European Marginals in Mediterranean Africa: Race, Space and Environment in Tunisia and Libya (1881-1950s)

This research project proposes a trans-imperial historical analysis of the agency, ecology and representations of European subalterns in Tunisia and Libya during the colonial period.

The presence of marginalised Europeans, mainly from Southern Europe, in Tunisian and Libyan societies challenged the dichotomy dividing the colonisers from the colonised.

This colonial liminality is the fulcrum of the project European Marginals in Mediterranean Africa: Race, Space and Environment in Tunisia and Libya (1881-1950s) (EMMA).

The chronological analysis framework spans the French occupation of Tunis in 1881 to the end of colonial rule in Libya (1951) and Tunisia (1956).

The aim is to analyse the intermediate and ambiguous position of these subalterns to show not only the slippery boundaries of a White/non-White and European/North African identity in a Mediterranean colonial context but also how entangled these identities are with social, political and ecological frontiers and perceptions.

This goal will be achieved by an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses cognate field of social sciences as history and anthropology.

For this reason the project is under the joint supervision of professor Francesca Biancani, MENA area scholar from UNIBO, specialist on gender and colonial North African history; and professor Naor Ben Yehoyada, social and cultural anthropologist at CU, specialist on Mediterranean mobility.

This interdisciplinary project is based on multi-archival research encompassing sources from colonial, national and private archives and journals, press and publications in Tunisia, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Malta; it consists in 7 work packages dedicated to training, management, research, dissemination and communication activities.