Abstract
This article discusses the development of Berber literature in Morocco and the connections between this literature and Moroccan national identity as well as the pan-Amazigh identity movement. Over the last 40 years, the political conjuncture in Morocco has led Berber writers to affirm an alternative definition of Moroccanness, not exclusively based on Arabness, but one in which Berberity is included. This article aims to shed light on modern Berber literature, and on the social space in which it is embedded. It argues that there is no autonomous Berber literary field, the literature being intrinsically bound up with identity issues, but a Berber literary space, located at the intermingling of several fields (the political field and the field of language production in particular). The article first reconstructs the Moroccan political context by exploring the Amazigh movement, its aspirations and its reality. It then focuses on the relationship between the language issues (alphabet, standardization, etc.) and the emergence of a Berber “neo-literature.” Lastly, it moves beyond Morocco into the wider pan-Berber world — the Maghreb and those countries to which Berbers have emigrated — to question the possibility of a transnational Berber literature.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Political Science and International Relations,History,Geography, Planning and Development
Reference82 articles.
1. Aboulkacem El Khatir . “Nationalisme et construction culturelle de la nation au Maroc: processus et reactions.” Thesis in social anthropology and ethnology. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2005. Print.
2. This article will not address prior writings which may be considered to form the “traditional” field, composed of Amazigh writings in Arabic characters produced since the seventeenth century by an Arabic-speaking fringe of the Amazigh population from the Souss (southern Morocco) and principally linked to Islam and its attendant sciences.
3. Agadir Institut Français, Morocco, 25 March 2008.
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