Academic literature on the topic 'Moroccan poetry (French)'

AbstractColonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territory and infrastructural development carried out between 1907 and 1934, dramatically transformed the social and political context in which collective identity was imagined in Moroccan society. Prior scholarship has highlighted the struggle between colonial administrators and urban Arabophone nationalist elites over Arab and Berber ethnic classifications used by French officials to make Moroccan society legible in the wake of conquest. This study turns to the understudied question of how rural, tribal communities responded to state- and nation-building processes, drawing on a unique collection of Tamazight (Berber) poetry gathered in the Atlas Mountains to illuminate the multiple levels on which their sense of group identity was negotiated. While studies of identity in the interwar Arab world have concentrated on how Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, and local nationalisms functioned in the Arab East, this article changes the angle of analysis, beginning instead at the margins of the Arab West to explore interactions between the consolidation of nation-sized political units and multivocal efforts to reframe the religious and ethnic parameters of communal solidarity during the colonial period.

As an alternative to a model of world literature complicit with global capitalism and its ecological destruction, critics have proposed the ‘planetary turn’ to name the emergence of a mode of thinking capable of accommodating both social and ecological diversity. Global relationality in this context is understood not only as connectivity between different cultures but also that between the human and the non-human, and emphasizes not only cultural differences and interactions but also our deep embeddedness in and reliance on the ecological environment. Planetary thinking champions the dynamic entanglement between manifold peoples and cultures at the same time as it insists on the connections between the human and the physical world. This article focuses on the ways in which francophone postcolonial North African poetry also betrays a peculiar attentiveness at once to cultural hybridization and to the riches of the ecological landscape. The Moroccan Abdellatif Laâbi and the Tunisian Tahar Bekri are contemporary writers whose poetry has combined, over the last forty years or so, a passion for multilingualism and cultural exchange with a fascination with the singular plant life they discover at home and abroad. Both use both French and Arabic, though most of their work is in French, and write against the forces of oppression left by the legacies of colonialism in part by celebrating transculturality. Both also evoke a form of intimate communion with the ecological environment, and portray it as a force with agency in order to condemn the history of ecological destruction. Their ‘ecocosmopolitan’ poetry in this way proposes a salutary communality that responds in far-reaching ways to human mastery and oppression as it acts both on cultural difference and on the delicate ecology of planet.

This paper aims to emphasize that the French colonial intervention in Morocco represents a metamorphic historical turning point that should not be bracketed from the general process of revisiting the teleological assumptions about what constitutes the contemporary Moroccan Identity. It sets the challenge of problematizing the Nationalists’ cultural agenda whose insistence on a fetishized continuity with the precolonial history has eclipsed the disruptive effects of the colonial configurations and symbolic struggles of groups who were cast aside though they were at the center of anti-colonial resistance. Telling Morocco’s colonial history from a third perspective would bring hitherto neglected and silenced actors, in our case the Berber tribal groups under the spotlight, and draw together both elite and not elite actors into the scope of analysis. The premise behind analyzing the Berber oral poetry which was composed and sung on the eve of colonial expansion, is to understand the standpoint of these “peripheral groups” over matters of political allegiance and Jihad, away from the totalizing narratives of the official historiography. These artistic outlets are primary sources of a significant importance because they provide unexplored details of how Berber groups endured living at the center of the struggle between the colonial administration and the Arabophone nationalist elite. They demonstrate also the complex adjustments and inter/ intra- tribal negotiations these groups have to go through to reconfigure those mechanisms of power that sought to annihilate their subjectivities as agents of change

AbstractThis article interrogates the South-South internationalism of two renowned US Latinx poets: Miguel Algarín’s abjection in Morocco in his poem “Tangiers” and Sandra María Esteves’s anti-apartheid poetry for the French Art contre/against apartheid project, which included the controversial participation of Jacques Derrida. Although these poems focus on different contexts of African liberation, both react to French coloniality. For Algarín, his Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a third world alliance fails. In Esteves’s work, her poetic solidarity draws on Frantz Fanon’s experience of French colonization in Algeria but also comes into crisis when Derrida’s foreword for Art contre/against apartheid is challenged as Eurocentric. Although both engagements with African self-determination exhibit residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term is a poetic Latin-African solidarity, their South-South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American, and by extension, Latinx identities have been sidelined.

The concept of motion is central to the human cognition and it is universally studied in cognitive linguistics. This research paper investigates concept of motion, with special reference to traveling, in the poetry of Widad Benmoussa. It mainly focuses on the cognitive dimensions underlying the metaphorical representation of traveling. To this end, the research conducts a semi-automated analysis of a corpus representing Widad’s poetic collections. MetaNet’s physical path is mainly used to reveal the cognitive respects of traveling. The personae the poetess assigns are found to pursue a dynamic goal through activation of several physical paths. During the unstable romantic relations, several travel impediments are met. Travel stops and detours, travel companions, paths in journey as well as changing travel destinations are the most stressed elements of ‘Traveling’ respects. With such a described high frequency of sudden departures and hopping, the male persona the poetess assigns evinces typical features of 'wanderlust' or dromomania. References Arenas, E. S. (2018). Exploring pornography in Widad Benmoussa’s poetry using LIWC and corpus tools. Sexuality & Culture, 22(4), 1094–1111. Baicchi, A. (2017). The relevance of conceptual metaphor in semantic interpretation. Estetica. Studi e Ricerche, 7(1), 155–170. Carey, A. L., Brucks, M. S., Küfner, A. C., Holtzman, N. S., Back, M. D., Donnellan, M. B., ... & Mehl, M. R. (2015). Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), e1. David, O., & Matlock, T. (2018). Cross-linguistic automated detection of metaphors for poverty and cancer. Language and Cognition, 10(3), 467–493. David, O., Lakoff, G., & Stickles, E. (2016). Cascades in metaphor and grammar. Constructions and Frames, 8(2), 214–255. Essam, B. A. (2016). Nizarre Qabbani’s original versus translated pornographic ideology: A corpus-based study. Sexuality & Culture, 20(4), 965–986 Forceville, C. (2016). Conceptual metaphor theory, blending theory, and other cognitivist perspectives on comics. The Visual Narrative Reader, 89–114. Gibbs Jr, R. W. (2011). Evaluating conceptual metaphor theory. Discourse Processes, 48(8), 529–562. Kövecses, Z. (2008). Conceptual metaphor theory: Some criticisms and alternative proposals. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 6(1), 168–184. Lakoff, G. (2014). Mapping the brain's metaphor circuitry: Metaphorical thought in everyday reason. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 958. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago press. Lee, M. G., & Barnden, J. A. (2001). Mental metaphors from the Master Metaphor List: Empirical examples and the application of the ATT-Meta system. Cognitive Science Research Papers-University of Birmingham CSRP. Lönneker-Rodman, B. (2008). The Hamburg metaphor database project: issues in resource creation. Language Resources and Evaluation, 42(3), 293–318. Martin, J. H. (1994). Metabank: A knowledge‐base of metaphoric language conventioms. Computational Intelligence, 10(2), 134–149. MetaNet Web Site: https://metanet.icsi.berkeley.edu/metanet/ Pennebaker, J. W., Boyd, R. L., Jordan, K., & Blackburn, K. (2015). The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. Retrieved from https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/ handle/2152/31333 Santarpia, A., Blanchet, A., Venturini, R., Cavallo, M., & Raynaud, S. (2006, August). La catégorisation des métaphores conceptuelles du corps. In Annales Médico-psychologiques, revue psychiatrique. Vol. 164, No. 6. (pp. 476-485). Elsevier Masson. Stickles, E., David, O., Dodge, E. K., & Hong, J. (2016). Formalizing contemporary conceptual metaphor theory. Constructions and Frames, 8(2), 166–213 Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology,29(1), 24–54. Sources Benmoussa, W. (2001). I have Roots in Air (in Arabic). Morocco: Ministry of Culture. Benmoussa, W. (2006). Between Two Clouds (in Arabic and French). Morocco: Marsam Publishing House. Benmoussa, W. (2007). I Opened It on You (in Arabic). Morocco: Marsam Publishing House. Benmoussa, W. (2008). Storm in a Body (in Arabic). Morocco: Marsam Publishing House. Benmoussa, W. (2010). I Hardly Lost my Narcissism (in Arabic). Syria: Ward Publishing House. Benmoussa, W. (2014). I Stroll Along This Life. Morocco: Tobkal Publishing House

Abstract In 1961, the poet Jacques Roubaud was dismissed by the French military in Algeria after undergoing a series of “clandestine hunger strikes,” an act he later referred to as his “very first constraint.” By using a term that at once refers to a particular and increasingly prevalent resistance act, the rules and procedures used by post–World War II avant-garde artists and writers, and oppressive structures like prisons that delimit lives, “constraint” provides a way to rethink the history of avant-garde procedural poetry through the act of the hunger strike. This essay analyzes the constraint as a “score,” a method of making that allows for the repeatability and transformation of forms across contexts. This repetition with a difference is underscored by a cast of 1960s and 1970s writers from France, the United States, and Morocco, including Roubaud, Norman H. Pritchard, Bernadette Mayer, Saïda Menebhi, and Abdallah Zrika. Foregrounding the hunger strike and seeing an aesthetics that accords with this provocative and popular act, this essay makes a case for avant-garde practice, rather than the avant-garde object, as acts that might not only reorganize everyday life into weapons and tools, but also thread trans-national possibilities of solidarity through a shared political form.

After Immoral Virtues (2009) and Mordecai (2013), Kebir Ammi has published Ben Aîcha, A travelling and a Historical fiction in which Kébir Ammi returns to the diplomatic relationships between Morocco and France in 17th century. Whereby he uncovers the noises of an impossible relationship; Ben Aicha, A famous Moroccan privateer of 17th century, falls in love with Marie-Anne of Bourbon, princess of Conti, and daughter of King Louis XIV, who met her in a lavish feast in Versailles. In Ben Aicha, the fictionalization of the story emphasises on the convening of Arab, French, Spanish and English intertext. In fact, the novel showcases several artistic forms, several writing forms and several forms of thought and hence, breaking the univocality of a monolithic vision of the world. The dialogue between history, politics, philosophy, poetry and painting made Ben Aicha a mosaic, a fragmentary text, an open domain for all cultural and linguistic influences. This generic and discursive outbreak, far from being arbitrary, is rather the expression of a vision of history and mankind sensitive to virtues of cultural encounters, he big shifts of the postmodern world which is reflected in the open structure of a literary text.

Abstract This article examines the literary and spiritual initiatives undertaken by Henri Bosco and his collaborators, notably Captain Léopold Justinard, in interwar colonial Morocco. Focusing on the Revue Aguedal, inaugurated by Bosco in Rabat in 1935, I highlight the revue's primary role as a cultural conduit between French and indigenous Amazigh and Arab intellectuals. Bosco's concept of a “poetic church,” championed by contributors such as René Guénon and Ahmed Sefriou, sought to document, safeguard, and translate Amazigh and North African literature. Although the Aguedal literary project experienced interruptions during World War II, it accentuated indigenous perspectives through sections like “Propos du Chleuh,” overseen by Justinard. I also underscore Bosco's simultaneous advocacy for French culture, challenging stereotypical colonial narratives while amplifying Amazigh voices within them. Despite financial challenges leading to the revue's demise after the war, the literary circle fostered enduring literary relationships and left an indelible mark on the nexus of colonial scholarship, literature, and spirituality.

This chapter addresses literary engagements with hijra (illegal migration from Africa to Europe) produced in Morocco and Gibraltar in French, Spanish, and Arabic. It reads Mediterranean hijra and its concluding shipwreck as the negative mirror image of the illustrious tradition of rihla—the knowledge-seeking journey underpinning the development of Arab modernity. The chapter starts with Tahar Ben Jelloun’s configuration of Tangier as the realm of subversive poetic parole in Harrouda. Following Ben Jelloun’s model, Moroccan Mohamad al-Baqqash’s deconstruction of rihla—a model entangled with Arab nationalism—reframes Mediterranean crossings as an extension of subaltern resistance to the postcolonial watan (the national construct of Arab nationalism). In turn, Gibraltarian Trino Cruz shifts the focus from national space to the deadly maritime plane of the crossings. As the hope for inclusion into alternative networks through emigration to Europe founders, only physical disintegration awaits the migrant. The chapter concludes by showing how this form of mobility delineates a new dystopian Mediterranean. This valence of the sea as a voracious abyss brings to light the epistemic violence intrinsic to the region, complicating readings of the space of the Mediterranean as a site of cultural mediation in a lingering echo of Andalusian convivencia.