Tuesday 16th March marked the launch of a new book, coedited by Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy, entitled Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond, published by Liverpool University Press. Abdelkébir Khatibi is one of the most significant cultural thinkers to have emerged from the Maghreb in the postcolonial period, and this is the first major volume entirely devoted to his work in English. Khatibi lived in Morocco all his life, and was steeped in Moroccan culture, history, philosophy, and politics. Yet he was also a major international thinker; his thought was insistently transnational and nomadic, and evolved in dialogue with a plethora of writers and thinkers from both Europe and the Arab world. Philosophy was for Khatibi the search for a ‘pensée autre’, an ‘other thought’, that would contest the oppressive foundations of both Western metaphysics and Islamic theocracy. And literature too for Khatibi was to record and promote multilingualism, nomadism, and dialogue, ‘un nouvel internationalisme littéraire’.
Despite his significant contribution not only to Moroccan cultural thinking but also to postcolonial critique in both France and the Anglophone world, Khatibi’s works are just starting to gain the recognition they deserve. This book is an attempt to open the dialogue with Khatibi, to extend the attention that Khatibi receives in the Anglophone world, through a wide-ranging series of readings by major international scholars, as well as through translated excerpts from two of his works, La Blessure du nom propre and Le Même livre.