Colonial State-Building and the Negotiation of Arab and Berber Identity in Protectorate Morocco

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8965804
AutoresJonathan Wyrtzen (0000-0002-9536-2949, autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen43
Número2
Páginas227-249
Fecha de publicación2011-04-08
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743811000043
OpenAlexW2124302868
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas37

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

Colonialism · Ethnology · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Protectorate · Sociology · State (computer science · African Studies and Geopolitics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · North African History and Literature