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The Colonial Roots of Nationalist Modernity: Rereading Abdallah Laroui
Abstract
During the early to mid-twentieth century, the halls of the Sorbonne in Paris were bustling with scholars nostalgically revering the French Revolution as one of many markers of an inherited modernity. Through the civilizing mission of the French colonial project, this modernity was imposed upon the subjects of empire throughout the Global South. As the epistemological heart of the metropole, the Sorbonne eventually became the site where future nationalist leaders and intellectuals would receive their higher education, before going on to pen declarations, manifestos, and laws that eventually ushered in a wave of independence. What resulted was the formulation of ideologies and discourses of nationalism that are strongly rooted in ideologies and discourses of colonialism. Historian Edmund Burke III argues that "colonial and nationalist histories are deeply imbricated in one another" (Burke, 11). One of the ways in which they are imbricated, Burke adds, is through the teleology both historical narratives embrace: "Both derive from post-Enlightenment thought in which they appear as the successive stages of a world historical narrative--the march of freedom from the French Revolution to the present" (Burke, 11). Among those French-educated intellectuals who played a major role in formulating discourses of nationalism in Morocco was historian and public thinker Abdallah Laroui. This paper seeks to demonstrate how French colonialist discourses of modernity, while the object of Laroui's critique, essentially frame Laroui's conceptions of nationalist history and ideology in Morocco. In seeking to trace a modernity native to Moroccan history, Laroui ultimately transposes a bourgeois Arab nationalist consciousness into his characterization of Moroccan history that excessively situates the history of the indigenous Amazigh community on the margins and the monarchy at the front and center. This elision carries significant implications into the postcolonial context and through the present, as many of the major contestations that have challenged the Moroccan state's control since independence have emanated from the Amazigh community.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Maghreb
Morocco
Sub Area
None