In the 1940s during a period of intense housing shortages across the French Protectorate in Morocco, a group of engineers founded the Laboratory of Building and Public Works (LBTP) in Casablanca. This institution—a site for testing local construction materials—was part of larger a network of colonial laboratories stretching from Algiers to Brazzaville. This paper will take up a series of arguments within North African history and colonial studies more broadly about what it means to describe a “colony” or a “colonial city” as a “laboratory” for modernity, social reform, or urbanism. This paper will reevaluate the vision of the “laboratory” at stake in North Africanist claims that colonies acted as laboratories through an engagement with ethnographies of laboratory practice within Science and Technology Studies (STS). In reassessing the figure of the “colony as laboratory” within colonial studies and Maghrebi history this paper will also consider how the understanding of what a laboratory is shifts when the laboratory in question is a colonial laboratory, such as the LBTP in Casablanca. The network of scientific institutions that included Casablanca’s lab defined their project not in terms of creating universal or transferable knowledge, but as an attempt to demarcate the very boundaries of the “local.” While testing the performance of various materials, Casablanca’s LBTP defined Morocco itself as an experimental space. Studies produced by the LBTP network also demonstrated the barriers to the circulation of new construction technologies—limits derived from a particular way of seeing colonial climates, environments, geologies, and labor forces. By examining a series of reports produced by these laboratories along with supporting archival materials, I will analyze how the LBTPs elaborated a program for defining locality in an imperial context that would continue to shape laboratory practices in Morocco after the end of the Protectorate. The conclusion of this chapter will consider expert efforts to extend ways of measuring matter and organizing labor from the laboratory to the Protectorate’s construction sites. For European engineers working in Morocco, managing the construction site was a question of mastering and mobilizing “the local”— whether the peculiar and unpredictable qualities of local materials or the misunderstood skills of Moroccan laborers and artisans.

Prolific expatriate writer and composer Paul Bowles (1910-1999), who spent his final decades living in Tangier—coinciding in part with French Protectorate rule—was so concerned about the rapid pace of “modernization” in the Kingdom following independence in 1956 that he applied for a grant to record its indigenous musics. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Library of Congress, he assembled a team (Canadian musician Christopher Wanklyn and Moroccan assistant Mohammed Larbi Djilali) and traversed Morocco in Wanklyn’s VW for four months in 1959 (with additional research in 1960-62). Equipped with an Ampex 601 reel-to-reel machine, they recorded musics of several genres in a total of 23 locations (contingent on electrical sources). Bowles, not trained in Ethnomusicology, prepared 140 typewritten field notes from these recording sessions for the Library of Congress. Technological advances have resulted in several mediated iterations of Bowles’s recording project. The original 2-LP set was issued as “Music of Morocco” in 1972 by the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In 2016, a boxed set with 4 CDs and illustrated leatherette booklet was released by the Dust-to-Digital label. Ethnomusicologist Philip D. Schuyler edited Bowles’s field notes for each musical selection and added his commentary on the music, along with a general introduction. The Bowles project has had an online presence since 2016 with Archnet, an open-access resource of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT—integrating photographs, audio, and scans of the original field notes, without commentary. This platform is arguably the most “raw” encounter for the viewer/listener. A 2014 news release from the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (which digitized the Bowles audio files) speaks of “repatriating” Morocco’s musical heritage “after more than fifty years in the vaults of the Library of Congress.” This paper interrogates issues raised by Bowles’s original recording project and its subsequent offshoots. Was there a consciousness of intellectual property rights for the musicians performing the repertoire in the recording sessions? Is it problematic that the original “team” did not include a specialist in Moroccan music/culture? What do Bowles’s field notes reveal about his understanding of indigenous Moroccan musical culture, and his own “Western gaze”? How did the concept of “ownership” shape later projects? To what extent do these iterations represent “repatriation” of Moroccan musical culture? I will discuss the implications of these questions in the context of the ethics of “knowledge diffusion” (Post 2017).

This paper examines the imperial policy-making process that led to a textual separation of Sudan from Egypt in the wake of Britain’s defeat of the Mahdi insurrection. British officials drew two lines were drawn on a map. The first, a straight border along the 22° latitude drawn in 1899, allowed the British ruler in Cairo, Lord Cromer, to now define Sudan simply as ‘south of the parallel’. A second border, conceptualised in 1902, made some adjustments which brought regions north of the line (Wadi Halfa, Hala’ib) under the control of British officials in Khartoum, while extending Cairo’s administrative responsibility southward over a small bulge of land in between (Bir Tawil). These competing lines on a map did not depict any natural, pre-existing boundaries: they rarely do, of course, nor are they ever meant to (see, e.g. James Scott,1998). Rather, they represent the multiple frontiers which existed in the colonial imagination (see e.g. Lord Curzon, Lord Cromer). This paper shows how these new spatial constructions were intentionally nebulous in order to allow Britain to both recognize Egyptian claims and exclude European ones (e.g. the capitulations), all the while ensuring that the empire maintains secure control over the entire Nile River ecosystem. But the significance of these competing borders goes further than can be captured in the archival record of the colonial officials who were responsible for marking these dividing lines on a map. Drawing on conceptual debates in the field of border studies or ‘borderlands’, ‘borderscapes’ (inter alia, G. O Tuathil, A. Paasi, C. Brambilla, J.P. Laine) this paper also examines the changing ways in which the two lines have been experienced, exploited and perceived by successor regimes in Cairo and Khartoum, in the years since (with a particular focus on the last decade). --- Brambilla, C. “Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept” in Geopolitics, Vol20, No.1 (2015) Cromer, Modern Egypt (MacMillan, 1911). Curzon, Frontiers (Clarendon Press, 1907). Laine, J.P. “Understanding Borders under Contemporary Globalisation, in Annales Scienta Politica Vol.6, No.2 (2017). O Tuathil, G. Critical Geopolitics: the Politics of Writing and Global Space (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Paasi, A. Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (Wiley, 1996). Scott, J. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998).

Mohammad Abed al-Jabiri, (1936-2010) was the first Ph.D. recipient that any academic institution in Morocco ever granted in philosophy (1970.) His dissertation marked the rise of a new generation of scholars from the margins; one that was animated by politics of decolonization. Though Jabiri is regarded as a western oriented scholar, his work mounts a defense of Arab Turath or its cultural heritage. He spent decades studying Western, and French philosophy in particular, only to end up deconstructing the ways Arab intellectuals condemned their past. His work, since the early 1980s, had done more than that of any living Arab intellectual to unsettle the traditional understanding of how current Arab peoples perceived their past. It had long been taken for granted, for example, that Arab past and history simply existed “out there” in the world before they were discovered by scholars. Jabiri turned this notion on its head. In a series of significant books in the 1980s, he argued that historical facts should instead be seen as products of intellectual inquiry. Both secular-nationalists and Islamists rejected Jabiri’s project. Islamists rejected him because his ideas undermine the objectiveness of historical facts. They asked: If historical knowledge was socially produced — and thus partial, fallible, contingent — how could that not weaken its claims on reality? For Secularists, on the other hand, Jabiri’s writings sent an alarming sign since they seem to discredit the intellectual record that was established since the nahda, i.e. brushing aside its most guarded principles of progress, modernity, Westernization, and secularism. Jabiri’s ideas are rarely aligns to the normal right verses left disagreement on cultural and historical orientation. In this paper, I argue against the current historiography that continue to see the raging debates that took place in the Arab world in the last few decades through secular/religious prism. I ask how the anxiety about the post-colonial conditions shaped the intellectual production in Morocco and North Africa in general? What kind of intellectual frameworks were appropriated in the endeavor to decolonize the Arab self? The case of Jabiri affords a rare window to peer at the recent angst with ideas like Arab authenticity and Turath around which much of the post-colonial debates are structured.

In the 1910s, the French Protectorate in Morocco established two separate colonial offices dedicated to “the arts”: the Service des Beaux Arts (Service of Fine Arts, or SBA) and the Service des Arts Indigènes (Service of Native Arts, or SAI). While sharing a common investment in “art,” through their respective projects the two Services reinforced hard boundaries between “native art” and “fine art” and also what was “Moroccan” and “European.” Yet ultimately, this theoretical model often failed in practice. This paper will consider the work of the SBA and its reiterative maintenance of separate artistic spheres, as well as the inherent instability of those spheres, in the context of interwar French colonialism and Hubert Lyautey’s associationist policy. It argues, using the career of Algerian Orientalist painter Si Azouaou Mammeri as a case study, that the boundaries between these spheres often failed in practice due to the ambivalences of the colonial project as well as the active claiming of space by North African subjects. Drawing on archival evidence from Morocco and France, including Protectorate reports, correspondence, and gallery brochures, I outline the SBA’s major projects in the interwar period, including furnishing ateliers and exhibit spaces in Moroccan cities for mostly European artists. These reveal its primary orientation as a producer of colonial propaganda, as well as its de facto exclusionary policy towards North African artists, who were perceived as only capable of producing “native art,” the provenance of the SAI. Si Mammeri, as one of the few North Africans accepted into SBA programs, was a transgressive figure who troubled these boundaries. An elite Kabyle Muslim and successful practitioner of beaux arts, colonial officials proclaimed he could be the leader of a Moroccan “Renaissance” movement; SBA head Jules Borély even suggested in 1928 that Mammeri direct a school to instruct Moroccans in European art. Significantly, Mammeri was instead hired as an Inspector of Native Arts—yet he continued to play a prominent role in the broader colonial arts administration to his retirement in 1948. This paper will treat Mammeri’s career as a lens through which to better apprehend the contradictions of the colonial project, set against the backdrop of the tale of two Services. As genres were redefined and “native” subjects staked claims in new art worlds, the broader instabilities around colonial concepts of culture, race, and nation in North Africa were exposed.