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This article examines the transnational forms of cultural affiliation andMediterranean margin-to-margin circuits of production with which l'Ecole d'Alger (here, Audisio and Camus) experimented in the 1930s, and highlights new theoretical perspectives appropriate to these practices. The authors' use of a mythicized Mediterranean as a unifying trope downplays national and religious differences to the benefit of a common utopian identity both cosmopolitan in nature and generative of a regional awareness which runs counter to dominant colonial segregationist discourses. Descendants of immigrants from throughout the Mediterranean, these writers occupy a unique positionality which enables them to open new spaces for identification and articulate anti-fascist stances as well as a limited critique of colonial practices. These writers' imaginative affiliations spell out a transnational position, which calls for regional areas of study to be considered autonomously. Attention to regional spaces would constructively displace analytical models where the theoretical existence of marginal spaces is but a by-product of their necessary relation to the metropole. The recognition of margin-to-margin relations leaves room for théories de la Relation in keeping with Glissant's paradigm, thereby showing how, in a global decentred paradigm, relational theories from the margins can provide viable alternative frameworks. Résumé Cet article examine les formes alternatives d'affiliations culturelles développées par l'Ecole d'Alger (ici, Audisio et Camus) dans les années 1930. Le recours à une Méditerranée mythique et transnationale qui transcenderait les clivages nationaux et religieux met l'accent sur une identité commune pour tousles Méditerranéens, une identité cosmopolite génératrice d'une appartenance régionale qui va à l'encontre des discours ségrégationnistes coloniaux. Descendants d'immigrés originaires de diverses régions méditerranéennes, ces auteurs occupent une position unique au-delà des polarités colonisateur/colonisé qui leur permet de concevoir de nouveaux espaces identitaires et d'articuler des positions antifascistes ainsi qu'une critique limitée des pratiques coloniales. Les affiliations imaginaires de ces auteurs développent une conception transnationale de la Méditerranée qui préconise un modèle d'études postcoloniales qui n'aurait pas pour seule perspective l'inéluctable relation que l'ex-colonie entretient avec son ex-metropole. Une telle méthode pourrait fournir une alternative fructueuse à des

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Through its focus on decolonization, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s oeuvre has revealed the Maghreb’s intrinsic plurality—a legacy of intercultural contact that encompasses, yet extends beyond, the trauma of European colonialism. Drawing on the fluctuating principle of the Mediterranean as method, this chapter extends the purview of Khatibi’s “double critique” of any stable concept of origins to include other moments of trans-Mediterranean contact between the Maghreb and the West—moments preceding the watershed of colonialism and conveying other logics of interaction than European domination. Khatibi has written that his core concept of bi-langue functions as a means “to enter into the telling of forgetting and of anamnesia […] ‘I am an/other’ i[s] an idiom that I owe it to myself to invent” (“Diglossia” 158). This chapter probes the form that this anamnestic idiom is to take, beyond Manichean visions of being and belonging, in the density of the Maghreb’s marge en éveil—as the point of inception of a transcultural heuristic tethered to the contiguous space of the Mediterranean Sea and its manifold, multi-directional histories. In the vertiginous space of the interlangue (the point of contact between two languages, here conceived as “the space between two exteriorities” [ibid.]), the revised conception of bi-langue that this chapter proposes concerns itself with the resurrection of an alternative, deep-rooted idiom, one incommensurable to the languages in which writing occurs. This post-traumatic, Mediterranean form of expression moves beyond melancholia to open the bi-langue to the pluri-langue and disseminate it beyond the strictures of the colonial relation. By taking account of the “historical churning of between people, between civilizations” (ibid.) in the embracing space of the Mediterranean, this discourse gives shape to a revivified Maghrebi memory in all its sedimented density.