Rethinking Archives, Rewriting History: Other-Archives and the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Moroccan History of the “Years of Lead”

Abstract

Archives are loci of power where state (and archive creators’) hegemony is reproduced and sustained through the stories they allow to be told and the ones they suppress. However, this applies only to contexts in which archives actually exist and are organized. I argue that Morocco’s postcolonial history challenges Western notions of archives and begs for a conceptualization of “other-archives” in which silenced stories find their way to the public arena and resist authoritarian amnesia. Not only do other-archives liberate history (re)writing from archival hegemony, but they also open up space for an interdisciplinary study of history. Other-archives, as I theorize them, allow the inscription of the voices of the subaltern into the other-archival documents while also helping to decenter history and historiographical discourses by creating the need for historians to collaborate with specialists in other non-history-focused disciplines, such as cinema, literature, sociology, and political science. This article reveals how the existence and wide dissemination of other-archives within the context of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission’s work in Morocco (2004–2005) spurred transformative debates among Moroccan historians and incited them to push the boundaries of their discipline through the use of tārīkh al-zaman al-rāhin (history of the present).