Recentering the Maghreb, Part I
Panel 071, sponsored byOrganized under the auspices of the Center for Maghreb Studies, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 15 at 10:15 am
Panel Description
Multilingualism, an interstitial geographic location, and a multiplicity of cultural identities have all contributed to the prevalent definition of the Maghreb as a liminal space between Europe, the Atlantic, the Middle East, and Africa (Khatibi, N???r? 1966, Esposito 2014, Kitlas 2018). Building on these scholarly engagements with the Maghreb, this panel seeks to foreground the region as a center that, while being enmeshed in various peripheral and liminal positions in connection to other centers in a polycentric world, has always continued being a human, cultural, economic, and political hub. The Maghreb's ethnic and demographic makeup today cannot be but a result of a long historical process of human miscegenation and intermarriage (Hall 2011). Annual Sufi festivals in Morocco and Algeria specifically turn the cities of 'In Madi and Fez into spiritual hubs for thousands, if not millions, of Tij?ni pilgrims and disciples. Cultural festivals, such as Essaouira International Gnawa Music Festival, bring both the local and diasporic audiences to Morocco, which becomes, for the duration of the festival, the center of this indigenous African art (Kapchan 2008, Aidi 2015). For many years in the 1960s and 1970s, Algiers was one of the significant capitals of Third World activism, thus earning itself the name "the Mecca of revolution" (Cabral, Meghelli 2009, Byrne 2016). Even during colonial times, writers and painters, such as Eugène Fromentin, Pierre Loti, and André Gide spent extensive periods of time in the Maghreb. More recently, the flow of economic and environmental, sub-Saharan African migrants (White 2011, 2017), the relocation of thousands of European retirees and job seekers to different Maghrebi countries (Gharbaoui 2018), and the increasing attraction of American Muslims to Morocco, to name just a few examples, indicate the Maghreb's role as an economic, spiritual, and cultural center. During pre-colonial times, when trans-Saharan trade was still active, the Maghreb was not merely a passageway (Lydon 2013)--it was a final destination for goods and scholars. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, the panel will investigate the various ways in which the Maghreb can be theorized as a center through human movement, trans/intra-Saharan mobility and connectivity, socio-cultural and economic exchanges, activist solidarities, as well as ecological, intellectual and artistic production.
"Session one" papers make a connection between spatial mobility and the recentering of the Maghreb. "Session two" papers are thematically linked through their investigation of the recentering of the Maghreb through art and literature.
Disciplines
Education
Geography
History
International Relations/Affairs
Journalism
Language
Law
Library Science
Linguistics
Literature
Participants
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Dr. Brian T. Edwards
-- Discussant, Chair
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Dr. Brahim El Guabli
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik
-- Presenter
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Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Chouki El Hamel
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Brahim El Guabli
Theorizing the Sahara/Desert as a Center
The Sahara/Desert, a vast stretch of arid land extending from Sudan to Mauritania, is one of the most misunderstood and undertheorized places. Cast as an inherently dangerous, marginal and peripheral space, the Sahara has been mainly defined by what it is not, thus overlooking a lot of what it actually is. Building on the proposition that the Sahara is a place of life and production, where people live, produce artefacts, exchange material and immaterial goods, and form relationships, I argue that the Sahara is a center in and of itself. I analyze a host of pre-colonial and colonial writings that explicitly foreground the centrality of the Sahara as both a destination and a quest for generations of European explorers. From René Caillié (1799 –1838) to Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) and Andre Gide (1869-1951), a motley of explorers, adventurers, divine prophecy followers, geologists, and colonialists gravitated towards this sparsely populated land. Fascinated and mesmerized by the Sahara’s power, these individuals gravitated toward it for decades for various reasons. Moreover, the Sahara’s centrality can also be seen in it becoming the object of scientific conferences and exploratory expeditions underwritten by civilian and military organizations through the 20th century. This centrality of the desert is also manifested in it being a destination for individuals seeking isolation, contemplation, and spiritual introspection. Although the list of Euro-American Saharans—as they referred to themselves—is long, they all share a fascination with the desert and an avid desire to experience it before its discursive production in very successful publications. The discovery of oil and gas in mid-1950s and the relocation of multinational companies to the desert only consolidated the Sahara’s strategic importance as a center for global economic interests. Also, most recently, the flow of sub-Saharan African immigrants has led to the incorporation of the Saharan borders into Europe, thus offering us another way of refiguring the Sahara as a center--in Europe this time.
Drawing on a significant number of understudied precolonial and colonial, literary and reconnaissance works that take place in the desert, I offer a rereading of the Sahara as a center. Through my analysis of its role as a space for mobility, connectivity, and multidirectional exchanges, the Sahara emerges as a destination and a final goal for people of different backgrounds and persuasions.
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Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
This paper offers a fresh reading of Khatibi’s bi-langue in light of the interculturality and multilingualism born of the Maghreb’s historically central position in the Mediterranean. Khatibi’s reflections on Maghrebi plurality provide a ground-breaking corrective to binary conceptions of culture and identity resulting from the history of colonialism and decolonization. Khatibi’s “other-thought” reveals a fluctuating identity principle, a form of heterogeneity emerging in the gaps between monolithic thought systems. Taking Khatibi’s insights further, this paper argues that reading the Maghreb as a center productively restores it to its multiple interfaces, to the contiguous spaces on which it has historically exerted its political, cultural, and symbolic influence. I envision the Maghreb in relation to one such interface, the Mediterranean here rethought as a space mediating the Maghreb’s transnational deployment. I examine the theoretical adjustments that a focus on the Maghreb as center imposes, especially in relation to language and writing. What happens to bi-langue, Khatibi’s concept of bilingualism, once the focus on Arabic and French is displaced? Once we take account of moments of Mediterranean transcultural contact, stretching beyond the logics of colonialism and Islam, that have left their imprint on Maghrebi culture?
I start by examining the enduring plurilingualism born of the historical flows and counterflows of people and cultures to the Maghrebi center, from the early modern days of a Western Mediterranean lingua franca to the diasporic corpus of Maghrebi writing composed in Spanish, Italian, and Catalan—a corpus whose very existence loosens the stronghold of French and Middle Eastern publishing centers on Maghrebi literary production. Returning to Khatibi, I examine lesser-known texts beyond the insights of Maghreb pluriel and Love in Two Languages to study the use of Spanish as a memorial idiom preserving the history of Andalusian transcultural contact ("Par-dessus l’épaule"). This linguistic plurality recalibrates bi-langue as pluri-langue and disseminates it beyond the colonial relation. Following Khatibi’s meditation on al-Andalus as the Golden Age of transnational Maghrebi influence, I theorize pluri-langue in relation to the “forgetting and anamnesia” of this glorious history (“Diglossia,” 158), that is as a Maghrebi idiom mediated by the sea which alone can produce a fully-inclusive memory.
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Dr. Chouki El Hamel
There are several villages in Morocco that are grossly neglected because the government considers their residents to be the black descendants of slaves. The government has long failed to provide basic social and administrative services to the people living in the small villages of Khandaq ar-Rayhan, south of Tangier, and this neglect is part of the historical marginalization of black Moroccans. The villages of Khandaq ar-Rayhan are inhabited by descendants of maroons who established distinct settlements in the eighteenth century that are now a testimony to their resistance to chattel slavery in Morocco. There are about 500 families living in this area, but the dominant culture in the region and the political administration do not recognize them because they associate the families with the country’s history of racial slavery. I will trace the origin of the families of Khandaq ar-Rayhan to the ‘Alawi ruling dynasty. Primary sources attest that the isolation and later dispersion of Morocco’s black peoples happened during the reign of the ‘Alawi sultan Mawlay Isma‘il (1672-1727), who ordered the enslavement of all black Moroccans to serve in the army under his command. Mawlay Isma‘il’s effort led to the forced collection of about 240,000 black Moroccans, who came from all regions of the country. This enslaved population gradually separated themselves from Isma‘il’s government and claimed their original status of freedom by dispersing throughout the country. I intend to examine and expose the historical marginalization of the people of Khandaq ar-Rayhan and the present dilemma of racial discrimination in Morocco.
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In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role that Algeria played throughout the 1960s in fostering freedom fighters from around the world. Books such as historian Jeffrey James Byrne’s 2016 Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World and Elaine Mokhtefi’s 2018 Algiers Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers, have established Algeria as a hub of revolutionary activity and as a key player in determining the ideology and composition of the Third World or Pan-African communities. Algeria hosted and trained what Byrnes calls the “pieds rouges” [red feet], a babel of leftists, revolutionaries and other idealists from around the globe drawn by the country’s reputation as the Mecca of Revolution. With the assistance of the Organization of African Unity, the Algerian government organized the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers, bringing together artists and militants from across Africa in an effort to achieve cultural decolonization. While scholarship on Algeria has played a crucial part in recentering the Maghreb in the history of the postcolonial world, Morocco and Tunisia are still eclipsed by their revolutionary next-door neighbor.
This article turns to Tunisia’s attempt to match Algerian efforts towards cultural decolonization. In 1966, the Tunisian cultural ministry, determined to become a key player in the African cultural scene, created the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage [JCC]. The JCC’s beginnings were weak and geared towards European approval. But under the joint leadership of Tunisian intellectual Tahar Cheriaa and Senegalese novelist and director Ousmane Sembene, the biennale emerged as a panafrican forum for anti-colonial resistance and criticism. By the end of the 1960s, with the Maghrebi post-colonial governments’ increasing control over the printing press and the media, the hopes for the role that poetry or fiction could play in liberation were dying out. A number of African writers turned instead to film, exchanging cameras and cameramen, carrying reels halfway across the continent to show in cinematheques, or in town-square projections. With film, they felt, they could more easily reach the masses. Through interviews with JCC participants and administrators, pamphlets, press coverage, and personal correspondence this article looks at the JCC as the final Maghrebi home to a transnational network of young artist-militants in the mid-1970s, before the Tunisian government eventually reclaimed the space and turned it into red-carpet regalia.
