The Wound of the Name

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.