“The Two Lives of Mas‘ud Amoyal: Pseudo-Algerians in Morocco, 1830-1912,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, v. 44, no. 4 (2012), pp. 651-670. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Colonial Legitimization-Legibility Linkages and the Politics of Identity in Algeria and Morocco
Scholarship on the modern state’s symbolic and social infrastructural power typically correlates high state capacity to practices of standardization, homogenization, and integration. Less attention has focused on how this power can be directed towards differentiation and heterogenization, as amply demonstrated in the case of empire. This article develops a framework for analyzing how infrastructural power is employed by modern colonial states and how it impacts society. It argues that formal legitimization structures defined for colonial subunits influence legibility practices enacted within them—what is named and counted and how it is named and counted—and that these legitimization-legibility linkages are significant because they politicize particular boundaries of collective identity in lasting ways within the subjugated society. This model is used to analyze variation within French North Africa between a colony-type linkage in Algeria and a protectorate-type linkage in Morocco, and account for the divergent identity politics and claims-making strategies that emerged within these units. The conclusion considers the broader comparative implications of legitimization-legibility combinations in formerly colonized political units.
Citizenship in the Colony: Naturalization Law and Legal Assimilation in 19th Century Algeria
PoLAR: Political <html_ent glyph="@lt;" ascii="<"/>html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="<html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/>"/<html_ent glyph="@gt;" ascii=">"/> Legal Anthropology Review, 1996
You will find pell-mell in the streets of Algiers children of the Balearic Islands, especially Minorca (Mahonnais), Arabs from the desert, Moors, Koulouglis (born of Moorish women and Turkish men), Maltese, Spanish, Negres, Italians, Kabyles, Jews living in the same sun and the same air (Bard 1854:137). Next door to an elegant French milliner, an Arab barber was shaving the heads of his fellow-countrymen, and an Italian restauranteur, who extolled his macaroni to every passer-by, was the neighbor of a Moorish slippermaker (Gordon 1845:15). Mid-nineteenth century Algeria was a colony of remarkable ethnic diversity, as the preceding descriptions by European visitors suggest. Subject to multiple invasions and colonizations over the past several millennia, Algeria by the time of the French conquest in 1830 was comprised of multiple language, religious, and ethnic groups, including several distinct Berber tribes, Arabs, indigenous Jews, "Andalous," or Muslims chased from Spain, 1 Turks, Kouloughlis, freed African slaves, and Mozabites, among others. There were also multiple active and relatively distinct legal systems. Added to this ethnic melange were European colonists, who began arriving immediately in the 1830s, particularly from areas bordering the Mediterranean. Settlers from Spain, Italy, and Malta outnumbered the French during the first several decades of French "rule," leading to much concern there and in France regarding demographic trends, foreigner assimilation, and the stability of French rule. How would the French colonial state cope with this ethnic diversity? The array of indigenous and European ethnicities presented a challenging continuum of identities that did not "sort" easily. Groups like the Arabic dialect-speaking Christian Maltese, 2 for example, posed problems; their very existence risked calling into question the "naturalness" of the categories "colonized" and "colonizer," and thus the legitimacy of the entire social order.
The French colonial occupation and the Algerian National Identity: alienation or assimilation
2012
The problem of cultural identity continues to plague the Algerian society half a century after liberation from French colonisation in 1962. This paper seeks to analyse the question of Algerian national identity during the French colonial occupation, discuss its causes, manifestations and ramifications, and examine the policies of alienation and assimilation adopted by the French authorities in their treatment of their subjects. This study shows that issues of culture and identity were continually used as strategies of control and domination, and that both of these policies carried out decisive impact on both the past and present development of Algeria.
COLONIAL STATE-BUILDING AND THE NEGOTIATION OF ARAB AND BERBER IDENTITY IN PROTECTORATE MOROCCO
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2011
Colonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territory and infrastructural development carried out between 1907 and 1934, dramatically transformed the social and political context in which collective identity was imagined in Moroccan society. Prior scholarship has highlighted the struggle between colonial administrators and urban Arabophone nationalist elites over Arab and Berber ethnic classifications used by French officials to make Moroccan society legible in the wake of conquest. This study turns to the understudied question of how rural, tribal communities responded to state- and nation-building processes, drawing on a unique collection of Tamazight (Berber) poetry gathered in the Atlas Mountains to illuminate the multiple levels on which their sense of group identity was negotiated. While studies of identity in the interwar Arab world have concentrated on how Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, and local nationalisms functioned in the Arab East, this article changes the angle of analysis, beginning instead at the margins of the Arab West to explore interactions between the consolidation of nation-sized political units and multivocal efforts to reframe the religious and ethnic parameters of communal solidarity during the colonial period.
Dividing south from north: French colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara
Journal of North African Studies, 2012
Algeria occupies a special case within the context of modern Jewish history, as the only site in the colonial world in which autochthonous Jews were granted citizenship by a colonial power; with the passage of the Crémieux Decree in 1870, some forty years after the French conquest of Algeria began, roughly thirty thousand Jews became citizens of France in one of the only acts of mass naturalization to occur under modern European imperial rule. It is usually but a footnote to histories of Algerian Jewry that the Crémieux Decree did not, in fact, extend to all Algerian Jews. At the time at which this law was passed, France had begun but not yet completed its bloody, fifty-year conquest of the Algerian Sahara, where several thousand Jews lived. Algeria’s Southern Territories (as they would come to be called in 1902) remained under direct military oversight for nearly eighty years of colonial rule, and Jewish residents of this administrative region, like the majority of Algerian Muslims, were categorized by the state as indigènes (indigenous subjects). This paper reconstructs how colonial conquest, law, and policy sought to delineate southern Algerian Jewry from northern Algerian Jewry. It argues that in the aftermath of the French conquest of the M’zab in 1882, the military sought to identify and legally isolate ‘southern Algerian Jewry’ (first from ‘northern Algerian Jewry’, and subsequently, from Algerian Muslims) for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews, per se; rather, in order to avoid jeopardizing a protectorate relationship it had built with the region’s Ibadite leadership in 1853, to protect French strategic interests, and to maintain a fragile status quo. Southern Algerian Jewish difference, neither inherent nor extra-historical, thus emerged as an exogenous creation of colonialism.
Unsettling Intercultural Communication: Rethinking Colonialism through Indigeneity, 2024
Globalization, migration, and multiculturalism are inseparable constituents of the current century. So are the myriad of-isms and-phobias. Whether in forms of racism, xenophobia, or Islamophobia, cultural Othering is, sadly, another social Zeitgeist, rooted in the dark pages of history, such as slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and colonialism. The ruthless duality of the West and the Rest, synonymous with the strategically created dichotomy of the dominant colonizer, the Occident, and the historically colonized Orient, has frequently justified and normalized discriminatory practices of the arguably multicultural Western societies towards their cultural Others. Paradoxically, cultural legacies of colonialism are almost as brutal as colonialism itself: while power, privilege, and agency remain the features of the mighty First World, cultural amnesia, invisibility, and misrepresentation, combined with denial of memory, remain the signifiers of the previously colonized, non-Western Others. A complex phenomenon of land expropriation contributed to a special type of colonialism-colonialism of the white, predominantly European settlers. Settler colonialism happened all over the world, on Native lands-in the Americas, in Asia, Africa, and Australia. Rooted in the centuries of French settler colonialism of Northern Africa, French-Algerian interculturality is highly problematic. In 2006, the Algerian Foreign Ministry declared: “Le colonialisme a été une longue, longue nuit. Mais nous sommes indépendants depuis quarante-cinq ans, et la page n’est pas encore complètement tournée malgré les efforts de nos dirigeants respectifs./ Colonialism has been a long, long night. But we have been independent for forty-five years, and the page has not yet been completely turned despite the efforts of our respective leaders”1 (Stora and Jenni 199). I argue that decades after the War of Algerian Independence that officially ended the French colonial rule, the aftermath of colonialism still plays a crucial role in both the identity politics of the respective nations, and their understanding and interpretation of history, responsibility, and cultural memory.