Moroccan Other-Archives

Winner, 2024 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies
Honorable Mention, 2024 MELA Book Awards
Finalist, 2024 ASA Best Book Prize

Moroccan Other-Archives investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma play in reconstructing stories of three historically marginalized groups in Moroccan history: Berbers/Imazighen, Jews, and political prisoners.

The book shows how Moroccan cultural production has become an other-archive: a set of textual, sonic, embodied, and visual sites that recover real or reimagined voices of these formerly suppressed and silenced constituencies of Moroccan society. Combining theoretical discussions with close reading of literary works, the book reenvisions both archives and the nation in postcolonial Morocco. By producing other-archives, Moroccan cultural creators transform the losses state violence inflicted on society during the years of lead into a source of civic engagement and historiographical agency, enabling the writing of histories about those Moroccans who have been excluded from official documentation and state-sanctioned histories.

The book is multilingual and interdisciplinary, examining primary sources in Amazigh/Berber, Arabic, Darija, and French, and drawing on memory studies, literary theory, archival studies, anthropology, and historiography. In addition to showing how other-archives are created and operate, El Guabli elaborates how language, gender, class, race, and geographical distribution are co-constitutive of a historical and archival unsilencing that is foundational to citizenship in Morocco today.

The conceptual framework offered in this book sheds light on loss as a historiographic and civic phenomenon suffered in many places and communities in the Maghreb and the Middle East.

Brahim El Guabli is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.Brahim El Guabli is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.

In his new monograph, Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence, Brahim El Guabli explores the possibilities of recovering historical narratives in the absence of a formalized archive by looking to the literary and cultural production of a society faced with multiple losses.

Moroccan Other-Archives opens new terrain for the study of independent Morocco, and will certainly give specialists in the nation’s literature, history, culture, and politics much fodder for discussion. Moreover, the project’s deep engagement with questions of how history is written in the aftermath of state violence affords it a transnational bent: given the unfortunate abundance of episodes of state violence that have gone unaccounted for, the conceptual framework of other-archives has an analogical potential that is built to travel, and should.

[An] impassioned and innovative book. . .

El Guabli’s book joins the growing field of ‘archive studies’ in questioning an official historiography that silences other histories not only by virtue of its methodological precepts but also by the partnership between the state apparatus and archives. As El Guabli shows, what has been written out of official archives has nevertheless left marks on unofficial memory and it is to the excavation of this other archive that his work is dedicated. The book is written in a fluid and accessible prose that can be read with ease and pleasure.---Nasrin Qader, Northwestern University

Moroccan Other-Archives will be of great interest to scholars of the region and the global south, of human rights studies, comparative literature, archives and library sciences.---Susan Slyomovics, UCLA