Moroccan Other-Archives

Abstract

Combining the study of Amazigh activism, testimonial prison literature, and novels focused on the absent Jewish communities, this book investigates how Moroccan cultural production after the passing of King Hassan II (reigned: 1961–99) and the end of the violent “Years of Lead” (1956–99) has created other-archives, situated at the intersection of fiction, documentary cinema, testimonial literature, and scholarly history to rewrite popular understandings of post-1956 Moroccan history. The book demonstrates that the post-independence Moroccan state foreclosed the promise of a citizenship-based democracy through three acts of silencing: facilitating Jewish emigration, disappearing political opponents (imprisonment, exile, assassinations), and institutionalizing historiographical and mnemonic silence about the state’s contested past by repressing academic historians and denying them access to official archives. The book argues that the concomitant emergence of cultural productions about Amazigh identity, political imprisonment, and Jewish emigration is a de facto rewriting of the nation by narrating Moroccan history through the eyes of its excluded victims whose voices were erased from official history, state archives, and canonical memory. Moreover, the book draws on discourses about transitional justice, human rights, and constitutional reforms in the country to articulate the ways in which the production of other-archives has become synonymous with the practice of citizenship. Using Amazigh, Arabic, Darija, French, and English sources, the book offers an unprecedented investigation of loss as a locus for the redefinition of the Moroccan nation through the cultural production that revisits stories of Moroccan Berbers, Moroccan Jews’ emigration, and memories of enforced disappearance.