Sophie Bessis Quotes

French-Tunisian historian and journalist

Sophie Bessis (Arabic: صوفي بسيس , 1947) is a Tunisian-born French historian, journalist, researcher, and feminist author. She has written numerous works in French, Spanish, and English on development in the Maghreb and the Arab world, as well as the situation of women denouncing the identity imprisonment to which they are subjected.

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How do I introduce myself? Every work, academic or research-based, rests one way or another on a personal make-up. If I wasn’t who I am, or I didn’t receive the make-up that I did, perhaps I wouldn’t have written what I wrote.”

As I see it, the universal is besieged by the hegemony of the commodity and that of the religious. Two faces of globalisation that have nothing to do with the universal, that is anti-universal, which is a thesis I worked on in my book La Double Impasse, in which there are extensive sections on the culturalist and the essentialist.

Then history took its course, and the lives and fates of individuals were tied to the collective history, as is always the case in our countries, and the Jewish minority left the country, for numerous reasons.

I believe that in Tunisia, and perhaps in all the Arab countries, the communist parties — for all their many mistakes and shortcomings — were the only place in which ethno-religious affiliations were overcome, which is an element that can’t be overlooked in my personal make-up. My childhood was not at all marked by that kind of segregation.

The Arab world doesn’t want to know it, and this comes out clearly today, when we see what’s happening in Libya with the return of the slave trade. This is the dark part of Arab history. Africans know it and remember it perfectly well.