LARC

“Refashioning Barbary: American Discourse on North Africa” with Dr. Karim Bejjit, Associate Professor of English at Hassan II University in Casablanca and a Fulbright scholar.

America’s strained relations with North African states, particularly the regencies of Algiers and Tripoli during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, have been the object of numerous historical accounts, and have generated a continuing controversy among American historians about the failures and accomplishments of US policies towards this part of the Muslim world. Following the tragic incidents of 11 September 2001, several studies have again appeared on America’s encounter with the so-called Barbary States advocating analogies between terrorist attacks and corsair activity. This talk offers a critique of this established historiography and the politicized drifts which characterize its recent publications.