One of the major concerns of postcolonial literature in North Africa centers on how ethnic and racial identities are negotiated, performed and contested and how these processes are connected to the economy of political and social forces that have prevailed in the post-independence national state. In this regard, questions of racial and ethnic conflict generate subjectivities that are polarized in their allegiance between micro group ideology and the demand for intergroup solidarity/national identity. Laila Lalami’s Secret Son explores the struggle for self-definition and cultural belonging within a stratified society in which the wide gap between the elite (select wealthy Arab dominant) class and lower classes (including majority Arab and Berber populations) is complicated by ethnic and racial difference; from this, I argue, ‘reading’ the narrative relies on deep knowledge of the Moroccan social fabric and related politics of identity. In this paper I explore how the performance of ethnicity is constituted through the dynamic of rejection and social invisibility that some individuals, particularly Berbers, face in their assimilatory struggle and how ethnic ambiguity affects not only the emergence of cultural agency but generates forms of social resistance and political dissidence. In this regard, social construction of cultural hegemony is based on a dynamic of ethnic exclusionism and structures of racial or ethnic stereotyping. This paper highlights the notion of ethnic performance and how this connects to the development of tension between Islamist groups, national institutional indifference and the jaded transformation of former liberals into voices of the hegemonic power structures as reinforced by social stratification. I also explore the linguistic choice made by the author to write the work in English/address the work to an American reading audience.

Recent examinations of Arab literary history have been conducted within the categories of class, gender, and nation. However, few attempts have been made to bring the question of race into discussions of Arabic literature. In an attempt to reconstruct a Black canon, one finds a wealth of Arab literary production on race from the pre-Islamic era to the present. Studying such representations of Blackness offers a twist to Edward Said’s Orientalism in that Arabs generated a hierarchical representational discourse themselves, one that was predicated as much on a Self-Other binary as Western Orientalism. This has important consequences not just for Black diaspora studies but also for post-colonial studies. In this paper, I will trace representations of Blacks and Blackness through the study of different literary texts and films from the Maghreb. My cultural analysis of the literature and film aims to highlight the representations of the imagined identities assigned to Blacks as a result of slavery and racial stratification. It also aims to shed light on the derogatory messages that are hidden in Black stereotypes and the racist ideology that in subtle and not so subtle ways served to keep Black people in their place. The texts I discuss include short stories such as "Mountain Lion" by Mustapha Tlatli; novels such as Kateb Yacine's Nedjma, and Malika Mokkadem’s Century of Locusts; folktales such as Marguerite Taous Amrouche's “Le Granin Magique," Abdelaziz Aroui's “The Black Merchant," and Jilali El Kodia’s “The Little Sister with Seven Brothers;" and films such as Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace and Farida Benlyazid’s Door to the Sky. This is literature and film produced in both Arabic and French in countries like Morocco and Tunisia. Hence my geography does not perfectly coincide with the geography chosen by other scholars who have written on the topic of Black Africans in Arabic society, since Bernard Lewis focuses his study on “the Middle East,;” Shaun E. Marmon on “the Islamic Middle East;” Alexandre Popovic focuses on Iraq, John Hunwick on “the Mediterranean Lands of Islam,” and Eve Trout Powell on Sudan. My paper will build upon their work and will examine Maghrebian representations of blackness within the context not only of Arab discourse on race, racial identity and empire but also within the context of French colonialism.

This paper examines the ways in which articulations of Moroccan, Maghrebi, and African identity are represented in Moroccan literature of clandestine migration. While the texts that comprise this subgenre mainly thematize both the precipitating factors that lead migrants to undertake dangerous journeys across hostile landscapes and life-threatening seas and the fraught outcomes of their odysseys, they implicitly broach issues of identity formation and deformation as well. In particular, the texts address how identity construction and its obverse are articulated along (as well as across and athwart) lines of race, region, and nation. Moreover, in these and other instances, identity formations are represented as being not so much in conflict (either internally or in relation to other formations) but in a state of implosive and irredeemable emergency. Concomitantly, covert emigration to Europe is portrayed as a rational if desperate response not just to strictly economic constrictions, but also to the ongoing crisis of the post-colonial nation of which the subgenre is an effect and which it depicts. After surveying some of the key ways in which questions of identity manifest themselves across the subgenre, I will focus on how I teach two key texts from the corpus, Laila Lalami’s collection of inter-related stories Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Mahi Binebine’s novel Welcome to Paradise. I will discuss how I get students to consider some of the strategies by means of which the texts contest reified notions of race, region, and nation, especially insofar as the latter are inflected by gender. One of my goals in teaching these texts is to illustrate how in implicitly denouncing the plight of subjects who are forced to leave their homes and home countries, the texts also lend textured aesthetic substance to Giorgio Agamben’s twofold contention that the apparently marginal figure of the refugee fundamentally calls in question the seeming cohesion between nation, state, and territory and his concomitant claim that as a result of their power to destabilize seemingly given categories of identity construction refugees ought to be regarded as central figures of our contemporary world-historical moment. Lastly, I will also discuss how I connect the real-life dramas that these Moroccan texts mediate through fiction with analogous situations along the United States- Mexico border. I will explain how I encourage US students to think of these border-crossing texts not just as agents of critique, but also as harbingers of a different global order.

Wa?at al-Ghurub (2006) captures in its plot the complexity of the colonial situation in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century through engaging different peoples and spaces. It portrays the reaction(s) of individuals from the Berber population at the Siwa Oasis to the current of dissimilar cultural beliefs and practices striking their community when Ma?mud, their new district commissioner and his Irish wife, Kathrin, arrive at their oasis. Ma?mud’s life experience is the generator of events and flashbacks. His journey from being the young, hopeful son of an affluent merchant and becoming a police officer in Cairo to falling into existential despair and suicide at the oasis corresponds with the experience of the Berber marginalization under the dual colonial rule by the Egyptian government and the British colonial administration. In this paper, I examine how the novel portrays critical and dynamic areas of interaction and tension among the racially and culturally diverse characters, on one level, and among the allegedly homogenous Berber community, on the other, in order to disrupt essentialist perceptions of this significant ethno-cultural minority group in Egypt. I argue that Wa?at al-Ghurub does not only present a profound criticism of imperial doctrines and practices of differentiation, but also revokes the invasive and unethical forms of knowledge that heedlessly disregard others’ values and customs in the selfish pursuit of one’s own desires.