Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo - Review of Colonial al-Andalus in MLN (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Moroccan Nationalist Movement and its Anticolonial Activism from 1925 to 1944
Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Studies
During the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, the European colonial rivalry over Morocco intensified. The European powers targeted the North African country because of its strategic location and rich natural resources. Hence, after establishing the French and Spanish Protectorates over Morocco, the colonial powers started to implement their exploitative policies in the Sherifian Kingdom. Those policies provoked the Moroccan people, who refused any foreign presence in their country and pushed them to engage in armed resistance. However, the failure of the armed resistance to liberate Morocco and the emergence of a new generation saturated with the spirit of peaceful resistance contributed to the birth of the Moroccan nationalist movement as a political organization aiming to confront the colonizers’ plans and ambitions by peaceful means. The present paper is intended to highlight the political struggle of the Moroccan nationalist movement from its inception to 1944. More specific...
Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (2015, Cornell University Press)
How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, the analysis in Making Morocco focuses on interactions between state and society. Jonathan Wyrtzen demonstrates how during the Protectorate period, interactions among a wide range of European and local actors indelibly politicized four key dimensions of Moroccan identity: religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid monarchy. This colonial inheritance is reflected today in ongoing debates over the public role of Islam, religious tolerance, and the memory of Morocco’s Jews; recent reforms regarding women’s legal status; the monarchy’s multiculturalist recognition of Tamazight (Berber) as a national language alongside Arabic; the still-unresolved territorial dispute over the Western Sahara; and the monarchy’s continued symbolic and practical dominance of the Moroccan political field. "Making Morocco paints a compelling picture of this country's extraordinarily complex twentieth-century history. Jonathan Wyrtzen explores interactions between Moroccan leaders and their colonizers and the responses of subaltern groups, which ranged from anticolonial jihad to individual efforts to exploit contradictions within colonial policy. The book pays special attention to practices shaping the identities of Arab and Berber, male and female, and Muslim and Jew. A work of stunning erudition, drawing on a vast range of archival and original sources, including Berber oral poetry and Arab-language newspapers."—George Steinmetz, Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan "Making Morocco is an imaginative and original analysis of how modern Moroccan identity (or identities) developed between 1912 and 1956. Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the interaction of state and nonstate actors and institutions shaped and politicized what he defines as the 'colonial political field' and continued to influence the formation of Moroccan identity in the postcolonial period. Wyrtzen offers a convincing explanation of how the Alawid dynasty survived the colonial period and regained its position as the center of power after independence. Wyrtzen focuses not only on the nationalist elites but also on rural Berbers, Jews, and women as active participants in the contested field of Moroccan identity. Especially innovative is his use of Berber poetry as a way to understand non-elite identities."—Daniel J. Schroeter, University of Minnesota, author of The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World "This book is a compelling account of struggles over identity during French colonization in Morocco. It is a must-read for anyone in search of a greater understanding of interactions between those in power in the colonial state and marginalized subaltern local groups. Jonathan Wyrtzen combines a rich, well-crafted, finely grained narrative with a rigorous sociological analysis. The Berber oral poetry skillfully discussed by the author speaks volumes on anticolonial sentiments in rural areas and resistance to colonial encroachment. Making Morocco is a major contribution to the study of French colonialism in North Africa."—Mounira M. Charrad, University of Texas at Austin, author of the award-winning States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco "In Making Morocco, Jonathan Wyrtzen takes a refreshing approach within the realm of sociological histories. The sociological concepts and categories he uses are well chosen and deployed with sophistication and a good underpinning theoretical understanding. His use of a variety of archives and archival material is also to be commended, particularly the way in which he draws on oral histories and poetry to build specific understandings of the politics of identity among people less likely to leave behind written records. This book's organization around issues of identity provides a distinctive entry point into the wider debates on state formation."—Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Warwick, author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination Jonathan Wyrtzen is Assistant Professor of Sociology and History at Yale University.
This paper is a reaction to Adria K. Lawrence’s book Imperial rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-colonial Protests in the French Empire, dealing with historical developments in the French colonial empire, and more particularly in Morocco. Focus is laid on some of the shortcomings of the book: namely the failure to mention the role played by the Zaouiyas, the Tribal Chieftains and the Protégés in the making Moroccan history specifically at that time. Other failures such as the incongruous argumentation or the ignored importance of the global context have also been addressed. This attempt at historicizing the mobilization campaigns of autochthonous populations in the French colonies has been dubbed a miscarriage is as much as it muted roles of the key players suggested above. This characterization is premised on the fact that the hypothetical shifting of the campaigns from pure politically oriented agendas before the 1930s to exclusively nationalist ones after the 1930s betrays a shortsighted drive on the part of the author presumably due to ideological as well as methodological considerations.
National resistance, amazighité, and (re-)imagining the nation in Morocco
Revisiting the colonial past in Morocco (pp. 184-99), 2013
Since the 1930s, the dominant discourse of Moroccan nationalism emphasized the nation’s Arab and Islamic character, and it is therefore a remarkable development that Morocco’s amazighité, or Berber identity, is now also being celebrated at the highest level, fifty years after independence. In this process of re-imagining the nation, in which the Palace itself has taken a leading role, the pluralistic reality of Morocco’s cultural and ethnic heritage is celebrated, while, at the same time, national unity is affirmed around the pillars of Islam, a fiercely independent spirit that has resisted invasion and division, and allegiance to the Alawite (Filali) monarchy. Moroccan “national” history is also being reworked into a more inclusive narrative, specifically colonial history of the resistance (al-muqawama) against the foreign invasion that took place during the Protectorate period. Nationalist historiography before and since independence reified Arabophone urban “resistance” against the French beginning in the protests against the 1930 “Berber Dahir,” continuing with the activities of the Istiqlal party created in 1944, and culminating in a unified official “resistance” period following the exile of the King Mohamed V in 1953 that resulted in his triumphant return in November 1955. Recent attention, however, is being focused on the earlier tribal “resistance” against colonial conquest between 1907 and 1934 (in the Rif, the Middle and High Atlas, and the Saharan south) and on the role of women in the independence struggle. As the Ajdir speech above indicates, the key criterion validating national unity (and, in fact, inclusion in the Moroccan nation) is participation in “resistance to every form of invasion and attempt at division.” In this “revisiting” of national history, the roles of previously marginalized, subaltern groups such as rural populations and women are highlighted, but a teleological historiography of the Protectorate—a grand narrative of national struggle leading to independence—continues to be perpetuated, albeit now with an expanded cast. This chapter critically considers this category of “national resistance” during the Protectorate period, with specific attention to the struggle by many of Morocco’s Berber-speaking population in the Middle and High Atlas against the “pacification” (the French euphemism for colonial conquest) of these regions. The question of amazighité, or Berber identity, was at the nexus of conflicting colonialist and nationalist narratives of Moroccan history and has historically been fraught with political tension since the 1930s, when France’s ostensible “Berber Policy” became the bête noir for Arab nationalists protesting an attempt to divide the country along “Arab” and “Berber” ethnic lines. Our goal is to reconsider this critical aspect of Morocco’s colonial past by listening to Berber “voices” themselves—by drawing on an archive of Tamazight poetry collected between 1911-1939—to begin to move forward towards a more complex and nuanced understanding of “resistance,” beyond the colonial and nationalist paradigms which reduce it to either “siba” or “national.” This revisiting of amazighité and “national resistance” during Morocco’s colonial period also illustrates how a subaltern approach can provide a needed empirical contribution to the broader theoretical discussion about nationalism, including the perennial question, “What is a Nation?” and by extension, “What is Nationalism?”
This paper is a reaction to Adria K. Lawrence's book Imperial rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-colonial Protests in the French Empire, dealing with historical developments in the French colonial empire, and more particularly in Morocco. Focus is laid on some of the shortcomings of the book: namely the failure to mention the role played by the Zaouiyas, the Tribal Chieftains and the Protégés in the making Moroccan history specifically at that time. Other failures such as the incongruous argumentation or the ignored importance of the global context have also been addressed. This attempt at historicizing the mobilization campaigns of autochthonous populations in the French colonies has been dubbed a miscarriage is as much as it muted roles of the key players suggested above. This characterization is premised on the fact that the hypothetical shifting of the campaigns from pure politically oriented agendas before the 1930s to exclusively nationalist ones after the 1930s betrays a shortsighted drive on the part of the author presumably due to ideological as well as methodological considerations.