Decolonizing Mediterranean History: Between Deconstruction and Redemption

By Nora Lafi

Introduction

In 1965, Mohamed Chérif Sahli (1906–1989) published the seminal book Décoloniser l’histoire (Sahli, 1965). A longtime activist of the Algerian national movement, Sahli, a historian, journalist, diplomat and philosopher, became the director of the Algerian national archives when the country obtained independence in 1962. He later pursued a career as Ambassador in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. His reflections on how to decolonize history were both theoretical, with an examination of how history-writing had been part of the colonial ideological apparatus, in particular as for the Mediterranean area, and very practical, as he had been confronted in his daily work with questions of sources and history writing in a colonial context:

Since 1830, the history of Algeria was the monopoly of French scholars. Generations of historians, professionals and amateurs, both civil and military, have delved and excavated into our past with an interest linked to the myth of ‘French Algeria’ (p. 11).

In his book, Sahli tracks the French historiography of Algeria, and the way Algeria was inserted into the historical narratives of the colonial Mediterranean, the elements of a colonial condescendence and civilizational hierarchy, and how historians participated in structuring the colonial narrative.

Historians of colonized peoples initially come up against a series of ideological conventions that form part of the defensive system of the colonial regime. The main convention is the postulate of the congenital inferiority of the colonized, a theme widely exploited by certain historians and discussed in the following chapters. The postulate’s corollary is the symbolic transmutation of colonial domination into tutelary power (p. 27).

In his analysis of the colonial regime of history, he deconstructs a series of determinist attitudes that constitute its pillars: geographical determinism, racial determinism, and sociological determinism. Sahli denounces the way in which history writing has served for example Maréchal Bugeaud’s (1784–1849) genocidal policies and subsequent violent endeavours by ethnic, social and confessional categorizations along the colonial device “By dividing them, we will destroy their overall strength and nationality” (Grandmaison, 2005).

The Tunisian sociologist Salah Hamzaoui (1940–2021) in a review of Salhi’s book laid out matters for further discussions on the successive layers of narratives of coloniality and of history writing:

The native is deprived of the possibility of writing his own history and an attempt is made to offer him one which, shrouded in an illusory objectivity, imposes on him an image of himself that encourages his submission. Writing his history is, in short, robbing his conscience, and it is easy to understand how the ex-indigenous person, who has become aware of his own reality, who has broken the master/slave relationship on which his existence as a colonized person was based, has the normal reaction of trying to give himself his own image and rewrite his own history. Re-writing one’s own history becomes a historical necessity insofar as one’s past, and in particular one’s colonial past, weighs heavily and shapes one’s future to a large extent. In short, making history and conceiving history are one and the same thing. Both movements involve a united adversary: colonialism and its representatives (S. Hamzaoui, 1966).

Hamzaoui sketches out how Décoloniser l’histoire set up a work programme for historians, that he, in his own work on the Mediterranean (Hamzaoui et al., 1984), attempts to apply: historical research should give back a voice to the colonized peoples of the past reaffirming its legitimacy in the face of the inertia of colonial narratives. Studying social movements aims to give a voice to those, particularly the popular classes, who had been neglected by research.

Reflections on ways towards a decolonial historiography and on how to give back a voice to those who had been silenced by colonial narratives can also refer to Frantz Fanon’s writings, that laid some of the foundations of decolonial thought, connected experiences from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, as well as theory to action (Oussedik, 2024, Renault, 2011). Albert Memmi (1920–2020) can be credited for deciphering the very conditions of the production of a decolonial thought that could avoid being formatted by colonial legacies and hierarchies. In the meantime, not always in reference to Sahli, who was largely ignored by later decolonial historians (who sometimes, soit dit en passant, adopted a quite colonial attitude towards theoretical impulses coming from the colonized and ex-colonized), decolonializing history has become the subject of new reflections.

The Mediterranean, as a colonial idea, logically, has been at the core of such efforts. Precursors had already identified it as a problematic notion, as both the content and the context of theoretical elaborations about it were intimately embedded in colonialism. Decolonizing Mediterranean history thus may mean, not only to critically analyze the successive layers of narratives that have contributed to the constitution of coloniality, but also to deconstruct the concepts themselves, including that of “Mediterranean”. For historians today, the aim should be to decipher how a foundational, and even performative, ambiguity was created within the object itself, and how the writing of history served as scaffold of the colonial edifice.

Another task is to identify the ontological link between temporalities, geographies, dominations, occupations and the concept of Mediterranean. This inevitably implies a severe process of deconstruction. But it also raises the question of whether the decolonial approach offers a path to a redemption for the concept itself. This is what this short reflection sets out to examine. An inclusive historiographical approach and a methodological reflection has, in my opinion, to start from the nature of various archival corpuses. The theoretical question is whether uncovering the biased nature of a concept may lead to its inevitable rejection. A practical task is the reflection about the profession of the historian and the process of writing. The hypothesis put forward as a possible avenue of redemption stems essentially from the historian’s responsibility as an intellectual of the present in a region still marked by intrusive and violent forms of post-coloniality and subjected, like in Palestine, to colonialism tout-court. Thus only a critical exploration of the concept enables the historian to affirm a posture with a performative aim towards a decolonized future.

Historical narratives and the Construction/Deconstruction of Mediterranean Coloniality

Decolonial deconstruction as a collective effort has by now well demonstrated how history writing was not just a context, or a side-effect of colonization, but an integral part of its ideological apparatus (Sibeud, 2004). The same argument has been made as for Mediterranean archeology (Mazari, 2011). History and Archeology are interrelated in colonial contexts in many ways. The first one pertains to careers. Archeologists and historians literally often worked for the colonial administration. They even participated in the shaping of it. They often embodied the colonial use of knowledge as an instrument of governance and domination. They shaped categories, including that of the Mediterranean, and their contributions were used for the shaping of categories aimed at dominating colonized societies. What they found in the archives or chronicles was used, sometimes by themselves, for the seizure of decision-making processes and for the purpose of occupation. Colonial knowledge even reshaped societies for the sake of domination, under the mask of authenticity.

Laurent-Charles Féraud, for example, a historian of colonial Algeria active in the 19th century, also active in the preparation of the colonization of Tripolitania that France was seeking, was a high-ranking officer in the military intelligence, and a consul in the French Foreign Office (Lafi, 2005). Many such careers shaped the relationship between knowledge, espionage and governance. They also shaped the very status of knowledge. The work of Louis Bertrand (1856–1941), insisting on the latinity of Algeria and its belonging to a latin-oriented Mediterranean, participated in the diffusion of negative views on the identity of local societies (Mazari, 2011). Decolonizing Mediterranean history is thus also debunking the truth about their postures (studying archives of the colonial apparatus for example) and tracking the inertia of their interpretations in different layers of temporality and history writing. Many of these historians were men of great culture and learning. But their use of categories and hierarchies (ethnic, confessional) was often at the service of the colonial project. Many of them participated in the modification of identities and of what it meant to belong to them. Many participated in the general judgment on how the societies of the past functioned. Such judgments have a strong inertia which sometimes impedes interpretations that would bypass the colonial filter.

Another regime of coloniality that colonial historians actively built was that of the narrative of the history of the colonized, with its biases: subordination, construction of psychological identities unfit for rationality and progress, dedication to violence, alleged inability to build a state structure. Among such regimes of coloniality there was also that pertaining to concepts and notions, including that of a Mediterranean, not only for the construction of a myth of legitimate sovereignty, validated by past imperial configurations but also for the construction of a sphere an uneven connivance. Beyond the instrumentalization of past belongings for the sake of fraudulent legitimacies and the biased interpretation of past imperial integration for the sake of violent domination indeed, there was also, under the claim or sometimes implicit assumption by historians of the existence of common features or of a shared dedication to locality, a defense of existing hierarchies and aspects of domination.

The present-day (relative) consensus on the colonial ambiguities, but also on the ontological integration of colonial attitudes in the use of the concept of Mediterranean, began with a critical examination of Fernand Braudel’s work. The colonial ‘civilizing mission’ was embedded into the narrative, into the categories, into the chronologies and into the concepts (Deprest, 2010). As Walter Mignolo suggested, tracking such ambiguities is key to the very decolonial attitude:

“Decoloniality is a double-faced concept. On one side, it points toward the analytic of coloniality, the darker side of modernity. On the other hand, it points toward building decolonial futures. In the first case, it is analytic and theoretical. In the second it is utopian. However, the analytic procedures are already decolonial: Coloniality is always already a decolonial concept, a concept that was not created by any other way of thinking, discipline, or ideological frame than decoloniality” (Mignolo, 2012)

This argument, however, does not provide specific clues for further reflections on the deconstructed notion. Scholars of African history have identified other ways to explore this possibility, with the invitation to “rethink thinking” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021) that resonates with the constant need to address critics of essentialism (Boidin 2009) and to reflect on one’s own position. The academic world itself in its structure embodies the inertia of colonial representations and hierarchies (Lafi, 2011). Inclusive historiographical and theoretical approaches to a decolonial history of the Mediterranean, which might lead to a possible redemption of the very concept of Mediterranean need to affirm and put into practice a real parity of dignity and scientificity for the archives, or documents of diverse nature, produced by colonized societies, or societies that were going to be colonized or have been colonized, in relation to the archives produced by the colonizing structure. This endeavour requires not only a linguistic effort, but also constant care to ensure that the analysis does not incorporate colonial stereotypes about the inability of local societies to produce and preserve such documents. Insisting on orality and informality, indeed, sometimes hides attitudes of negation towards the substance of the written heritage produced by local societies. Inclusive historiographical attitudes should also implement a parity of dignity and scientificity for scholars from the region, the mastering of academic English being sometimes, too, a vector of post-colonial postures of abusive hierarchizations.

The starting-point for such renewed research attitudes may be in local archival documents. Their very existence, but also their testimony of cultural or political practices such as decision-making processes informed by diverse forms of inquiries, rationalities, negotiations and mediations need to be taken into account. As far as the Mediterranean is concerned, it also requires accepting to consider other phases than the colonial and the colonial reading of various layers of past, as participating in the definition of what mediterraneity might be (or not be). On the basis of local and imperial archives, critical Ottoman studies have shown, for example, that a shared dimension, from the Balkans to North Africa and the Levant, existed, that involved exchanges, common practices, access to the sphere of governance, and the recognition of diverse local identities. In other words, a form of Mediterraneity existed, not Euro-centered, that the colonial concept of Mediterranean ignored (Lafi, 2018; Lafi, 2026). The redemption of the concept refutes and refuses colonial interpretive and ideological burdens. Decolonial History needs to be an instrument for debunking intrusive forms of post-coloniality in the present. Affirming one’s own subjectivity as a (post)colonized scholar is part of the decolonial programme of refuting suggested postures that were and still are imposed on the basis of biased values, whose very core is perverted by the colonial ideology. For historians, the need for a decolonial public history of the Mediterranean is thus strong. As is the need for a decolonial attitude in real life.

Conclusion: Decolonial History against Colonialism tout-court

Writing a decolonial history of the Mediterranean is a collective endeavor that requires analyzing past configurations of coloniality on the ground, in society and in the books, as well as the relationship between all that. It also requires, as the decolonial attitude would be useless in a world in which we would accept contemporary forms of colonialism, to debunk the colonial dimension of present-day situations. A posture could be inspired by Arno Mayer’s study on the persistence of the old regime (Mayer, 1981): tracking the contemporary persistence of the colonial regime in a variety of places and situations, including academia. The most urgent task, however, pertains to Palestine: exposing, by a precise methodology of historical research informed by what decoloniality learnt from India, the Caribbean, Algeria or South-Africa, and the critically deciphered notion of Mediterranean, the mechanisms of occupation, the biased justification of expulsion, the territorial logics of eviction, the biased narratives of historicity and the ideologically-driven uses of the Ancient past as well as the violent consequences of the promotion of social and confessional hierarchies based upon orientalist categories of colonial matrix.

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About the Author

Nora Lafi is a Professor of Islamic Studies at Universität Bayreuth. She has published extensively in the field of critical Mediterranean studies. As a historian of both the Ottoman era and of later colonial apparatuses of occupation in North Africa and the Middle East she has also tackled the question of the deconstruction of colonial paradigms.

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Citation: Nora Lafi, Decolonizing Mediterranean History: Between Deconstruction and Redemption, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 13.08.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/66646

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