Rewriting French conduct literature in Arabic: Pedagogy and transculturation in Cairo and Paris, 1870s-1920s

Weekly internal seminar by Marylin Booth, holds the Khalid bin Abdallahs Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford, and 2021-2022 Paris IAS Fellow.

Communication discussed by Frédéric Lagrange, professeur des universités, directeur de l'UFR d'Etudes Arabes et Hébraïques de Sorbonne Université.

Presentation

Among many French texts translated (and creatively adapted) into Arabic from 1870 were conduct-focused books used as school readers. This project studies this translational process within histories of education and feminism in France, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. How did translation create new texts and audiences ? What notions of modernity, gender, social interaction, communal relations, and class did they embed ? How were transnationally circulating repertoires of rhetoric and meaning modulated by interactions with European colonial projects ?