This edited book started as an idea in the late 1990s and was published in 2000 by Palgrave. “Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics”, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida is a read for a niche audience. The chapters cover historical narratives, memory, identity, literature, and politics. As many edited books, the cohesion across is relatively thin, which makes a macro review challenging. For a book published in 2000, it was novel on contesting colonial narratives for north Africa. One note:

“The colonial history of the maghrib, because it reflected the values, culture and mentality of European colonial society, provides but a partial introduction to the colonial experience of North Africans. Often willfully ignorant of the realities they comment upon, colonial histories are expressions of the society that created them. It would be pointless to expect them to be anything else. An expression of a particular historical epoch, their principle function was to provide legitimacy for the French colonial venture by inscribing it as invested with a world historic progressive mission. This ideological mission, however, came into crisis following World War I, when with the emergence of nationalism the evident human costs for North Africans began to call into question the colonial venture.” (p. 21-22)