlimmes Libyen zu verfluchen oder zu hassen ist schier unmöglich. Seine Sturheit schwächt uns, aber seine Hybris verleiht uns Stärke.