Relating to the MENA/SWANA region Discretion by Faïza Guène | The best Algerian novel to my knowledge, it recounts the experience of an Algerian family fitting into life in Paris. Likeable characters, provides a view of Algerian colonial and postcolonial experience. Available in French and English. I picked this up after reading an interview with…
I grew up surrounded by memories of WWII—not my own of course, since it officially ended more than 30 years before I was born. My grandparents’ military service was common knowledge among those who knew them. Films like Casablanca and War and Remembrance were familiar. In school, we studied Holocaust accounts. Later, when I lived…
In honor of Salma Khadra Jayyusi, who passed away earlier this year, I’d like to revisit Juha the famous trickster character. I was fortunate enough to study Arabic langugage and literature during the years when Jayyusi’s PROTA project was bringing many works to the attention of readers in English. One of these works is published…
Guest Post by Houda Elfchtali | Meknes, Morocco Arabic version here | انظروا هنا للنسخة العربية Long excluded from the world of music–history makes no mention of female Moroccan artists before the 1940s–Moroccan women had to fight to be able to express their talent. There were eventually some developments in this arena, with national music…
In this post, I’m delighted to introduce you to some embroidery textile arts happening today and some of the people who are currently at work in these fields in the SWANA/MENA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa/Middle East and North Africa). We’ll be looking at Palestinian, Egyptian, and Moroccan examples, in that order. This post…
انظروا هنا للنسخة العربية Guest Post by Meriem Sahli | In the following post, guest writer Meriem Sahli outlines important developments in education in Morocco and identifies remaining areas for improvement. INTRODUCTION The Kingdom of Morocco is situated in the North-Western part of Africa. Its geographic location makes it both an African and an Arab-Muslim…
Two Film Industries (Separate, Not Equal) It would seem that there are two very distinct film industries in Morocco: the films produced by Moroccans, and the films produced by foreigners. In fact, they are linked to one another by political economy. Consider the following scene. Moroccan filmmaker M. A. Tazi was trying to reconstruct a…
This mini-series consists of two posts. The first provides a historical introduction to the film industry in Morocco. How did it get started? What are the big issues that shaped, and continue to shape, this industry? The Foreign Origins of Cinematography in Morocco Both domestic and foreign production are best understood in the context of…
This series seeks to map shifting levels of language dominance in Moroccan history in order to investigate contemporary developments in government policy. The previous post focused on Colonial Language Policy. Nationalist Language Policy of Arabization The Moroccan constitution of 1956 names Arabic as the sole official language, and by the end of the 1950s, a…
This series seeks to map shifting levels of language dominance in Moroccan history in order to investigate contemporary developments in government policy. The previous post presents a Brief Linguistic History of Morocco. Colonial Language Policy French Morocco’s first resident-general, Hubert Lyautey, relied on ethnological research to guide Protectorate policy. Georges Hardy, head of the educational…
