Écrire à Alexandrie (1879-1940) : capital social, appartenances, mémoire

This dissertation is a cultural-history study of the building up of categories of belonging. The spatio-temporal context is the city of Alexandria between the late 19th century and the first third of the 20th. Being a field of confrontation between several cultural and political horizons (ottoman, Arab, European), Alexandria is a privileged domain to study the notions of foreigner, Egyptian, ottoman, local, national, cosmopolitan as shifting categories, built-up by actors. In the aim of treating imagery as a historical object, these categories are investigated through a set of literary texts (in Arabic, French, Italian, English) produced by the actors of Alexandrian cultural life. By studying their trajectories, the sociability that emerges (or not) in Alexandrian literary milieus and the criteria on which literary reputations are built up, we can link the individual scale to a societal dimension. In conclusion, to extend the perspective, we propose a socio-historical analysis of the survival or disappearance of these literary reputations beyond the space and time firstly considered. Analyzing the milieus in which an author reputation built up in the age of empires survives, or not, through the age of Nation-states, or from the colonial epoch to the age of decolonization, is offering an approach to the field of memory which is not based on nostalgic or ideological positions.