Moroccan Other Archives

Moroccan Other-Archives investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma play in reconstructing stories of three historically marginalized groups in Moroccan history: Berbers/Imazighen, Jews, and political prisoners. The book shows how Moroccan cultural production has become an other-archive: a set of textual, sonic, embodied, and visual sites that recover real or reimagined voices of these formerly suppressed and silenced constituencies of Moroccan society. Combining theoretical discussions with close reading of literary works, the book reenvisions both archives and the nation in postcolonial Morocco. By producing other-archives, Moroccan cultural creators transform the losses state violence inflicted on society during the years of lead into a source of civic engagement and historiographical agency, enabling the writing of histories about those Moroccans who have been excluded from official documentation and state-sanctioned histories. The book is multilingual and interdisciplinary, examining primary sources in Amazigh/Berber, Arabic, Darija, and French, and drawing on memory studies, literary theory, archival studies, anthropology, and historiography. In addition to showing how other-archives are created and operate, El Guabli elaborates how language, gender, class, race, and geographical distribution are co-constitutive of a historical and archival unsilencing that is foundational to citizenship in Morocco today.

Focused on understanding and analyzing LGBTQ activism and protest globally, this edited collection brings together voices from different parts of the world to examine LGBTQ protests and their impact. Through the lens of media, culture, and sociopolitical structures, this collection highlights how cultural and technical factors like the emergence of social media and other digital platforms have impacted LGBTQ activism. This book draws on studies from countries as varied as Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Hungary, Morocco, China, and the US. The contributions provide important insight into how social media and digital platforms have provided space for self-expression and protest and encouraged advocacy and empowerment for LGBTQ movements. It also examines the diversity and similarities between different national contexts and the various obstacles faced, while spotlighting countries that are traditionally understudied in Western academia, in an important step toward decolonizing research. Each chapter, through the voices of activists and media scholars, moves beyond an oversimplified examination of queer protests to show, in rich detail, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer protests throughout the globe. This book is suitable for media, communication, and cultural studies students; researchers; academics; and LGBTQ activists, as well as students and scholars from related academic disciplines.

The LAMALIF anthology presents a wide variety of articles from LAMALIF, Morocco’s longest-serving Francophone journal. Active between 1966 and 1988, LAMALIF covered the most critical periods of Moroccan history and engaged in crucial debates about democratization, feminism, culture, education, Third World relations, and decolonization. However, LAMALIF was not just a journal; it was a real school, where Morocco’s, North Africa’s, and the developing world’s emerging and established writers, artists, and thinkers found a space to disseminate their ideas and address readerships across different cultures and geographical areas in French. This anthology is the first comprehensive translation into English of a wide selection of LAMALIF’s articles covering literary and art criticism as well as critical theory, feminism, Islam, and emigration. In addition to making available to Anglophone readerships articles about transnational solidarities and connections between North Africa and the rest of the world, LAMALIF anthology historicizes this sociocultural and political project within the painful period of authoritarianism in Morocco and reveals how culture worked as a trenchant weapon in the struggle against repression and silence.

This text challenges existing writing on ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jazā'irī which divides his life into two juxtaposed phases separated by narratives of conversion: from Francophobia to Francophilia, from militarism to pacifism, from activism to quietism, from Islamism to pluralism, from politics to religion. This work's interdisciplinary approach demonstrates that these narratives cannot be sustained in light of the evidence. Rather, they can be shown to originate in specific historical, cultural, and methodological tendencies within western societies and academies. Drawing on primary materials including archival documents and selections from his own writing, it constructively critiques his reception in the literature while advancing a continuous and contextualised account of his life and ideas. These include the relating of his ethico-religious and jurisprudential concerns to his political decision-making, and a resituating of his mystical writings within a definite moral, epistemological, and political context. By problematising these interpretive issues, this thesis aims at opening new avenues for understanding even as it offers its own solutions. In so doing, this study contributes to discussions on Sufism, political Islam, and east-west relations. This monograph has been awarded the annual BRAIS – De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.

Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.

To what extent can Islam be localized in an increasingly interconnected world? The contributions to this volume investigate different facets of Muslim lives in the context of increasingly dense transregional connections, highlighting how the circulation of ideas about ‘Muslimness’ contributed to the shaping of specific ideas about what constitutes Islam and its role in society and politics. Infrastructural changes have prompted the intensification of scholarly and trade networks, prompted the circulation of new literary genres or shaped stereotypical images of Muslims. This, in turn, had consequences in widely differing fields such as self-representation and governance of Muslims. The contributions in this volume explore this issue in geographical contexts ranging from South Asia to Europe and the US. Coming from the disciplines of history, anthropology, religious studies, literary studies and political science, the authors collectively demonstrate the need to combine a translocal perspective with very specific local and historical constellations. The book complicates conventional academic divisions and invites to think in historically specific translocal contexts.

The chapters in this study cover the four major Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish) and are authored by experts in these literatures, who read and engage with these texts in their original languages. Their intimate knowledge of the linguistic and cultural contexts of the works they analyse provides readers access to nuances in the texts and, ultimately, to a more profound understanding of them. This is the first cohesive collection addressing the Gothic in the geographic/linguistic context of the Middle East region. There has been increased interest not only in global iterations of the Gothic but also in Middle Eastern writing, particularly when it intersects with the Gothic (i.e. Frankenstein in Baghdad). The Introduction of the volume offers a new theorisation of Gothic literature, proposing the "transnational region" as a frame for reading literary texts that cross national and linguistic boundaries.

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.