Latter-day Levantinism, or ‘Polypolis’ in the Libretti of Bernard de Zogheb
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 This article argues that these libretti, most of which remain unpublished, project a parodic Camp celebration of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores.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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".