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Tamazgha: Orientations Towards Queer Futures
Abstract by Mr. Hatim Rachdi On Session III-15  (Queer Pasts and Futures)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
If we embrace Imazighen (Indigenous people of North Africa), “free people”, as bearers of liberation, then Tamazgha, our dreamed-of land, asks of us to embody such freedom. But how does one materialize a free, limitless imagination within this envisioned space? Space, as Massey (2005) contends, is a nexus of openness, multiplicity, and relationality, forever in flux and evolution – a precondition for an open history, and by extension, the potential for political agency. So, what kinds of politics and futures might arise from Tamazgha? And how do we mold the contours of both space and politics in its image? Probing these questions, this essay employs a scavenger research methodology (Halberstam, 1998), drawing from vexed “other-archives” (El Guabli, 2023) that encompass personal family narratives, artistic performances of queer Amazigh individuals, queer Moroccan argots, digital activism within the Moroccan queer community, Moroccan street graffiti, and ethnographic encounters with the Amazigh diaspora. Through this lens, Tamazgha is reimagined as both an onto-epistemological and political queer orientation (Ahmed, 2006) toward “freedom” and emancipatory futures. I contend that a genuine engagement with Indigiqueer Tamazgha futures requires us to relinquish the allure of conditional liberal recognition, identity-based imaginaries, colonial legacies, linguistic standardization, cultural essentialism, and cis-heteronormative border norms. The envisioned queer future of Tamazgha embodies a freedom-centric and profoundly utopian mode of existence and action in the world. By interrogating what such a future demands of us and exploring the possibilities it presents, we can challenge biogenetic family-centered structures associated with conventional notions of partnership, parenthood, military service, and gender conformity.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
Maghreb
Morocco
Sub Area
None