Writing trans-Saharan history: Methods, sources and interpretations across the African divide

Lydon, Ghislaine

doi:10.1080/13629380500336664

Cited by 28 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 5 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…It is undeniable, however, that the pan-Arab nationalist movements and postcolonial state-building led to the subsuming of Amazigh language and identity, an issue which is recently being addressed by both state institutions and civil society (Boudraa & Krause, 2007 ). At the same time, as we mentioned above, early Muslim scholars and especially geographers, travelers and conquerors conflated Amazigh populations with whiteness, in opposition to black Africans (Lydon, 2005 , pp. 295–296).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Moroccan subaltern voices narrated: the historical imaginary of race and the legacy of slavery in Rabbaj’sLe Lutteur[The Wrestler] and El Hachimi’sDhākirat al-narjis[The Daffodil’s Memory]

Goikolea-Amiano

Simour

2021

Social Identities

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Nation in Moroccan historiography writings has traditionally been described as culturally, ethnically and racially homogeneous; an all-encompassing discourse that silences episodes about the historical legacy of slavery and racism in the country, and undermines multicultural Morocco. In fact, the history of Morocco’s blacks of sub-Saharan descent remains fragmented, scattered and undocumented – partly because of the scarcity of archival sources. Recent years, however, have witnessed the revival of an ‘African consciousness’ in Moroccan history and in literature. This is also the case of Maghrebi (North African) and Arabic literature from the Mashreq (the Middle East) and the Gulf. In this paper, we consider how two recent Moroccan novels, Le Lutteur [The Wrestler, in French] by My Seddick Rabbaj (2017) and Dhākirat al-narjis [The Daffodil's Memory, in Arabic] by Rachid al-Hachimi (2018), deal with salient moments of trans-Saharan cultural connections. We argue that the historical and the geographical imaginaries connecting North and sub-Saharan Africa compel a discussion of the ‘decolonial’ as outlined by the Moroccan critic Abdelkebir Khatibi, and enforce a rebound on the concept of ‘significant geographies’. In engaging with the narratives’ concern about the construction of racial and cultural identities in Morocco, we consider how these works resonate with the recovery of the subaltern history of black Morocco, and how gender, rural and ethnic identity inform and imbue the texts with a knot of ambivalent discourses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Moroccan subaltern voices narrated: the historical imaginary of race and the legacy of slavery in Rabbaj’sLe Lutteur[The Wrestler] and El Hachimi’sDhākirat al-narjis[The Daffodil’s Memory]

Goikolea-Amiano

Simour

2021

Social Identities

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“…Many of these Black Moroccans had lived in Morocco “since time immemorial” and had “always been free” (El Hamel 2002: 39). Numerous Black Moroccans also arrived as enslaved peoples from West and Central Africa, as part of what Lydon (2005) described as the trans-Saharan trade route. These individuals are known as Ḥarāṭīn and are considered descendants of freed slaves who had once worked as soldiers, domestic workers, and in other roles (El Hamel 2013: 90–91).…”

Section: Sub-saharan African Migration To Moroccomentioning

confidence: 99%

Surveying the Landscape of Labor Market Threat Perceptions from Migration: Evidence from Attitudes toward Sub-Saharan African Migrants in Morocco

Buehler¹,

Fabbe²,

Kyrkopoulou

2023

ILR Review

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Morocco, once primarily known as a country of emigration and transit to Europe, has become a destination country for migrants, the majority of whom are from sub-Saharan Africa. Using an original nationally representative survey of 2,700 respondents, together with data from two census waves and one migrant regularization wave, the authors examine Moroccan citizens’ labor market threat perceptions from this new migrant group. Consistent with findings from studies conducted in developed countries, less educated, poorer respondents express higher labor market threat perceptions. The authors also find evidence, however, that city dwellers and employed female Moroccans are the most likely to report threat perceptions, even after controlling for greater “exposure” to migrants. The article contributes to literatures on migration exposure and how rural–urban dynamics shape labor market threat perceptions in a developing country.

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“…Roughly at the same time, the wave of revisionist historiography questioned the nationalist framework and the elite-and androcentric narratives which had prevailed in Maghribi studies and opened new methodological and thematic horizons. As a result, we developed a more comprehensive understanding of the slave trade across the Sahara as entrenched in larger systems of commodity trade, religious pilgrimage, and intellectual exchange stretching from the Sudan, North Africa, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Levant (Montana, 2013;Lydon, 2005;Valensi, 1967). It also stimulated the emergence of analyses focusing on the local realm as part of larger systems such as the Ottoman Empire or the trans-Saharan system, on the one hand, and historical subjects other than the male elites, on the other (Robertson and Klein, 1983;Temimi, 1994a;Ennaji, 1999;Hunwick and Powell, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering the Gender and Sexual Archive of the Black Diaspora in Tunisia: a Decolonial Approach to Historical Anthropology

Goikolea-Amiano

2023

Cult. Hist. Digit. J.

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The available studies on the cultural history of the Black diasporas in the Ottoman Mediterranean have focused on religious and other cultural manifestations, leaving out the inquiry about notions and practices related to gender and sexuality. Taking a cue from works on the Black Atlantic and the African continent, this article investigates the notions of gender and sexuality underlying the sub-Saharan worldviews and offers a template to interpret the subjecthood of enslaved sub-Saharans in the Maghribi diaspora. The first part of the essay lays out a historical contextualisation of the Black diaspora in early nineteenth-century Tunis. Then I take the reference to the practice of al-musāḥaqa (lesbianism) among the Black slaves in an 1808 Arabic manuscript as a starting point to investigate, by surveying different anthropological studies, whether al-musāḥaqa can be thought of as pertaining to the archive of sexual epistemology which the enslaved would have taken to Tunisia and, more importantly, to enquire into how we can understand it within a non-anthropocentric historical cosmology-which, ultimately, can contribute to the necessary decolonisation of feminist and queer studies, and history and anthropology more generally.

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Writing trans-Saharan history: Methods, sources and interpretations across the African divide

Cited by 28 publications

References 5 publications

Moroccan subaltern voices narrated: the historical imaginary of race and the legacy of slavery in Rabbaj’sLe Lutteur[The Wrestler] and El Hachimi’sDhākirat al-narjis[The Daffodil’s Memory]

Moroccan subaltern voices narrated: the historical imaginary of race and the legacy of slavery in Rabbaj’sLe Lutteur[The Wrestler] and El Hachimi’sDhākirat al-narjis[The Daffodil’s Memory]

Surveying the Landscape of Labor Market Threat Perceptions from Migration: Evidence from Attitudes toward Sub-Saharan African Migrants in Morocco

Remembering the Gender and Sexual Archive of the Black Diaspora in Tunisia: a Decolonial Approach to Historical Anthropology

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