The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib

by Slyomovics,Susan

• ISBN13: 9780714682150
• ISBN10: 0714682152
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-09-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to the medina, the traditional walled Arab city of North Africa. The medina becomes a concrete case study for comparative explorations of general questions about the social use of urban space by opening up fields of research at the intersection of history, comparative cultural studies, architecture and anthropology. Essays by American, European and North African scholars demonstrate a variety of sources and theoretical approaches now being used in writing historical narratives framed within the city space. They shed light on recent studies by anthropologists regarding social praxis within the urban context, and analyze the urban experience of the medina and the casbah as they are represented in visual and material culture.

Author Biography

Susan Slyomovics is the Genevieve McMillan-Reba Stewart Professor of the Study of Women in the Developing World and Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(9)
Susan Slyomovics
Susan Gilson Miller
Orientalism as Irony in Gerard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient	10	(15)
James E. Housefield
Watering the Garden of Tangier: Colonial Contestations in a Moroccan City	25	(26)
Susan Gilson Miller
The Social Context of Working Equines in the Urban Middle East: The Example of Fez Medina	51	(18)
Diana K. Davis
Denys Frappier
The Role of the Medinas in the Reconstruction of Algerian Culture and Identity	69	(12)
Djilali Sari
Geographies of Jewish Tlemcen	81	(16)
Susan Slyomovics
Neighbourhood Notes: Texture and Streetscape in the Medina of Tunis	97	(24)
Justin McGuinness
Preservation and Self-Absorption: Italian Colonisation and the Walled City of Tripoli, Libya	121	(34)
Mia Fuller
Abstracts	155	(4)
Index	159