Kontakt
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Historisches Seminar
Lehrstuhl Patel
Postfach 105
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
80539 München
Raum:
K 203
E-Mail:
david.stenner@cnu.edu
Website:
http://www.davidstenner.com/
Personal Bio
David Stenner is an Associate Professor of History at Christopher Newport University focusing on decolonization in the Arab world. Before moving to Virginia, he received his BA in Semitic Philology (2007) and MA in Middle East Studies (2009) from Uppsala University, and his PhD in history (2015) from UC Davis. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley.
His first book, Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State (SUP, 2019) studies the country’s independence struggle through the activities of a worldwide network of anticolonial activists. He has published articles in numerous journals and currently serves as the associate editor of The Journal of North African Studies. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the France-Berkeley Fund, and the McLeod-Lewis Memorial Fund have funded his work.
Project description
The Second World War paved the way for the decolonization of North Africa. Individuals from across the region experienced bombing raids, an ever more restrictive political atmosphere, and a devastating economic situation that caused widespread hunger. As a result, the colonial state apparatus began to play an increasing role in the lives of much of the population. Yet this shared historical experience did not overcome the region’s social fragmentation; it rather further accentuated it by throwing into sharp relief the divergent interests of the different communities. The defeat of the Vichy regime in the wake of the Allied landings in November 1942 meant liberation only for the European settlers and further oppression for native Muslims. These tensions came to a head in Sétif on 8 May 1945, when the French army massacred thousands of Algerians who had seized the opportunity presented by VE-Day to demand independence.
The existing historiography deals exclusively with the diplomatic and military aspects of the Second World War in North Africa. My project, by contrast, puts the region’s inhabitants front and center to move beyond a Eurocentric understanding of the war years. More specifically, it integrates all the Maghrib’s communities––native Muslims and Jews as well as European settlers––into a single analytical framework to explain how the war years led to an explosion of anti-colonial activism that ultimately culminated in the independence of Morocco (1956), Tunisia (1956), and Algeria (1962). By engaging with Arabic newspapers, colonial records, diaries, private correspondence, German trade statistics, US military police reports, and many other sources, it retells this pivotal episode of North African history as a multi-sided story focused on the lives of regular women and men.