This paper investigates the case of Mohamed Leftah, a Moroccan francophone novelist who wrote most of his works while an expatriate in Egypt. This author's oeuvre, characterized by its transgressive character, is a product of an epitomic exilic condition. Leftah was designated the laureate of "La Mamounia" prize, yet his novel, Le dernier combat du captain Ni'mat, narrating a love relationship between the married Ni'mat, an old Egyptian former army official, and his young Nubian gardener, Islam, is unavailable in Morocco. Drawing on Edward Said's discussion of the intellectual as an outsider and a parrhesiastes, I examine how Leftah's linguistic, geographic, and ontological exile conditions his writing, fundamentally parrhesiastic and modernist. Leftah's text operates by exposing the acts of foreclosure, and addresses the political and cultural discourses of the modern postcolonial nation-state as well as the regulatory practices and norms established by modern governmentalities. Leftah's transgression through a narration of the body and pleasure assumes the awareness that biopolitical modernity operates through regulations of the body and norms.(1) Le dernier combat du captain Ni'mat articulates the modernist's "fearless speech" and search for new ideals in two manners: through an anchoring the narrative in Sufism, the precursor of early Islamic hadātha (according to Adonis), thus operating from within the locus of Islamic tradition; and through the figure of the decadent, deployed in connection with excessive and unregulated sexual practices. Leftah's mobilization of sexuality in his writings contests simultaneously the heteronormalizing and homogenizing discourses of modernity, the nation-state, the conservative Islamic fundamentalists, and Western Orientalism, thus imagining the postcolonial modern Arab subject as one of differentiation and desire. This paper examines the intersection of sexuality, aesthetics, and politics inform the modernity in the literary work in question through an excavation of the haunting excess in the text, be it in a form of decadence, paralyzing failure, hallucinatory narratives, or modern Sufism. 1.I draw on Michel Foucault's conceptualization of the close connection between the deployment of sexuality and biopolitics in History of Sexuality, Volume 1, and Afsaneh Najmabadi's study of Iranian modernity through a historicization of sexual practices and norms in Women with Moustaches and Men Without Beards.

Casablanca: City of contrasts and disparities—from economic hub to lieu of crime and disenfranchisement. This paper explores Casablanca women as rendered in four popular films from Morocco: Mustapha Derkaoui’s Casablanca by Night (2003); Farida Benlyazid’s Casablanca, Casablanca (2002); Mohamed Asli’s In Casablanca, Angels Don’t Fly (2004); Noureddine Lakhmari’s Casanegra (2008). These films render the city of light as darkness, a city of crime and passion, a city to be feared, inhabited by crime lords, prostitutes, the marginalized and fanatics. “I have invented nothing. My film is a mirror of Moroccan society. I show Morocco as it is, not as one would have us believe that it is, explains Noreddine Lakhmari. Violence, social injustice are universal. Let’s stop being hypocrites and admit that we find them here in our own house."* Amidst crime and corruption, fear and longing, women figure as doubly marginalized—prostitutes, beaten wives, divorcees, abandoned—yet also at times as self-directed, conscious manipulators of their marginal positions for their own gain. This paper utilizes the cultural studies tradition in which media products do not exist separately from their origins, the constraints on the production process or the audiences desires to see certain representations on screen. Further, as the late Stuart Hall notes: “Cultural identities are the … unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning.”** The underworld is “positioned” as both oppositional and intertwined with the dominant public sphere; the roles and essences of the female bodies are also “positioned” within this underworld. Derkaoui’s Kalthoum uses her marginalized position to maneuver within the underworld to play dark forces against each other to gain funding for sick brother’s operation. Lakhmari’s Adil uses profits from crime to save his mother who is beaten and oppressed by her husband while his partner woos a divorcee who sleeps with him then rejects him, revealing that some marginalized women can seduce for personal pleasure but remain bound by other socio-economic strictures. This paper elaborates how women in four films are represented as simultaneously victims, beneficiaries, and manipulators of the underworld of “the city of light”. *Florence Beaugé, "Casanegra", film-vérité sur Casablanca, dévoile la face sombre du Maroc, Le Monde, 27.01.2009 **Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora". In Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman eds. Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Harvester Whaeatsheaf, 1993.

This paper focuses on images of blackness in selected Maghrebian literature, produced in French and Arabic in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The paper aims to highlight the representations of the imagined identities assigned to Blacks and to shed light on the derogatory messages that are hidden in Black stereotypes. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Nicole Fleetwood and Mary Ann Doane, I argue that blackness in Maghrebian literature is reimagined as a fetish. The Black body-- often associated with death, the unconscious, the mysteries of the night, magic, rampant sexuality, etc--is implicated in imaginary appropriations in service of Arab hegemony. The paper elaborates on the link between the objectification of Blacks and Arab Muslim patriarchy. Marked as superior to its black other, Arab Muslim patriarchy has profited from blackness without admitting it. It has used Blacks as a fetish both to obliterate their difference and to render them silent. The texts I discuss include Kateb Yacine's Nedjma (1956), Mustapha Tlatli’s Lion Mountain (1990), Marguerite Taous Amrouche's “Le Grain Magique" (1966), Rachid Boujedra’s L’Insolation (1970), La Repudiation (1969) and La Macération (1984), Mouloud Mammeri’s La Traversée (1982), Mohammed Khair-Eddine’s Le Déterreur (1973), Tahar Ben Jellou’s La Prière de l’absent (1981) and Moha le Fou, Moha le Sage (1978). Within this literature, there are many examples of the use of the Black other in the mode of fetish. I particularly focus on two examples. In the first example, the body of the Black other is imaginarily inhabited, objectified and caricatured. In the second example, the Black other is used to provide an image of the self as good. It is important to note that most of these narratives were written at a time when Black tribes and communities of ex-slaves remained silenced and absent from political and academic discourses. The fall into oblivion of Black communities remains a constant reality even in the post-Arab Spring Maghreb.

When Burroughs goes to Tangier in early 1954, he is looking for yet another place where drugs and male partners come cheap and easy. Most stories of Interzone are set in the fictional city of Interzone, a utopian site of extreme laisser-faire permissiveness. As Burroughs continues the fictional mapping of this imaginary city, Interzone comes to take on more and more of the trappings of Tangier, especially what Burroughs conceives as its Arabness. Burroughs writes about the city: “There is no line between ‘real world’ and ‘world of myth and symbol.’ Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.” The architectural aspect of Interzone, with its mutations and sense of disorder, is not essential to the spatiality of this fictional city, which is made of tangible places like 1950s New York City and Tangier. What defines Interzone is the animating spirit of the place and the disconnected schizoid impressions from which it is assembled; thus it is a form of utopia, a place of escape from set identities and controlling agendas (religious, national, and cultural). The Tangier of Interzone features an exhilarating spirit of libertarian promiscuity. This promiscuity is both sexual, and the promiscuity of capitalism – a constant exchange between buyers and sellers where “everyone looks you over for the price tag, appraising you like merchandise in terms of immediate practical or prestige advantage." Burroughs' life in Tangier and his writing about it were supported by colonial relations of power, and it is ironic and morally questionable to look for greater freedom in a location where such freedom only exists due to the oppression of the native population. Burroughs' Tangier writings address the dynamic of subjugation, and justify this rapport through a misapprehension and misrepresentation of Arabs and Arab culture. It may seem strange to use the term "utopia" to describe a place as nightmarish, brutal and claustrophobic as Interzone. However, Burroughs presents it as an ideal place not only for the libertarian freedom it affords, but also in the sense that nothing is secret or concealed there. Raw control and power are used openly, and these dynamics are glaringly ugly. Interzone, in forming a point of contrast with American society, allows Burroughs to satirize 1950s America – its aspirations, conformity and institutional violence.

This paper is an examination of users’ and owners’ decoration of motorized vehicles found in large urban centers of Morocco. The decoration can be understood as a less intrusive form of tinkering defined by Kathleen Franz in her 2005 analysis of early twentieth century American vehicular augmentations. My focus is primarily on contemporary work vehicles used to haul persons or goods, such as taxis, camios, and trucks. Time permitting, analysis of personal moped and automobiles will also be considered. Based on fieldwork in Rabat/Salé, Casablanca, Marrakesh, and Tangier, I document and analyze the meaning of types of décor. Inspired by Franz, I argue that the vehicles and the process of creating them both announce and become the means through which the creators craft belief and value systems. As moveable exhibits, the vehicles reveal visual languages that express life histories and senses of identity and place within society and the city.