The Maghreb is a complex geopolitical and cultural space. Occupying an interstitial position between different continents and cultural centers, the Maghreb straddles various cultural, linguistic, musical and aesthetic spheres. Indeed, this liminality makes the Maghreb a de facto hub for literary creolization, human hybridization, and linguistic and cultural cross-pollination. Further, the recent increase in sub-Saharan African economic and ecological migrants (White, 2011) and the heavy policing of the European borders (Keenan, 2007) turned the northern part of Africa into a destination, rather than a transitory passage, for migratory movements. Even Maghrebi writing and aesthetics keep emerging from nontraditional locations, including Catalonia, Rome, California and Mali, thus forcing us to question what makes Maghrebi literature, music and cinema Maghrebi in this transformed geographic context. In questioning the very notion of the Maghreb and attempting to grapple with it theoretically, this panel seeks to further challenge diehard misconceptions that theorize the Sahara as a barrier between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, the entrenched Arabic/Francophone binary in literary studies, and formulations regarding the Maghreb's insularity (jazirat al-maghrib). Recent scholarship's investigation of the Maghreb's African, Mediterranean and even Caribbean connections (Lydon, 2009; El Hamel, 2010; McDougal, 2012; Tamalet-Talbayev, 2017; Aidi, 2017) lay the foundation for our endeavor to problematize the Maghreb as a concept. In posing the unconventional question about the location of the Maghreb, this panel draws on cutting-edge approaches to literature, music and art to investigate the location of the Maghreb in light of mobility, changing migration patterns and the emergence of Maghrebi aesthetics in nontraditional languages from nontraditional locations.
One paper makes a case for Maghregraphy, which accounts for the variety of languages, locations and positions in/from which the Maghreb is articulated as a literary and intellectual space. A second paper uses the trope of transcontinental imaginary to probe women's cinema in the Maghreb and its creolization of this dynamic space. A third paper examines Maghrebi migratory and diasporic writings' undermining of the Arabic/Francophone binary in the aftermath of post-2011 Arab uprisings. Further complicating the concept of the Maghreb, a fourth paper draws on ethno-musicology to reveal the failure of prevalent theorizations of Moroccan musics to reflect the various connections between sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab World.
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Dr. Brahim El Guabli
The Maghreb has been approached from a variety of theoretical prisms. However, the Sahara has interestingly not theorized to serve as a paradigm for the investigation of the meaning and location of the Maghreb. In light of a growing body of literary works published in the last fifty years and which I label as Maghregraphy, I argue that literary representations of the Sahara remap the Maghreb both as a geographical and literary space. In their seminal work, Mille Plateaux , Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have distinguished between two types of space: un espace lisse (a smooth space) and un espace strié (a striated space). While the first is characterized by its openness, accommodation of creativity and adaptation to the nomadic penchant of its users, the second is fenced, bordered and by its very organization limited and limiting. Maghregraphy deploys mobility, connectivity and absolute openness associated with the “smooth space” to depict the Sahara’s resistance to spatial management and territorial organization. Moreover, Maghregraphy subverts widespread misconceptions that the Sahara is inherently barren and anarchic. Analyzing novels by Souag, Ould Ibnou, al-An??ry, al-Koni, and others, I advocate a remapping of the literary Maghreb through the prism of Maghregraphy about the Sahara as a realm of connection, movement, openness and subterranean solidarities. I argue that the postcolonial Maghregraphies that I examine in this paper resist the “striated” space of the nation-state and undermine the boundaries (linguistic and conceptual) inherited from the colonial era. Moreover, Maghregraphy reclaims the Maghreb, which also includes parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as a site of life, production, and myriad exchanges. These works, the paper demonstrates, challenge notions of quadrillage (gridding of all sorts), post-colonial borders and policing strategies that are detrimental to realization of the full meaning of Maghrebiness, which transcends its geopolitical location. Piecing together Maghregraphies’ engagement with language politics, spatial divisions and politics of place, I contend that the Sahara offers a new paradigm from which to reconceptualize the Maghreb beyond the prevalent binaries. Also, reading in Maghregraphy opens up a wide array of possibilities for ecocritical engagement with the Maghreb as a nomadic potential that is in permanent shift across place and time.
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This paper examines how films by Maghrebian women filmmakers such as Leila Marrakshi, Nargis Najjar, Assia Djebar, Yamina Bachir, Leila Kilani, Yasmina Kissari and Fatima Jebli Ouazzani construct a particular model of Maghrebian cinema that demonstrates its global cultural dimensions at a time of increasing transnational mobility. Films made by Maghrebian women have been produced and consumed in France, the US and around the world. These new modes of production combine with political, religious and national local contexts, while intersecting with the global. The films’ global circulation and multinational production show their connection to Europe and the US. Even in early films such as Assia Djebar’s La Nouba and Farida Benlyazid’s Door to the Sky France remains ever-present as a subtext. Drawing on Brian Edward’s work in which he discusses anxiety about globalization, this paper draws attention to how diasporic Maghrebian women’s cinema has transcended colonial and postcolonial theories and heralds the coming of a new era. Taking the case of diasporic Maghrebian women’s films and their global circulation, the paper explores the transnational themes of their narratives.My use of the term ‘diasporic’ refers not only to women filmmakers’ physical movement from a place, but also to the unconventional ways in which they represent women. The paper particularly examines their representation of mobilities, and views such mobilities through the lens of travel, desire and difference and circulating global commodities. The paper addresses not only how globalization has shaped the mobility of characters who transport themselves to different places, but also examines the roles that gender and sexuality play in the representation of mobilities. I am also exploring writings by relevant cultural critics that deal not only with transnational cinema but also with translocality and mobility: Hamid Naficy, Brian Edwards, Ella Shohat, and Doreen Massey among others. Therefore, both films and theoretical works are used in this paper to discuss the variety of ways mobility, gender and place are constructed in Maghrebian women’s cinema.
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Ammar Naji
The rise of slave trade and displaced black communities in North Africa pose a challenge to the conceptual framework of postcolonial migration and diaspora in the Anglo-American academy. The development of this racial consciousness in North Africa in the aftermath of the Arab Spring compels us to investigate: how does ethno-racialization intersect and further expand the conceptual boundaries of defining diaspora in the Maghreb? And in what ways does racial liminality, as expressed in problematic terms such as Afro-Arab, Black Arab, North African Arab, Berber and Sub-Saharan African, foster a new modality of border-crossing that traverses the exclusionary North African nation-state? This paper examines the politics of ethno-racial marginalization of North- African Arabs and the way racialization has created new dynamics of extraterritorial belonging in the Maghreb. Ethnic Tunisian writing posits a revolutionized form of exile that is no longer defined by geographic and material mobility and border-crossing to the West. Enduring conditions of exile inside the homeland, Black Tunisians use extraterritorial displacement as an interventionist discourse against racial discrimination, forced labor migration and exclusive tribal affiliations in the MENA region. The work of the Tunisian activist-writer, Kamal Al-Riyahi, depicts the various forms of hardships young Tunisians face on daily basis due to dehumanizing state policies and racial discrimination against North-African Arabs in major Tunisian cities. By examining the dynamics of internal exile and alienation in North Africa, this paper demonstrates how contemporary Tunisian writing presents extraterritorial exile as an empowering political aesthetic not only for Arab/North African migrants overseas, but also for impoverished black communities in the Maghreb. The recent explosion of revolt and civic unrest in North Africa doesn’t only expose the practices of autocratic regimes, but also the politics of racial alienation inside North African homelands, a critical insight that ruptures the territorial and geopolitical demarcations of North African identity in the twenty first century.
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Hicham Chami
The researcher seeking information on the musics of Morocco would be disappointed at finding only one article--'Tuareg Music'--in the landmark Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 1: Africa (1997). Referencing Volume 6: The Middle East (2001), however, results in 11 articles under the subheading 'North Africa: The Maghrib'. The apparent dissociation of Morocco (and the Maghreb) from Africa invites an inquiry into perceptions of the region's enduring affinity with the Arab World despite its location in the northwestern portion of Africa. Yet geography cannot be the sole determinant of cultural kinship, as indicated in the objection of Wole Soyinka (1985) to the presumption that "all that is bound by salt water on the African continent is necessarily African."
This paper takes an Ethnomusicological standpoint in interrogating the quandary of Morocco's perceived affiliation with the Arab World in light of its geographical presence in Africa. How do factors of language, aesthetics, religion, political structures, historical antecedents, and migration patterns contribute to conceptualizing Morocco's cultural identity? Does "Maghrebi separateness and distinctiveness" remain a useful "unit of analysis" or merely hearken to the divisive "French colonial tactic" of keeping the Maghreb "sealed off from the Mashriqi [Eastern Arab] influences" (Brown 1997)? What are the ramifications of viewing the Maghreb as an isolated enclave within the continent of Africa? Must 'Africa' and the 'Arab World' remain "mutually exclusive labels" (Bentahar 2011), or are these geo-cultural boundaries permeable in combining Moroccan and African cultural elements, as demonstrated by the gn?wa genre? The problematics presented by the "division separating the Maghreb from sub-Saharan Africa" are re-examined vis-à-vis "the many forms of intertwining influence that exist" (Tissières and de Jager 2002). This inquiry into Morocco's cultural identification with the Arab World and Africa concludes with an assessment of its impact on the continuity of traditional music genres, instrumentation, and performance practices comprising Moroccan musical life and its effect on the continued privileging of Andalusian music within the Moroccan soundscape.
