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The city will follow you: Tunis, Tunisia, and the Mediterranean

Bond, David M.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343061679

Abstract Details

2012, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
The quotation “The City will follow you” from Constantin Cavafy’s poem The City foregrounds my experience of Tunis where I lived between 1995 and 2010. Starting with recollections of the 2004 closure of the British embassy in Tunis I survey some of the changes in the central Tunis streetscape at the end of the twentieth century and in the early years of the present century. Renewed official attention to the built heritage of Tunis and my awareness of this as a resident of the city is set in the wider context of a Tunisian national narrative that particularly in the post-1987 period sought to integrate migrant communities of Mediterranean origin into Tunisian history. This thesis follows the emergence of “Tunisia’s Mediterraneans” in public space and discourse based on my experience of a changing urban environment in the Bab al-Bahr and Bab Souika areas of Tunis. The work of Clifford Geertz and Michel de Certeau inform this approach to the city of Tunis, while Béatrice Hibou and Etienne Balibar have provided a model for the development of a Tunisian national narrative. The term “Mediterranean” was widely used in the colonial period by French authors seeking to develop an identity for the settler communities of French North Africa. Habib Bourguiba nevertheless sought to develop a Tunisian way of being in the world, one combining a centralising national narrative with openness to other cultures. After 1987 the Ben ‘Ali regime revised school curricula and academic research in order to recast the national narrative hitherto centred on the role of Habib Bourguiba. In “Sarkozy’s Mediterranean” and “Italiani, brava gente?” I highlight the persistence into the twenty-first century of traditional framings of the Mediterranean, while chapter 5 “Quicker than the human heart” returns to the changing urban forms we initially examined. A “post-revolutionary conclusion” situates “Tunisia’s Mediterraneans” in the post-2011 social and political landscape in which Tunisians grapple with their own diversity and the challenges this brings.
Sabra Webber, phd (Advisor)
Richard Davis, Phd (Committee Member)
Youssef Yacoubi, Phd (Committee Member)
82 p.
Cultural Anthropology; History; Middle Eastern Studies
Tunis; Tunisia; history; medina; urban studies, school curricula; France, colonialism, Italy, revolution 2011

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Bond, D. M. (2012). The city will follow you: Tunis, Tunisia, and the Mediterranean [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343061679

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Bond, David. The city will follow you: Tunis, Tunisia, and the Mediterranean. 2012. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343061679.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Bond, David. "The city will follow you: Tunis, Tunisia, and the Mediterranean." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343061679

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.