One of the major concerns of writers of postcolonial literature in contemporary Moroccan cultural production is how the intellectual legacy of the resistance movement of the 1960s is negotiated, performed and contested today. In Laila Lalami’s Secret son (2006), the focus on the present social and political realities involves a critique of the processes constituted by political and social forces that have prevailed in the post-independence national state. In this regard, Lalami looks at the failures and disparities within a historical frame—one that represents the evolution and devolution of the ideological formations born of the 1960s resistance movement. It depicts social disarray and political decay that generate subjectivities that have become polarized in their allegiances to past ideals of political commitment and cultural resistance against a present characterized by the disavowal of these commitments and the pursuit of neoliberal agendas of self-promotion. This becomes particularly salient in the behavior of the protagonist’s father, Nabil Amrani. In this paper, I argue that Lalami’s novel connects the ongoing struggle for social and cultural self-definition with the unfinished/aborted resistance movement of the 1960s and explores how this idealistic moment in Moroccan socio-political life continues to inform present struggles against economic structural inequalities and the persistent demands for equitable political rights and social justice. I also explore how the issue of resistance against hegemonic structures of domination and control, represented through generational shifts and the transformation of the protagonist’s family, impact subject formation, cultural identity and the perception of the past revolutionary legacy.

This paper engages with some of the ways Moroccan cultural production and the patronage system impact the growth of the public sphere in postcolonial Morocco. The enmeshed relationship between cultural production and patronage demonstrates not only the ideological and political underpinnings of different patronage schemes carried out by state institutions since the 1960s but also highlights the struggle of artists to reconcile the intellectual legacy and aesthetics of the 1960s with the contemporary forces of the market. The paper will argue that while the interdependent relationship between cultural workers and state institutions or private corporations has helped increase cultural production and inscribed cultural works into an international marketplace, it has also enhanced state dominance, ‘naturalized’ art’s ties to the market, curbed the development of the public sphere, and accentuated forms of inequity among cultural workers. The focus is on plastic arts, the cultural field which best illustrates the state and private capital’s efforts to incorporate cultural production into global economic and aesthetic systems while foregrounding the struggle between competing ideological and societal projects.

In the 1960s the Moroccan cultural journal Souffles (1966-71) not only reflected the literary and artistic debates of the times, it helped create them, push them forward and translate them to an intellectual readership open to interdisciplinary connections (art-literature-society-politics). With other journals in French such as Lamalif (1966-88), Intégral (1971-78), Pro-Culture (1973-77), and in Arabic such as Al Anfas (1971, a partner journal to Souffles), Afaq and Al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, Souffles provided a forum for discussions of decolonization, Morocco’s national culture and its place in the world. I will draw on Kenza Sefrioui’s study, La Revue Souffles 1966-1973, Espoirs d’une révolution culturelle au Maroc (2013). In 1972, Souffles was banned and its founder Abdellatif Laâbi was tortured and imprisoned. The following decades were a difficult period for free investigations of cultural issues even when they were not overtly linked to oppositional politics, as its co-editor Zakya Daoud makes clear in her book Les Années Lamalif (2007). This paper investigates the legacy of Souffles for a new generation of Morocco’s cultural press. News magazines such as Maroc Hebdo International (from 1991), Telquel (2001-present) and its Arabic-language sister publication Nichane (2006-2010) engage readers in reflection on topics that include literature and the arts. In an article on Morocco’s new Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art inaugurated in October 2014, for example, a Telquel journalist characterizes the building’s controversial architecture as “a timid step toward the present, anchored in the past” and subtly critiques its “neo-Moorish façade” with unconvincing touches of modernity. Other articles in the cultural press are asking provocative questions about the museum’s funding (royal), partners (European), directors (little experience with contemporary art), and purpose (serving urban elites?). My paper will reference Kashia Pieprzak’s insightful monograph Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco (2010). I will also be analyzing more specialized contemporary magazines such as Médina Maroc (1999-2009) which focused on cultural tourism, the short-lived Magazine littéraire du Maroc (2009-12) and DIPTYK (2009-present) whose goal is to “offer a unique perspective on contemporary Moroccan and Arab art.” To what extent are the queries of the 1960s so fervently posed in Souffles, etc., been reprised, recycled or rejected? Has Morocco been decolonized? Where are the limits of censorship? What does an educated Moroccan need to know about literature and the visual arts? (Why) is cultural development a fundamental part of the nation?

Contemporary Moroccan social and political realities have become an important field of postcolonial inquiry. In this paper I critically review the experience of political prison writing published in the 1960s, with a focus on the work of ʻAbd al-Karīm Ghallāb, Sab ‘at Abwāb (1965) [Seven Doors]. I also explore his relation to other Moroccan writers’ prison writing. This novel testifies to the author’s life and prison experience in the post-independence Moroccan prison and entails a debate associated with political imprisonment, a rethinking of the effect of incarceration and a reflection and a reevaluation of how this process has informed the project of nation-building. I argue that prison writing has become more foregrounded in Moroccan contemporary novels, whereby authors reevaluate their experience in a socially, economically, culturally and politically changing nation. I discuss how the experience of Ghallab’s political incarceration and his representation of the Moroccan intellectual struggle for cultural and political agency provides a point of reference for understanding the Moroccan activism of 1960s and the transition to what later came to be known as the ‘years of lead.’