Latter-day Levantinism, or ‘Polypolis’ in the Libretti of Bernard de Zogheb

This article analyzes the articulations of “Levantinism” as a cultural formation through a discussion of the libretti by the Alexandrian Syro-Lebanese writer and artist Bernard de Zogheb (b. 1924-d. 1999). While Levantinism, like the cultural formation Mediterraneanism, exceeds any geographical delimitations, it began its adjectival life as a derogatory colonial term applied by Europeans to the Eastern Mediterranean. Positing that the discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism was largely Eurocentric in its multi-pronged appeal to Greek elements, the article suggests that “Levantine” was deployed to designate a colonial ambivalence towards that mimicry. An artist and librettist whose ethnic background firmly affiliates him with the Levant and whose diaries and letters attest to the tensions of coming to grips with that specific cosmopolitan formation, de Zogheb wrote his libretti towards the end of the colonial period and after. This article argues that these libretti, most of which remain unpublished, project a parodic Camp celebration of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores. Set to popular tunes and written in a lingua franca-like pidgin Italian that enmeshes French, English, Greek, and Arabic, the libretti’s labor is doubly self-legitimizing of homoeroticism and an elite Alexandrian-Levantinism. Attending to the various ways in which this is instantiated in Le Sorelle Brontë , Le Vacanze a Parigi , Malumulla ou Il Canale , and La Vita Alessandrina , the article also broaches the limitations of that aesthetic. Skirting close to auto-Orientalism, the libretti can only acknowledge but not fully engage the persistence of colonial tropes of Levantinism in what is now the North and the South of the Mediterranean.

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