One of the heroes of resistance to Spanish and French colonial expansion in Morocco, Mohammed Ben Abdelkrim El Khattabi has become legendary for the local people in the Rif area of Morocco, within national history and at the transnational level. Since the 1920’s the narratives and stories revolving around Abdelkrim have metamorphosed in complex and multilayered ways revealing different forms of politics, interpretations and struggles that continue to manifest themselves even in the 21st century. In the more recent social uprisings in the Rif between between October 2016 and June 2017 and coomonly known as Hirak , the images and memory of Abdelkrim were ever present as symbols of contestation in the streets of Huceima and other towns in the area. The purpose of this paper is trace the different historical natives and conflicting interpretations that frame the story of Abdelkrim and to unravel the ways in which this history is evoked, marginalized, appropriated, instrumentalized or distorted. How did colonial and nationalist discourses represent Abdelkrim? How does he become the symbol of subaltern voices? How does his story take on a transnational dimension? What are the excesses or silences imbedded in the story about Abdelkrim? I will deal with these questions from an ethnohistorical perspective that takes into consideration not only the historical and political contexts of Abdelkrim’s story but also the discursive and symbolic dimensions through which it has been articulated.

National Identity in Algeria: The hard quest of reconciling people’s unity and cultural diversity Nation-State building in Algeria has been a daunting task because of the leaders’ plea for the unity of the people, while overlooking regional particularisms, language diversity and the clash between atavisms and conservative values on the one hand, and democratic aspirations, on the other. The imposed national identity based on Arabism and Islam in post-colonial Algeria did not conceal the existence of the Berber language, communitarianism, the use of French language, religious schisms and even debates on ethnicity and race. For conservative and orthodox Algerians, these ingredients are seen as antagonisms susceptible of hindering the national coherence, while for secular Algerians; they are simply regarded as healthy constituents of the cultural diversity that characterize the national identity. Clashes on the meaning of national identity are still persistent despite the recognition of the Berber as a national and official language, after decades of protests and revolts. These clashes are still fueled by the spread of imported religious practices, especially Salafism. The Hirak or popular movement that erupted in February 2019, which resulted in the downfall of the long-tenure of President of Bouteflika and his clan, has brought to light the manipulations of Algerian identity references by various leaderships in the name of the sacrosanct people unity of the Algerian people in order maintain a monolithic political system. The participation, side by side, of Islamist militants, seculars, men and women, youth and elders in the Hirak street demonstrations and the slogans banning racial differences, cultural particularism and regional disparities have exalted the unity of the people against political marginalization, contempt practices, corruption and social inequalities. The Hirak movement has sprung a new sense of citizenship in contradistinction with the national militant the regime has attempted to impose and the community of believers the Islamists are trying to incrust in the Algerian society. More than that, the Hirak movement has permitted the re-ownership by the people of its history, the rehabilitation of its past heroes, symbols, and ancestral memories. It has, in fact reestablished the historic link between the past and the future on new and more authentic tracks. It is, precisely, this sequential continuum that our contribution will delve into on the basis of an articulated analysis related to the dilemma to which the national identity has been confronted, ever since the independence of Algeria.

This paper offers a new approach to the concept of memories, as a site of both oppression, forcing minorities to forget their cultures, and of redemption, where minorities use their memories as means of defiance and resistance against erasure. Focusing on Moroccan Jews who were taken (a concept I have developed) by Zionist establishment to partitioned Palestine, I will critically engage with the forced construction of a unified and ‘bleached’ “Jewish” memory of Moroccan Jews by Zionist Ashkenazis, intentionally erasing Jewish-Moroccan memory. Divided into two parts, this paper first focuses on the oppressive mechanisms used in this violent project of memory cleansing by Ashkenazi establishment. The paper will then move to discuss what I call ‘the reverse exodus movement home’, both physically and conceptually, where this same memory becomes a site of resistance, reviving instead and redeeming stolen memories. Ashkenazi establishment not only deprived Moroccan Jews of any access to political, social, educational, and monetary resources. It also deprived them of the right to dream. To remember and to never forget. Filtered by and through Zionist lenses, they were constructed to think they were primitive and dangerous, and, therefore, needed to be modernized and saved. Memory has been replaced by a forced sense of gratitude. Their relationships with themselves, let alone with their origins have been erased, and filtered through Eurocentric ideals. Their Moroccaness is only a memory, and this memory is a memory that should be resisted. Yet, leading us to the second part of the paper, it is here in this exact moment that memory becomes a site of resistance, with Moroccan Jews resisting the Zionist imposition as ‘past-less’, and of revival, instead, of what has been erased. I will then discuss the exodus of Moroccan Jews, focusing on my ethnographic experience in regaining my memories through experience and life in Morocco, where the filters are abandoned, and gaze is shifted to me, the Moroccan Jewish woman remembering her stolen past, restoring her future. Referring to the recent peace accord, I argue that only history can witness whether it bears any will changes for Moroccan Jews in Israel. Coming back home, memory becomes a reality, not filtered by Zionist intervention, negotiated through my standpoint, dialoguing with my parents’ experiences. Morocco is more than a memory of a home to Moroccan Jews. It is past, present and future. It has become a means of restoring stolen memories and dignity.

This paper addresses the politics of Amazigh social memory at different scales of activist engagement, from the southeastern oases of Morocco to transnational to diasporic struggles for minority rights. I query how normative nonchalance about the pre-national (and pre-Islamic) Berber material past comes to be arrested and interrupted, how historical ruins come to be recognized, and indeed made, from the aggregate rubble. Drawing on my research with Amazigh activists in the Ghéris oasis valley, I try to fathom how a particular ethical-aesthetic sensitivity to the material past is cultivated through sustained effort and training, to the ways in which young men and women learn to experience the physical landscape as positively haunted. Through such training, ruins become less the passive objects for spiritual contemplation than the active translators of affective intensities, producing complex emotions that combine melancholy, outrage, and an incitement to political action. I thus argue that current Amazigh heritage politics and conservation efforts as they operate at national and transnational scales are not the end result of a pre-formed ethno-political ideology but the material and embodied means through which such cultural awareness and politics comes into being.