Overview

Winner of the Global Humanities Translation Prize  AbdelkÉbir Khatibi’s The Wound of the Name (1974) is a classic work of North African critical theory that seeks to decolonize French ways of looking at and writing about Maghreb cultures. Writing at the height of French semiotics’ popularity and prestige, Khatibi proposes intersemiotics as a study of signs that pass through related but different cultural geographies, times, and expressions. Proverbs, tattoos, the rhetoric of lovemaking, calligraphy, and oral storytelling show a circulation of cultural signifiers over, across, and against borders. Signs are not stagnant; meaning is not fixed. Khatibi’s intent is in keeping with his emergent double critique, which aims to redefine not only European understanding of North African culture but also North African self-understanding, by freeing it from the anthropological mandates of the modern colonial era as well as from the retrenched theocratic models that were characteristic of North African postcolonial states.

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9780810148512

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""Abdelkebir Khatibi counts among the most original and suggestive writers and thinkers of the twentieth century in any language. The Wound of the Name, an ambitious and sensitive translation of his Blessure du nom propre, one of the most significant works in decolonial epistemology, is no less than a gift of thought and method to the Anglophone world."" --Nasrin Qadar, Northwestern University

Author Information

Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) was a Moroccan literary critic, novelist, philosopher, playwright, poet, and sociologist. Matt Reeck is a translator, scholar, and poet. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in translation in 2022.

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