Ali al-Du'aji and al-'alam al-adabi (The Literary World): a voice of the Tunisian avant-garde under colonial rule (1930-1936)

Abstract

Under French colonisation, Tunisian intellectuals, with al-Snusi at the head, sought to create an Arabic language literary periodical al-'alam al-adabi (The Literary World) in the 1930s that attempted to create a national identity and define a national culture within an international context. A border zone, using Walter Mignolo's term, opens where colonial knowledges and local knowledges come together fuelling debates. This article examines the literary contributions of Ali al-Du'aji to a nationalist intellectual project that made use of a monthly, then weekly periodical. Al-Du'aji made use of literary colonial knowledge by subverting it to local knowledge in order to create a modern text that broke with traditional Arabic literary forms.