Writing Morocco

Conference on Writing Morocco

Writing Morocco Conference: A Report

By Jamal Bahmad
Saturday, April 26, 2008.

The Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre at Sidi

Mohammed Ben Abdellah University in Fez,
Morocco, chaired by Dr. Khalid Bekkaoui, organized
a two-day conference from April 25 to April26 which
examined recent progress (and exploits!) in cultural
studies research. Participation in the event
included several of the Centres alumni and current
doctoral students under the supervision of Dr.
Bekkaoui and Dr. Fatima Mouaid. The avid
participation of graduate students from current
research programs at the university also made the
event a success story. Throughout the six panels of
the conference and a concluding roundtable, the
audience was able to get acquainted with the
imperatives and research questions driving the
work of these young academics.

Friday, April 25, 2008.

The first day of the conference began with Dr.

Bekkaouis address which shed light on the
importance and urgency of such research
encounters to the progress of the Moroccan
tradition of cultural studies, something which the
Center has always held as one of its foremost
missions. In the same vein, he called upon the
participants to continue their interests in
interdisciplinary research on local questions in the
context of recent developments in cultural theory
scholarship worldwide. Dr. Bekkaoui, who is also a
postdoctoral fellow at many British and American
universities, concluded by promising the audience
a rewarding experience by actively participating in
this high-minded conference and future events of
its kind.

Panel 1: Morocco through Travel and Captivity

Writings
The first panel of the conference, chaired by
Abdelmonaim Ouyidir, squarely addressed issues of
representing Morocco in a number of cultural and
literary works by Moroccan and European authors
in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first speaker,
Sakina El Khattabi, presented a paper on the
intersections of race, gender and geopolitics in a
selection of modern British women travel
narratives on Tangier and Morocco at large. This
first compelling presentation showed El Khattabis
interests in elucidating the storied history of this
Moroccan city which has always been a prominent
contact zone in the itineraries of colonial and
postcolonial discourses between Morocco and the
rest of the Euro-American world.
The next participant, Mohammed Ahmed Gain,
addressed similar concerns in the context of his
research which focused on a number of influential
Western travel accounts on Morocco in the modern
period. Mr. Gain demonstrated to the conference
audience the intricacies of the discourses of
gender and nationalism in the formation of Western
visions of Morocco since the beginnings of colonial
Orientalism. He concluded his presentation by
stressing the importance of seeing Orientalism as
a heterogeneous set of discursive formations which
speak volumes not only about the past of
Moroccan-Western encounters in the framework of
colonial and anti-colonial struggles and
representations but also as one the residues of
present-day media wars as is the case with the
Hijab question in France and the rise of the
discourses of Islamic terrorism, both secular and
religious.
Nadia El Bouzoukis paper tried to encourage the
audience to look at the images of the Moroccan
city in European women travel writing of the last
two centuries. The speaker laid the ground for her
intervention by stressing the travails of knowledge
and power formations in the representation of this
urban space beyond the line, to put it in German
political philosopher Karl Schmidts words. Ms. El
Bouzouki delivered many of her research
conclusions such as that the Moroccan city in the
eyes of these female authors emerges as an agora
of complex configurations of gender, space and
race issues.
The first session of the morning panel was
concluded by Layachi El Habouchs paper. This
researcher who specializes in modern Moroccan
travel narratives about modern Europe invited the
conference audience to challenge the categories of
the Self and the Other in the context of one case
study: Tahar al-Fassis al-Rihla al-Ibrizia ila al-Diyar
al-Enghliziya. Mr. El Habouch framed his
postcolonial approach by showing a keen interest
in a textual analysis of a multitude of historical
discourses which informed the images of the Self
and the Other throughout the travel book of al-
Fassi, once Moroccan ambassador to London. In an
attempt to present a coherent vision of his subject
matter, the speaker also endeavored to situate the
authorship of the narrative in its dialogical
historicity.
After a brief coffee pause, the audience were once
again convened to attend the last three
representations of the morning, which made up the
Second Session of Panel 1. The first paper,
Moroccans in Drummond Hays Gaze, was
supposed to be given by Moundir El Amrani, a
current PhD candidate in Dr. Bekkaouis doctoral
program. Unfortunately, the participant himself was
not able to make it to deliver his paper in front of
an admirably enthusiastic audience of young
researchers. Confronted with such a challenge,
Panel Chairperson Mr. Ouyidir gave the audience a
birds eye account of the research questions that
this paper means to address in relation to
Drummond Hays renditions of Morocco from his
vantage point as a colonial officer.
Next speaker Majid Kettioui presented a paper on
what he termed the rhetoric of empire and its
discontents in the framework of his ongoing
doctoral dissertation on questions of
representation and power relations in British
captivity narratives of the 17th, 18th and 20th
centuries. This presentation started by putting the
audience in the picture about the importance of
tackling this subject, which has started to attract
the attention of established postcolonial scholars
such as Dr. Bekkaoui and Dr. Nabil Matar, to name
but two. Mr. Kettioui then moved to acquaint the
audience with the historical and intellectual
contexts of a number of British narratives of
captivity in Morocco. This research topic was
further made appealing to a young audience, most
in their early twenties, by drawing comparisons
between these historical texts and todays daily
media accounts of the captivity of Western
subjects in the Islamic world, a subject too familiar
to the audience to shock them to develop a critical
reception of mediated discourses of captivity,
historically and now.
The last speaker of Panel 1 launched his
intervention by promising the audience a critical
take on the images of the Moor figure in modern
British drama. His hugely performative approach
struck a note with the discursive detours of stage
representations. Mr. Jaouad Radouani inscribed his
critique in the context of previous scholarship on
the subject such as Dr. Bekkaouis Signs of
Spectacular Resistance (1999). The speaker then
presented a formalistic account of his subject
matter by drawing on literary criticism only to
move to a more challenging task: to extract the
political and racial overtones of the representation
of the Moor from the knotted literariness of some
of the masterpieces of British drama since
Shakespeare.
This first panel of the conference was round about
by inviting the audience to share their
commentaries and questions on different aspects
of the research questions outlined in the panels
presentations. Participation at this stage was
arguably productive in both number and size. As the
speakers were given time to respond to the
reactions of the audience, it was dawning on every
attendee that the conference was already a
success story in the making.

Panel 2: Morocco through Diasporic Eyes

The second panel of the conference was oriented
towards opening the space for the participant
researchers and the audience to share exceptional
excursions into the worlds of diaspora and its
attendant promises and predicaments. As
announced by Panel 2 chairperson, Mr. Kettioui, the
two following presentations recommended
themselves thanks to two invaluable assets: first,
their scholarly rigor and bravura given the young
age of postcolonial and cultural research in this
area; second, the historical situatedness and
urgency of this research for Moroccan cultural
studies following the turbulent histories of the this
countrys famous (e.g., Abdelkader Benali and
Hollywooods Said Taghmaoui) and notorious (e.g.,
Mohammed Bouyiri and 9/11s Zakaria Moussaoui)
diasporic voices in Europe and the world at large.
After a short survey of some of the illustrious lines
of debate in Diaspora Studies, first speaker Mimoun
Daoudi confronted his topic head on by noting that
his concern is with questions of memory and
space-making in Moroccan-Dutch literature by
taking as a case study H. Bouazzas Abdullahs
Feet. The analytic scope of the paper was made
even more concrete by elaborating on the terrains
of ethnicity, realpolitik and the imaginary
homelands in this novel. Mr. Daoudi kept the same
rigor throughout his paper which revealed the
rhizomANTics of identity formation in diasporic
literature of the Moroccan-Dutch community, which
has started to capture world attention in recent
days due to the rise of serialized conservative
voices both in the community and in the host
society. Such recent cultural productions such as
filmmaker Theo van Goghs 10-minute English
language Submission (which triggered his
slaughter by MoroccanDutch Mohammed Bouyiri),
Moroccan-Dutch InterSections clarion rap songs,
and Dutch pundit Geert Wilders' 15-minute movie
Fitna are only some the harbingers of more
creativity and anxiety of the hyphenated condition.
The next speaker of Panel 2, Mr. Lhoucain Simour,
delivered a compelling presentation on the
Moroccan-American Transatlantic. Taking as a
starting point a widely held belief among Moroccan
cultural studies practitioners that much work
remains to be done to examine the flows of
Transatlantic representations between U.S.-
America and Morocco, the participant dwelt on
questions of Otherness in Hijra ila Ardi Al-Ahlam
(Migration to the Dreamland), a Moroccan
academics account of his stay in the United
States. Mr. Simour enticed the attention of the
audience by foregrounding his approach as regards
the heterogeneity of the Transatlantic
representation as both a textual practice and a
mode of understanding.

Panel 3: Morocco and War Veterans Narratives

With much dexterity, Mr. Simour switched his
position from speaker in Panel 2 to moderator of
Panel 3. This short panel addressed questions of
memory and construction of Moroccanness and its
Others through the oral narratives of native war
vets during WWII, French Indochina wars and
elsewhere. I should note here that this projects
value is double: the researchers were concerned
with compiling an archive of oral narratives from
living war veterans and then transcribe them for
publication by the Moroccan Cultural Studies
Centre Press, on the one hand, and with pioneering
cultural research practices in the terrains of
Moroccan war memories, on the other.
In this spirit first speaker, Fatima Kamal, tackled
her subject matter by devoting a substantial part of
her paper to questions of orality, memory and
identity. This allowed her to pave the wave for a
subsequent series of illuminations on key concerns
in the study of identity and representation in war
narratives. Further taking insights from different
theories of narrative coupled with a sincere
militant tone, Ms. Kamal dwelt on the affirmation of
identity in the stories of these soldiers who were
caught in a war machine which they had believed
would emancipate them and their country from
misery and colonialism. However, as they were to
discover much later, they had been the object of an
oblique betrayal by both colonizer and colonized-
cum-postcolonial nation. In such a dreadful no
mans land, they had only one weapon to survive:
narration.
Mr. Jawad El Alami, the next participant, shared
with Ms. Kamal and the entire audience a concern
with articulating the voices of resistance in the
narratives of these forgotten warriors. First, the
speaker related his insightful experiences with a
dozen oral accounts which he had collected from
the vets in their homes throughout Morocco. He
then moved to specify that his critical stance
concurs with Subaltern Studies scholarship. To
substantiate this magnificent research project, Mr.
El Alami started analyzing some of the key
moments of narrativizing the past and the present
in these war narratives.

Panel 4: Morocco in Media Discourses

After these two compelling presentations, Panel 4
was launched under the chairmanship of Mr. El
Habouch, who stressed the importance of the
theme to be broached by the last three speakers of
the first day of the conference. The floor was thus
given to Ms. Meriem El Amine who dealt with the
constructions of gendered identities in a plethora
of local and global media venues. Her overall focus
was on questions of representing the female body
in Moroccan and transnational magazines. Ms. El
Amine took the continuity between colonialist and
sexist discourses as her starting point. As a
measure of concreteness, she displayed a number
of still pictures that she argued evidence her
critique of the styled sexism immanent in visual
medias renditions of the female body and, by
extension, habitus.
Next speaker, Mr. Abdelali Jebar, introduced his
paper as part of his PhD project dealing the
representation of Fez in French and Moroccan
colonial and post-colonial postcards. Mr. Jebar
delivered an interactive talk much to his credit as
part of the audience could not resist taking a
siesta in the warm afternoon weather in Fez; after
all, some of the figurants in the showcased
postcards were winking at them that it was no
harm doing so! But the speakers bursts of vivid
analysis of each postcard convinced those
audience attendees to postpone their naps to
another day. Even Loti would not have had a
different opinion!
Mr. Noureddine El Guennouni, the last speaker of
the day, gave a presentation that took us all back
to the pages of The Times of the late 19th century.
The participant dealt with the intertwined
discourses of trade and colonial desire in The
Times coverage of a vulnerable Morocco falling
prey to the major carnivorous colonial powers of
the time: Great Britain and France. Mr. EL
Guennouni therefore focused his analysis on the
multifaceted ways in which this newspapers
representations of Morocco were, in word and
deed, geared towards making the case for the
British thrones would-be dominion in Morocco: a
raj in Africa!
Before the curtains were drawn for the first day of
the conference, an exhilarating open discussion
was staged between the audience, who had already
forgiven the speakers for having denied them a
deserved siesta, and the participants. Questions,
remarks and jokes were exchanged in a spirit and
commitment known to young academics only.

Saturday, April 26, 2008.

Panel 5: Morocco: Tourism, Youth and Language

The conference community ardently convened for
the second day of the event. It was now my turn to
chair Panel 5 which addressed a wide range of
research interests pertaining to modernity, tourism,
youth subcultures and sociolinguistics. After a brief
introduction to the major themes of the panels
papers, I lent the floor to the first speaker, Wafae El
Attaoui, who strived to introduce the audience to
her research conclusions regarding the
commingling of forces between modernity and the
jargon and rituals of authenticity in the context of a
Moroccan tradition of cultural tourism. Mrs. EL
Attaoui ably deconstructed some of the languages
structuring this tradition by drawing her examples
from destination sites that she and the audience
knew well. Her presentation, brief as it was, drew
the audiences attention to the challenges facing
not only cultural tourism in Morocco and its
thousand and one ways of museumizing the local
but also the cultural studies critic in this regard.
Second participant, Mr. Ouyidir, delivered a lively
talk on the history and cultural geographies of an
emerging Moroccan youth subculture. His analysis
lensed the practices and discourses of this
multifaceted terrain, still less know to Moroccan
academics thus far. He therefore started by
drawing an extensive map of the different theories
that have guided research in this area in American
and European academies. With insights form Rupa
Huqs invaluable Beyond Subculture : Pop, Youth
and Identity in a Postcolonial World (2006) and
other high-caliber references, Mr. Ouyidir spent the
rest of his paper endeavoring to articulate a
postcolonial approach to different facets of youth
subcultures in Morocco.
The floor was now moved to Mr. Abdelfattah Araq,
who spent a good time probing the thorny
dynamics of the Moroccan-Arabic system of
address. His analytical paper drew its theoretical
insights from functional linguistics and sociology to
elucidate the diversity and pragmatics underlying
Darijas actual and virtual traditions of address. Mr.
Abdelfattah delivered this lively talk in an
interactive way that demonstrated his prowess in
addressing nay, seducing an audience for
whom Moroccan-Arabic or its twin Tamazight is the
mother tongue so much so that I had really
exhausted all my repository of address-systems
trying to make him keep his talk to the clock.

Panel 6: Screening Morocco

The last panel of the two-day conference was
devoted to the cinematic. Sternly, but marvelously,
moderated by Ms. EL Amine, Panel 6 began with an
introduction in which she informed the audience
about the crucial importance of the two research
papers dealing with different dimensions of the
(trans)national Moroccan cinematic event.
It was now my turn to address an audience with a
keen interest in divulging the mysteries of this
understudied cinema. My paper was squarely
concerned with bringing Deleuzian film-philosophy
to bear on postcolonial film theory in an effort to
trace a manifold thesis about the subject in
Moroccan film beyond the State science of
representation. With this ambitious aim in light, I
endeavored in the first place to acquaint the
audience with the importance, if not
indispensability, of a Deleuzian filmosophy of
difference encountering Moroccan cinema.
Following this brief exploit, I was systematically
keen on stressing the point that my minoritarian
approach will not follow the dominant, if not
domineering, paradigm in postcolonial film theory
by approaching the cinematic event a matter of
preconstituted images of a conflict between the
representationlist polarities of modernity and
tradition. Crucially, I strived to work out my point
that the subject in Moroccan film is a virtual field
that actualizes in intensive schemes of duration,
vortical diagrams of embodiment AND the
becoming-other of the national subject. This was
my wager. To make the point even clearer, I
marshaled a cogent array of concepts, percepts
and affects at the core of a postcolonial Deleuzian
filmosophy of difference. After some incursions into
exploring a couple of Moroccan films, my nomad
science approach concluded by putting a
particular emphasis on the urgency of constructing
a pedagogy of the concept (Deleuze), a new
heretical pragmatics of concept-building for
cultural studies research in Morocco to take it
beyond the royal science of representation and its
attendant arborescent Platonisms.
Last speaker, Mrs. Bouchra Badaoui, delivered her
vital paper by dwelling on a close textual analysis
of a selection of films of the early Moroccan
cinema. Her approach borrowed insights from
established (Kantian) traditions in film analysis,
postcolonial theory and cultural studies. Mrs.
Badaoui challenged the audience to keep a critical
eye on the discursive imbrications of meaning-
making in the Moroccan cinema of the masters:
Hamid Bennani, Abderahmane Tazi, to cite but two.
She showed how meaning-making in their films is a
storied poetico-perfomativity that transcends the
sublime dynamics of their contingent environment
within the filmic space. In a next level, she
deployed the category of space to unravel the rich
textiles of every film whose meaning-making she
endeavored to unlock to the audience.
After these two papers which had strived to deliver
divergent critiques of the Moroccan cinematic
event, the audience was eagerly invited to engage
all the participants of the second days panels. The
ensuing debates proved insightful to both speakers
and discussants.

Roundtable
The conference was concluded by a final
roundtable chaired by Dr. Bekkaoui and Dr. Mouaid,
the organizers of the event. In their speeches, both
professors encouraged the participants to continue
to further research each in his/her research area
and to collaborate in finalizing their conference
papers findings for publication in a special issue of
the Centres journal. This roundtable was also an
occasion for both participants and audience to
outline the achievements and gaps (time, of
course!). All in all, everybody agreed that the next
conference would be an occasion to foster the
achievements and go beyond the gaps.

Prayer
After their excellent performance in mesmerizing
the conference audience, the participants said
farewell to each other and hastily murmured that
they would see each other again soon: same place,
same zeal. They embraced, scattered and then rode
magic carpets to their far abodes in Absurdistan
thus answering the call of mystical powers from
One Thousand and One Nights.
Lets pray the magicians of the Orient will bring
these indispensable voices together again next
November for another encounter before the last. An
encounter after the fact. Amen!
Space and Cinema in Morocco,
An International Conference on
Space and Cinema in Morocco,
Organized by the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre,
University of Fs, Morocco,

This conference aims at providing insight into

contemporary film production from Morocco. Focus
is both on films in space which involves the
socio-economic and political context of film
production, distribution and consumption, and
space in films which refers to the representation
of different spaces and the spatial details treated
in films themselves. Whatever the case might be,
the spatial turn in social and cultural theory has
provided us with a renewed interest in the
problematic of space by redirecting our attention
not only to how relations of power and discipline
are spatially inscribed into social and cultural life,
but also to how they are contested, subverted and
transformed. Of all other cultural forms, cinema is
best suited to reflect this spatial turn, because it is
itself a spatial form of culture. On these theoretical
grounds, the conference hopes to raise and debate
ideas such as the decline of cinema theatres in
Morocco, the emergence of new consumption
patterns, the intervention of the state/Moroccan
Television in the field of cinematic production, as
well as issues of colonial and post-colonial
representations of space in Moroccan films, gender
and space, national identity and globalization. In
addition, the organizers seek papers drawing from
or expanding on the following themes:

* French Colonial Cinema: A Moroccan

Context.

* Otherness in the Hollywood Imaginary: A

Moroccan Context.

* Cinema & the politics of (trans)location.

* Trans/nationalism and Reflections on Space

in Moroccan Diasporic Cinema.

* Overlapping Territories and Imaginative

Geographies in Moroccan Immigration
Cinema.

* History and the Production of Space.

* Landscapes, ethnicity and Language.

* Representations of the City and/or the

countryside.

* Representations of the body and Space.

* Moroccan cinema & social space.

Please send a 200 word abstract of paper

to: lkhayati@hotmail.comDeadline for
abstracts/proposals: 15 March 2010; and for full
papers 30 April 2010. Participants are expected to
cover their own travel costs. However,
accommodation and meals are on the University.

For more information please

contact: lkhayati@hotmail.com
MCSC
The Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre is an
academic research group affiliated to the Faculty
of Letters and Human Sciences, Dhar Al Mahraz,
Fez. It is interested in various aspects of Moroccan
history, thought, language, literature and culture. It
aims to create a forum for research and
publications on Moroccan cultural and comparative
studies as well as foster an interdisciplinary and
cross-cultural approach to historical, cultural, and
literary encounters between Morocco and the West
(Great Britain and the United States in particular).
Executive Council

Chairman: Khalid Bekkaoui

Secretary General: Abdellatif Khayyati,
Treasurer: Sadiq Rddad,
Conference and social Organizer: Touriya Khannous
Librarian: Bahanou Akabouch

The Centre Charter

* The Executive Council will be elected for two

years.
* The members will hold monthly meetings, 2/3 of
the members should be present to make decisions
* Decisions will be taken with a majority vote.
* A member failing to attend three consecutive
meetings shall be deemed to have resigned
* Programs and projects will be conducted with the
guidelines adopted by the Executive Council
Honorary Members

Dr. Mohamed Chad, Dean of the Faculty of Letters I,

Dhar Mahraz, Fez
Dr. Mohamed Laamiri, University Mohamed I,
Faculty of Letters, Oujda
Dr. Taib Belghazi, University Mohamed V, Faculty of
Letters, Rabat
Dr. David Richards, University of Leeds, England
Dr. John Maier, Brockport State University of New
York, the United States of America
Dr. Ezra Engling, Lincoln University, the United
States of America

Mailing Address:
The Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre.
Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University,
Faculty of Letters Dhar al Mahraz,
Fez, Morocco.
Phone Number: (035) 64 17 75 and 64 17 39. Fax:
(035) 64 08 44

RESEARCH AREAS
1 Moroccan Cross-cultural Studies.
2 Moroccan writings on the West and Western
writings on Morocco.
3 Discourses on the city of Fez.
4. Cultural Encounters and dialogues.
5 Translationon of English and American writings
on Morocco into Arabic.
6 Translationon of Moroccan literature, culture and
thought into English.
7 Compilation of anthologies on Morocco in
writings in English.
8 Postcolonial theories and Politics of Identity.
Cultural Activities
Our Activities
GUEST SPEAKERS

Dr. David Richards, University of Leeds, England

Reading Colonial Texts: Europes Encounter with
Africa: A Reading of Heart of Darkness. February,
2000
Dr. Khalid Berkaoui, Faculty of Letters Dhar al
Mahraz, Fez, "Rhetoric and Politics of the Third
Wor(l)d Eye. March, 2000
Dr. Ezra Engling, Lincolin University, USA,
"Morocco in Two Calderonian Plays." November
2000
Mr. Mohammed Daoud, "Islam in/and America"
March, 2001
Dr Charles Lock, Copenhagen University,
Denmark, 11 Sept in Terror and Admiration
Thursday 22, June, 2001
Dr Kate Baldwin, University of Notre Dame, USA,
"Postcolonialism and Feminism", July 3, 2001
Prof. Abd-Arrazaq Sghir, Univ. Abd El Malek
Assaidi, Tetouan, Walter Harris and Lawrence of
Arabia" January 2002
Prof. Meriam Ouahidi, Beni Mellah High School,
Discourse of Advertising in Morocco, 31 January,
2002
Dr. Abdellatif Akbib, Univ. Abdelmalek Assaidi,
Tetuan, Moroccan Short Fiction. May 2002
Dr Ali Wahidi, Univ. Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah,
Fez, Volibilus and a Tourist Site (in Arabic), 10
May, 2002
Dr Brian Edwards Mohammed Mrabet and Paul
Bowles: Collaboration and Translation, December
2002
Dr Nabil Matar, Florida University, USA, "Barbary
and British Women," June 18, 2003.
Dr. Richard Pennell, Melbourne University,
Australia, British Travelers in Morocco in 1830: A
Comparative Approach, Thursday 18, 2003.

Mr. Abd-Arrazaq Sghir, Univ. Abd El Malek Assaadi,

Tetouan, Walter Harris and Lawrence of Arabia"
April, 2004
Anouar Majid, Death in Cancn, 23, Feb. 2005
Sara Hayke, Multiculturalism and Cross-cultural
communication, 17, Feb. 2006
Michelle Medina, Reflection on Moroccan Cinema,
12, May, 2005
Brain Edwards Seminar Research and Theories in
Globalisation, 22-23 June, 2006

CONFERENCES and STUDY-DAYS

Cultural Week on "British Studies in Morocco", 27-

31 January, 1997
"Reading Literature and Culture," Tuesday 18
February 1997.
Visual Culture, Pedagogy and Politics of
Interpretation: 20 March, 1999
Cultural Identities in Travel Writings, April 2003
Visual Representations, 7-11 December, 2003
Mrabet and Bowles: Literary and Cultural
Encounters, 18-19 April 2004.
Politics of Location Conference, 9-10, December,
2005.