On a Clear Day, You Can See the Atlantic Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Tawil assesses Laura Doyle’s Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 as a rich, ambitious work of scholarship working at the intersection of several paradigmatic shifts in literary studies: the “transnational turn,” the adoption of the “Atlantic world” paradigm for literary history, and a new genealogy of “modernity” constituted by race. Doyle addresses these paradigms through the lens of the “freedom plot” as it takes shape in, and shapes, the history of the novel in English; she argues that this plot implies a racialized narrative, and not only in the “African-Atlantic” tradition. Tawil finds that Doyle’s focus on an “Anglo-Atlantic” literary history whose cultural roots reach back to seventeenth-century political debates in which the concept of freedom was no less charged, and no less racialized, effectively designates the 1640s as the opening of her historical frame; this, Tawil argues, makes the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, rather than, say, the French or American revolutions of the eighteenth, into the primal scene of modernity and English-language narrative. The raced freedom plot, he finds, binds together the Atlantic imaginary; a three-centuries-long modernity; the rise of the novel; and the Idea of freedom. Tawil concludes that this long transatlantic perspective retains its conceptual unity even as he also finds it useful to put some critical pressure on the status, epistemological stability, and historical continuity of race as an organizing principle.

Fratricidal Rebels: Ideological Extremity and Warring Factionalism in Civil Wars

“…52 The unification communiqué declared that "the GIA is the only legitimate organization for jihad in Algeria" and "all mujahedeen must join the GIA." 53 Confronted with the possibility of losing leadership over the rebel movement, the FIS opted to balance against the GIA. Field commanders loyal to the FIS in the western and eastern regions rejected the May 1994 unification under the banner of the GIA; they formed the AIS instead.…”