Situated between the Arab East, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic, the Maghreb occupies an interstitial position, which serves both as a point of convergence and a site of permanent departure towards other aesthetic horizons (immigration, invasion, trade, scholarship). While the question of modernity vs tradition was central to Les Temps Modernes' 1977 special issue entitled Du Maghreb, scholarly anxiety in recent years has shifted significantly to refiguring the meaning of being a Maghrebi author, navigating multiple languages and occupying different geographical homes. The existence of novelists, such as Laila Lalami, Ibrahim al-Koni and Amara Lakhous, who write from unconventional locations (US, Italy, Switzerland/Spain), undermines any attempt to fix the nature of Maghrebi literature in a specific language or territorial entity. Maghrebi authors and their literary production do not only inhabit different literary worlds, but, like the Maghreb itself, they also constantly negotiate their multilayered idenities in these worlds. This panel seeks to capitalize on the Maghreb's liminality to shed light on the complexity of questions of transversality, transnational inspirations, circulation, intellectual dialogues and translation in Maghrebi literature. Our engagement with this topic will open up a new discursive space in which foregrounding these hidden links will contribute significantly to the redefinition/rethinking of the literary Maghreb. Additionally, bringing these multidisciplinary questions to the attention of Arabic scholars will generate a much-needed dialogue about the ways in which these transnational connections have informed and continue to inform—and transform—Maghrebi aesthetics in their diverse expressions and languages.
“Transversality and Translation in Moroccan Contemporary Poetry” reads Moroccan contemporary poetry for the “auditory traces” left by its authors and translators, as well as for the transversal relations of style imprinted there. “Beyond Binaries: the Maghreb after Post-Colonialism” explores the ways in which Maghrebi cultural producers and intellectuals looked in multiple directions both for inspiration and/or resistance, which inform their works. “Tanger to Havana: Race, Jazz and Urban Dystopia” looks at the culture wars and propaganda battles that played out in northern Morocco during the early Cold War, between Cuba, Spain, Egypt and the US and the ways in which they informed literature between Arabic and Spanish, Hispanism and Arabism, and brought the Americas to the Maghreb and vice-versa. "Sounding the Maghreb in the Nahda: Nineteenth-Century Arabic/European Language Politics at the Interstices" probes the roles of Maghrebi intellectuals in rethinking the literary nah?a, usually identified with the Mashriq, from the position of the Maghreb.
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The Maghreb occupies a liminal space in the long-nineteenth-century Arabic literary-intellectual “renaissance,” or _nahda_. Often the _nahda_ is identified with the Arab East, or Mashreq. Whether its politics also resonate in the Maghreb is an open question. That question turns in part on the premise that in the Maghreb (under coercive French colonialism) French supplanted “standard” Arabic, or _fusha_, whereas in the Mashreq (thanks to more ambivalent British and French colonial institutions), Arabic survived as a literary language, enfolding English and French in an unbroken skin of nativeness. While that premise holds truth, it ignores the fact that in the nineteenth-century Maghreb—even in Algeria, annexed and longest colonized—French supplemented but did not yet supplant Arabic as a language of intellectual production. This paper argues that Maghrebi intellectuals of that period shared with their counterparts of the Syro-Lebanese, Egyptian, and Palestinian _nahda_ a powerful investment in the past, present, and future of Arabic. Of special interest was the question of whether standard Arabic, _fusha_, was close enough to life, to the living, and to the people to “speak” to modernity and aspirational nationhood. Taking a case in point, I focus on a little-known text by the Algerian Mohammed Ben-Braham, _Répartition des voyelles dans l’arabe vulgaire_ (Distribution of Vowels in Dialectal Arabic), published in 1900. A judicial interpreter for the French colonial government in Algeria, Ben-Braham was a member of the Société Asiatique de Paris, participant in the International Congress of Orientalists (Paris, 1897; Rome, 1899; Hamburg, 1902; Algiers, 1905), and author of several French-language monographs on Arabic grammar and metrics. Refuting the notion that formal written Arabic is a “dead” tongue severed from its “living” spoken form, his _Répartition_ argues the derivation of _'ammiyya_ (dialect) from _fusha_ (“standard”) by marking the grammatical regularity of the phonetic shifts between these. Here continuum, not diglossia, defines the relation between Arabic speech and writing. Through that redefined relation, I contend, Ben-Braham’s _Répartition_ mounts a distinctly Maghrebi interstitial critique, rare in _nahda_ discourse, of colonial and hegemonic ideologies of language: a vindication of the “life” of formal Arabic in the face of European Orientalists and Mashreqi intellectuals who pronounce it “dead,” of the “democracy” of Arabic before French republicanism, of the status of dialectal Arabic in a formal Arabic literary culture that systematically devalues it, and of the position of the Maghreb in a modern Arab-Islamic intellectual landscape dominated by the Mashreq.
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Mr. Hisham Aidi
In 1959, after coming to power, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara began supporting anti-colonial struggles in North Africa - the FLN in Algeria and groups in the Spanish Sahara and northern Morocco. Cuba would begin to court activists and writers from the Spanish-speaking Rif region, as well as the American expat writers in Tangier (the Beats, Black Powerites and jazz musicians who had settled in the "Interzone.") This paper will look at the culture wars and propaganda battles that played out in northern Morocco during the early Cold War, between Cuba, Spain, Egypt and the US. Riffian intellectuals often had to negotiate different languages and political projects -- Arabic and Spanish, Hispanism and Arabism. Thus, Tuhami Wazzani would write in Spanish and Arabic, Ibn Azzouz Hakim would opt for Spanish, while Amina El Louh and Mohammed Choukri chose Arabic. The presentation will also look at how the propaganda wars played out in the realm of music. Finally, this paper will examine how the "belle epoque" era of 1950s Havana and Tangier is being revisited today in public discourse and cultural policy.
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Dr. Deborah A. Kapchan
Moroccan poetry is remarkably absent in twentieth century print-media anthologies of Arabic poetry in English. In Selma Jayyusi’s Modern Arabic Poetry, there is only one Moroccan poet mentioned (Mohammed Bennis) while in Issa J. Boulatta’s book, Modern Arab Poets 1950-1975, there are virtually no Moroccan poets. This may be because North Africa has fallen outside the purview of Middle Eastern Studies. However, there are no Moroccan poets in anthologies of West African poetry either. Despite the publication in 1929 of a book entitled al-Adab al-Arabi fi al- Maghreb al-Aqsa, “Arabic Literature in Morocco” (edited by Mohamed ben al-Abbas Kabbaj), until recently Morocco has been neglected in studies of modern poetry in English translation.
Certainly the politics of translation are implicated. Morocco, notes poet and novelist Abdellatif Laâbi, has long been on the periphery of both the Middle East and the West, adding that despite the post-colonialist moment, new forms of global domination maintain its marginality. Poet and scholar Mohamed Bennis echoes these sentiments when (speaking of Arab writers more generally) he notes, “It is significant that our great poets, thinkers and scientists remain ignored in the West. If I am the descendant of a symbolic family of modern Arab writers, whether Muslim or Christian, …I am also the descendant of these same Muslims and Arabs that …invented algebra, …the masters of logic and astronomy, doctors, scientists, but also great mystics, the inspiration for poetic, literary and artistic modernity in Europe.” Indeed Europe – and the entire Western world – owes the Arabs a literary debt whose acknowledgement is direly needed, especially today.
What is the influence of Moroccan poetry across social, gendered and political ecologies? While romanticizing a national spirit may lead to the grossest of fascisms, it is nonetheless possible to speak of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a “milieu” – the vibrations of a territory, formed by the stories that have lived there, as well as the songs, languages, idioms, metaphors and other rhythms of history that are embedded in place. In this paper, I read Moroccan contemporary poetry for the “auditory traces” left by its authors and translators, as well as for the transversal relations of style imprinted there – from the political poetry of Abdellatif Laâbi to the poetry of feminine desire of Wafa al-‘Amrani or Malika al-‘Asimi. Moroccan poetry is reread as a poetry of the larger Maghreb, an essential aesthetic link between east and west, north and south.
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Dr. Brian T. Edwards
This paper considers the frameworks scholars use to consider Maghrebi literary and cultural production since the 1940s. One of the assumptions I make is that it is frequently writers and other producers of avant-garde culture who express new imaginaries or epistemes. The theorists and critics are often catching up, as it were, to ways of thinking that cultural producers have (re)presented, whether consciously or not, in their creative work.
In the wake of Edward Said’s work, the methods that emerged to analyze twentieth-century Maghrebi literary and cultural production were overly invested in binaries (France–Morocco, France–Algeria, France–Tunisia). Certainly, we gained much from Orientalist discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. Many Maghrebi writers and cultural producers could be profitably interpreted through these critical lenses, particularly those working in French. But just as Khatibi called for the recognition of a Maghreb pluriel, the cultural and political imaginaries of Maghrebi writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals were more often plural or multivalent than binary, whether they were looking east, south, north, or west (or in multiple directions at once) for inspiration.
Moroccan writers and intellectuals in the twentieth-century often had their own “uses” for United States cultural production and political history (e.g., as a third term in relation to the French), but just as American travelers to the Maghreb experienced the Maghreb both as an Arab and Berber space and as a European colonial space, Maghrebi cultural producers were deeply conversant with multiple “foreign” cultural forms. The binary was always a fiction, based too heavily on stable poles.
In the past quarter century, as Maghrebi cultural producers and intellectuals looked in multiple directions—both for inspiration and to resist the new cultural hegemony of the US—post-colonialism, understood as Manichean or binaristic struggle, is a mode which has passed. With the rise of new technologies, digital media (including satellite television, the Internet, and social media), and in the context of transnational capital flows and migration, the cultural aspects of globalization must be accounted for in the interpretation of Maghrebi cultural production since the 1970s. This encompasses grappling with US “cultural imperialism” and neo-liberalism, but also more generative engagements with global cultural forms—including American—among a new generation of Maghrebi cultural producers.
