Two stories and two essays · fascism · migration · identity · memory · 2022 · 168 pages
Now and Then is a collection of two stories and two essays by Salah el Moncef that places contemporary questions of migration, nationalism, identity and cultural difference beside the unresolved political inheritance of the 1930s. The book asks what changes—and what returns—when fascism, racial exclusion and authoritarian language move from historical memory back toward the political present.
Stories, essays and the pressure of history
The collection combines fiction with critical reflection rather than separating literary imagination from political analysis. Its stories explore subjects whose identities are formed across languages, countries and historical ruptures; its essays return to literature and culture as ways of reading the reappearance of authoritarian and exclusionary structures.
The title names the book’s governing movement: the present is repeatedly forced into relation with a past that has not disappeared. Memory is therefore neither nostalgia nor historical decoration. It is a critical instrument for recognizing continuities between earlier fascist formations and contemporary political anxieties.
Benghazi, migration and cultural difference
Among the collection’s fictional works is “Benghazi,” in which Mariam Khaldoon confronts memories of growing up in Italian-ruled Libya during the years surrounding the Second World War. Across the collection more broadly, migration and cultural difference are treated as lived conditions that unsettle the idea that identity belongs naturally to a single nation, language or community.
Critical reception and conversations
A Foreword Clarion Review describes the volume as a literary collection concerned with diaspora and identity beyond the nation-state, emphasizing its combination of fiction, social criticism and literary criticism.
In a 2022 Chicago Book Review interview, Salah el Moncef discusses the collection’s engagement with the normalization of far-right politics, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and the political urgency behind its dialogue between “now” and “then.”
The book also has an edition and reader record on Goodreads. Further commentary is collected on the site’s Reviews & Press page.
Publication record
Now and Then was published by Penelope Books in 2022. Bibliographic records identify the volume as 168 pages and describe it as a collection of two stories and two essays.