In this podcast, Dr. Hisham Aidi of Columbia University hosts T. K. Blue, renowned saxophonist and the late Randy Weston's musical director, for a fascinating chat about working with Randy, jazz in Tangier, Morocco and Blue's adventures participating in the U.S. State Department Jazz Tour Programs in Africa and across the world. Take a moment to listen to this deeply engaging and uplifting chat.

Abstract:

Frustrated by the fragmented scene of modern Morocco poetry, Moroccan poet and critic Muḥammad Bennīs pens the Bayān al-Kitāba in 1981 (“Manifesto of Writing”). The manifesto, which was published in Al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, a journal Bennīs co-founded in 1974, set forth a new concept of writing steeped in Morocco’s visual culture. Throughout the Bayān, Bennīs calls for the renewal of poetry that is tied to a renewal of ways of seeing. This, he asserts, entails a critical attention to the work of both poetry and criticism, a point which the manifesto addresses as a sore subject and a challenge at the time for Moroccan poetry and poetics. He offers his own pathway, one that meanders through the visuals of the page, the Moroccan script, and the poetic image in order to recharge the body of the poem, and of the poet and reader. Through his attention to both the metaphorical and physical body, Bennīs recalls implicitly and explicitly a sedimented Andalusī poetics that had also marked the body’s importance and poetry’s transformative capacity through its turn to the language of the visual.

Speaker biography:

Lubna Safi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and in the Designated Emphasis Program in Critical Theory. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from The Pennsylvania State University, where she completed a thesis on twentieth century Spanish poets and the ways they invoked and mobilized al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) in order to negotiate Spain’s changing national, racial, and literary identities. Her dissertation, “How the Qaṣīda Sees: Vision, Poetic Knowledge, and the Transformative Capacity of Poetry from al-Andalus to the Maghrib,” examines discourses of visuality and visualization in the poetry and poetics of twelfth- and thirteenth-century al-Andalus and twentieth century Morocco. Engaging literary critical, poetic, and optical sources, the project explores how poets and critics discussed processes of visualization in poetry and the affective responses it engendered as well as its role in individual transformation and collective liberation.

Bibliography:

Bannīs, Muḥammad. al-Aʻmāl al-shiʻrīyah. Al-Ṭabʻah 1, Dār Tūbqāl lil-Nashr, 2002.

---. al-Shiʻr al-ʻArabī al-ḥadīth: binyātuhu wa-ibdālātuhā. Al-Ṭabʻah 1, Dār Ṭūbqāl lil-Nashr, 1989.

---. Kitābat al-maḥw. Al-Ṭabʻah 1, Dār Tūbqāl lil-Nashr, 1994.

---. “Bayān al-Kitāba. Al-Thaqāfa al-Jadīda, no. 19, 1981.

---. Fī ittijāh ṣawtiki al-ʻamūdī: shiʻr. Al-Ṭabʻah 1, Maṭbaʻat al-Andalus, 1979.

Gelder, G. J. H. van, and Marlé Hammond. Takhyīl : The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics. Gibb Memorial Trust, 2008.

Climate change and migration have a complex relationship, and Morocco presents an interesting case of intertwining environmental change, national development policies, and human mobilities. For her dissertation research, Rachael looks at the influence of social remittances, intangible non-material transfers across migrant connections, on climate adaptation and sustainable development in Skoura M’Daz, Morocco.

Rachael Diniega is a human mobility and environment specialist. She has studied the intersection of climate change and migration since her BA at the University of Virginia, through her MA Human Rights & Cultural Diversity at the University of Essex, UK, and currently for her PhD in Geography at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has worked and done research in sustainable development and human rights across North Africa and Central Asia. During her AIMS and Fulbright research from 2021 to 2022, she completed fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, in Skoura M’Daz, an olive town in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Rachael previously worked there as a US Peace Corps Volunteer and was very excited to return to beautiful sunsets, couscous Fridays, and the sound of waterfalls and irrigation canals.

Bibliography

Crawford, D. (2008). Moroccan households in the world economy: Labor and inequality in a Berber village. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Diniega, R., & Paredes Grijalva, D. (2021, October 23). Technically not a “climate refugee”: Legal frameworks, advocacy, and self-identification. Routed Magazine, 17: https://www.routedmagazine.com/technically-not-climate-refugee.

Dun, O., Klocker, N., & Head, L. (2018). Recognizing knowledge transfers in “unskilled” and “low-skilled” international migration: Insights from Pacific Island seasonal workers in rural Australia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 59(3), 276-292.

Levitt, P. (1998). Social remittances: Migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion. The International Migration Review 32(4), 926-948.

Paredes Grijalva, D., & Diniega, R. (2020, October 30). Thinking of environmental migration through translocality and mobilities. Refugee Outreach & Research Network blog: http://www.ror-n.org/-blog/thinking-of-environmental-migration-through-translocality-and-mobilities.

Peth, S. A., & Sakdapolrak, P. (2019). When the origin becomes the destination: Lost remittances and social resilience of return labor migrants in Thailand. Area 2019, 1-11.

Sakdapolrak, P., Naruchaikusol, S., Ober, K., Peth, S., Porst, L., Rockenbauch, T. & Tolo. V. (2016). Migration in a changing environment. Towards a translocal social resilience approach. Die Erde 147(2), 81-94.

Abstract:

Southeast Morocco is known for its oases, dates, and diverse linguistic and cultural landscape shaped by Amazigh, Arab, African, Jewish, nomadic and agrarian exchanges. Today, this landscape is also frequently colored by watermelons and water shortages. Small-scale farmers are at the center of the changes—navigating water scarcity and market fluctuations as the region orients towards global commodity production. This research examines the perspectives of farmers and local residents in Zagora to understand how water and agriculture are changing in the rural, pre-Saharan oases of Morocco, and the impact this is having on local lives.

Biography:

Jamie is a U.S. Fulbright researcher studying agricultural, social, and environmental change in the southeastern oases of Morocco. Her work stems from her time as a U.S Peace Corps Volunteer in the Province of Zagora from 2018 to 2020, and focuses on the lived experience of water shortages and agricultural transitions in the region. She holds a Master of Arts from Syracuse University in Geography and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in Middle Eastern Studies and Global Studies.

This podcast presents work related to my first book project, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the

Wake of French Empire—which concludes with a chapter on suicide bombing, focused on Moroccan

writer and artist Mahi Binebine’s (b. 1959) novel Les Étoiles de Sidi Moumen (2010)—and a second

book project, Narrative Subversions: Strange Voices in Francophone Fiction, which explores unconventional

narrative configurations and includes a chapter on narrative techniques in Binebine’s work.

In the final chapter of The Suicide Archive, and in a recently published article “Dead Narrators,

Queer Terrorists,” in New Literary History, I show how literary texts such as Binebine’s novel—a

fictional account of the 2003 Casablanca bombings—circumvent and unsettle the established

discourses around suicide bombing. Narrated by a dead terrorist from beyond the grave, Binebine’s

Étoiles uses “unnatural narrative” to ethical ends, helping us to understand the prerequisites for

extraordinary violence. “Unnatural” or nonnatural narratives can be broadly defined as a subset of

fictional narratives that violate “physical laws, logical principles, or standard anthropomorphic

limitations of knowledge” (Alber). In postmodernist fiction, unnatural narratives often draw on

impossibilities conventionalized by earlier or established literary genres but deploy them in otherwise

realist frameworks. Unnatural narratives might involve nonrealistic or unconventional storytelling

scenarios, such as a dead or unborn narrator; a narrator that is an inanimate object; or you-

narratives/second-person fiction.

Mahi Binebine’s novelistic universe abounds with unnatural narratives and unconventional

narrators: from his first novel, Le Sommeil de l’esclave (1992)—an extended second-person address that

gives way to the memories of an enslaved woman—to his most recent novel, Mon frère fantôme (2022),

which is narrated by the split or twinned personality of a touristic guide in Marrakech. Analyzing

works such as these, Narrative Subversions shows how “unnatural” narratives emerge as formal

solutions to historical and epistemological impasses and as a mode of ethical engagement: means of

cultivating what Martha Nussbaum has called the “narrative imagination,” the ability to become an

intelligent (and empathetic) reader of the other people’s stories.

Dr. Doyle Calhoun is currently Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies (postcolonial Francophone studies) at Trinity College in Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. in French from Yale University this year, where he was an affiliate of the Yale Council on African Studies. Prior to Yale, he completed a Masters in linguistics at KU Leuven, in Belgium, where he was also a Fulbright Research Grantee.

His first book project, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire, turns the difficult topic of suicidal resistance into one worthy of analysis, attention, and interpretation. Beginning in the eighteenth century and working through the twenty-first century, from the time of slavery to the so-called Arab Spring, The Suicide Archive covers a broad geography that stretches from Guadeloupe and Martinique to Senegal, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and draws on an expansive corpus of literature, film, oral history, and archival materials to plot a long history of suicide as a political language in extremis.

Abstract:

Between the 1850s and 1950s, colonial schools called médersas combined elements of French and Islamic educational traditions. First created in Algeria in 1850, the schools spread to the West African colonies of Senegal, French Soudan (today Mali), and Mauritania. The place of Morocco in this history is the subject of this discussion. In the 1910s, early in the protectorate period, the French established two “collèges musulmans,” the Collège Moulay Idriss in Fes and the Collège Moulay Youssef in Rabat. These were similar to the médersas in their curriculum and institutional framework; several of their directors had experience running médersas in Algeria and Senegal. In a field that remains deeply structured by national borders and by the notion of a “Saharan Divide” between North and West Africa, this research reveals close connections between societies usually considered in isolation.

Biography:

Dr. Samuel Anderson is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He received a PhD in African History from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2018. His research focuses on education, race, and religion in northwest African Muslim societies under colonial rule. His current project examines the médersas, so-called “Franco-Muslim” schools, that combined Islamic and European curricula in a French effort to colonize Islamic schooling and the Muslim elite in the Maghrib and West Africa. He has conducted research on this topic in Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, France, and now Morocco, with the support of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and other organizations. Portions of this project have been published in the journals Islamic Africa and History in Africa.

Abstract

Why does Marrakesh look the way that it does? The Red City is the topic of the forthcoming book by Dr. Abbey Stockstill, in which she discusses the medieval city’s relationship with its founding dynasties, the local landscape, and Berber politics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As the notion of what it meant to be “Berber” was being defined, the city of Marrakesh emerged as a metropolis that actively engaged the multivalent identities of Almoravids and Almohad dynasties. Rather than taking individual monuments in isolation, Dr. Stockstill’s work looks at how those monuments worked with each other and the local landscape to create a stage for these identities to be expressed. What emerges is a city that is both paradigmatic in its structure, yet innovative in its social and historical context.

Biography

Dr. Abbey Stockstill received her Ph.D. in the History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University (2018), and is currently an assistant professor of Islamic art and architecture at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She has contributed essays to academic journals such as Muqarnas and Hésperis-Tamuda, as well as to a number of edited volumes. She is also an assistant editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and serves on various committees within the International Center for Medieval Art and the Historians of Islamic Art Association. She is thrilled to be returning to Morocco after a two-year, pandemic-enforced hiatus, and can be found wherever couscous is being served.

Useful Links

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rUC8sxEAAAAJ&hl=en

https://www.smu.edu/Meadows/AreasOfStudy/ArtHistory/Faculty/stockstillabbey

https://www.hesperis-tamuda.com/Downloads/2021/fascicule-4/8.pdf

Selected bibliography:

Abbey Stockstill, “From the Kutubiyya to Tinmal: The Sacred Direction in Mu’minid Performance,” The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics, ed. by A. Hilal Uğurlu and Suzan Yalman (Chicago: Intellect, 2020);

Stockstill, Abbey Parker. 2018. The Mountains, the Mosque, & the Red City: ʿAbd Al-Muʾmin and the Almohad Legacy in Marrakesh. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

Ramzi Rouighi, Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019);

Mehdi Ghouirgate, L’Ordre Almohade (1120-1269) (Tempus, 2014);

Somaiyeh Falahat, Cities and Metaphors: Beyond Imaginaries of Islamic Urban Space (New York: Routledge, 2018);

Amira K. Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016);

D. F. Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, & Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008

This podcast explores the Andalusian music tradition of Morocco, known as al-ala, through the written song collections, such as the famous Kunnash al-Ha'ik. By examining the literary record, embodied in around 40 handwritten manuscripts found in libraries across Europe and North Africa, we can come to understand the evolution of the repertoire over the past two and a half centuries. Of special interest here is a little-known work called al-Rawdat al-Ghanna' fi Usul al-Ghina' ("The Lush Garden for the Principles of Song'') of which there are just three surviving copies — including one in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Rabat. In this video podcast we will explore such questions as: Who wrote this work, and when? What is actually in it? And perhaps most significant: Where does it fit in the history of the written repertoire of Andalusian music?

Dr. Carl Davila holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Yale University (2006). He lived in Fez off and on for nearly three years in the early 2000s and has visited Morocco frequently since then. Being the first scholar to write extensively in English on the Andalusian music in Morocco, he has published two monographs and numerous articles on the cultural, historical and literary aspects of this grand musical tradition. At the moment, he is developing a book series with E.J. Brill that will present English translations and commentary for all eleven nubas in the modern and historical repertoires. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York in Brockport, where he lives with his family and his cat.

For further reading

Books:

Carl Davila: The Andalusian Music of Morocco: History, Society and Text, Wiesbaden, 2013.

Carl Davila: The Pen, the Voice, the Text: Nūbat Ramal al-Māya in Cultural Context, Leiden, 2016.

Ruth Davis: Ma’luf: Reflections on the Arab-Andalusian Music of Tunisia, London, 2004.

Jonathan Glasser: Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa, Chicago, 2016.

Mahmoud Guettat: La musique arabo-andalouse: l'empreinte du Maghreb, Paris/Montréal, 2000.

Dwight Reynolds: The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus, London, 2021.

Jonathan Shannon: Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia Across the Mediterranean, Bloomington, IN, 2015.

Articles of interest:

Carl Davila: “Fixing a Misbegotten Biography: Ziryab in the Mediterranean World,” Al-Masāq v. 21 no. 2, 2009: 121-136.

Dwight Reynolds: “Musical ‘Membrances of Medieval Muslim Spain’.'' In Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain, ed. Stacy Beckwith. New York, 2000: 155-168.

Abstract

On February 29, 1960, an earthquake leveled much of the southern Moroccan coastal city of Agadir. Over the next decade, a new Agadir would be built in an avant-garde brutalist architectural style, representing a concrete example of Morocco’s newly independent future. And yet, this future is haunted by the trauma and violence of the past, by way of both the earthquake as well as colonialism. The literal and figurate aftershocks of the earthquake would go on to impact, in ways that are often obscured, various facets of life all around Morocco and beyond, especially with regards to visual and material culture. This raises the questions about the entanglements of human actors with non-human forces when it comes to histories of modernism, decolonization, and nation-building.

Riad Kherdeen studies global modern art and architecture, with a focus on the region of West Asia/Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He is working on a doctoral dissertation project on modernist art and architecture in Morocco related to the Agadir earthquake of 1960 titled “Spectral Modernisms: Decolonial Aesthetics and Haunting in the Aftershock of Morocco’s Agadir Earthquake (1960)." His interests fall within three main clusters of study: the first is in comparative and planetary modernisms via postcolonial studies and critical theory; the second is in the study of perception, including aesthetics, phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience; and the third is in materialisms, ranging from the micro scale with technical studies of visual and material cultural production, including techniques, processes, technologies, and materials/conservation science, to the macro scale including Marxist/historical materialism, new materialism, ecocriticism, and systems theory. Riad holds a B.A. in Art History and a minor in Chemistry from New York University (2013) and an M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts (2016). His M.A. thesis “Masdar City: Oriental City of the Twenty-First Century,” advised by Jean-Louis Cohen, looks at the urban design and architecture of Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates as a new iteration of the “Orientalized” city within a genealogy of recent urbanism in the Arab world, one that still succumbs to the imagined representations of the region created by European imperialism yet embraces those stereotypes to construct new narratives about its people and its nascent nation. Previously, Riad has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Art Genome Project at Artsy.

Photograph of the Agadir central post office, designed by Jean-François Zevaco in 1963. The photo comes from Thierry Nadau’s chapter in Architecture française d’outer-mer.

Zajal, which flourished in 14th century Andalusia, is a genre of poetry composed in spoken Arabic—Moroccan Arabic/Darija in this case. The genre reemerged in postcolonial Morocco, when it was largely published in newspapers. The recent history of zajal may appear male dominated: the 1992 edition of Afaq, the Journal of the Moroccan Writer’s Union, highlighted modern zajal poetry but included only one poem by a woman poet. But many Moroccan women who write zajal today look to history for inspiration, often citing Kharbousha, an iconic figure who resisted oppressive rulers through her poetry, as an example they seek to emulate. Beyond this, Facebook and TikTok, provide a rich and accessible realm for sharing poetry. My research, grounded in interviews with zajalat (women zajal poets) and close readings of their work, examines how and why Moroccan women write zajal poetry today, and what their experiences on and off the page can tell us about Darija as a literary language.

Catherine Cartier received her B.A. in History and Arab Studies in May 2020 from Davidson College (USA). Prior to Fulbright, she worked as an investigative intern and consultant at the Center for Advanced Defense Study and reported as an independent journalist from Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tajikistan. Her Fulbright research examines zajal poetry written by Moroccan women.

Bibliography:

​Afaq: the Journal of the Moroccan Writers’ Union​. 1992.

Elinson, Alexander. “‘Darija’ and Changing Writing Practices In Morocco.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 4 (November 2013): 715–30.

———. “Writing Oral Literature Culture: the Case of Contemporary Zajal.” In The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World, edited by Jacob Høigilt and Gunvor Mejdell. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Kapchan, Deborah “Performing Depth: Translating Moroccan Culture in Modern Verse.” In Colors of Enchantment: Theater, Dance, Music and Visual Arts of the Middle East​, edited by Sherifa Zuhur, 119-136. Cairo: American University Cairo Press, 2001.

———. Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Austin, 2019.

Mohammed, Hayat Kabwash. Ashaqa al-huriah, Rabat: Dar Assalam, 2006.

Union de l’Action Féministe. Saba’a Nisa, Saba’at Rijal, Tetouan. 2021.