Historical Views
Beyond the Oriental Despot and the Fanatic: The Failure of Democratization Projects during Modern State-Building in Morocco (1955-1960) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Osire Glacier
Taking Morocco as a case study, my current research strives to deconstruct erroneous beliefs that divide the West and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries into opposing camps. As Edward Said, founder of postcolonial studies, highlights, while the West tends to be viewed as the cradle of democracy, the Orient is perceived as despotic and fanatical. Advocating for the eradication of reductive stereotypes and for the pursuit of an inclusive democracy globally, my work demonstrates that authoritarianism and regressive interpretations of religion are geopolitical products, rather than cultural and religious fatalities. To do so, I analyze the mechanisms that led to the failure of the democratization projects during the first stages of modern state-building in Morocco (1955-1960). I examine new sources, including testimonies, newspaper clippings from that time, and documents from family archives. Adopting mixed subalternist approaches, I offer a corrective re-examination of concepts and key events conveyed by official historical sources. By revealing the struggles of citizens for democratization, my research shows that the Moroccan people worked with limited resources and took personal risks to democratize the power structures in the country. Conversely, the West contributed to the failure of movements for democratization in Morocco, among others by selling military equipment and mass surveillance infrastructures to the governing elite.
Inclusion and Equity or Depoliticizing Cultural Activism in Canada: Today’s “Ethnic Institutions” versus the Anti-racist and Anti-Colonial Cultural Politics of the 1970s-1990s
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirsten Mc Allister, Kenza Oumlil, Evangeline Holtz Schramek, Faiza Hirji, Zeinab Farokhi
In the late 1970s in Canada, a new generation of racialized and Indigenous activists began mobilizing their communities to demand justice from the Canadian state for historical wrongs, from the internment of Japanese Canadians and the “Komagata Maru Incident” to sending generations of Indigenous children to Christian residential schools. In addition to coalition-building and feminist principles, essential to these movements was the revival of cultural practices that had been dismissed as atavistic; the validation of their accounts of history the state tried to silence; and the embrace of a communal approach to ethics, which challenged Canada’s individualistic liberal values (Miki 2004). After many of these groups succeeded in negotiating state redress and reparations (that are now criticized; see Coulthard 2014 and Matsunaga 2016), they went on to challenge their exclusion from the country’s cultural institutions in the 1990s, from publishing houses and universities to film studios and museums (Lai 2014). Their struggles radically changed the policy and funding structures of the country. These changes meant that racialized (“ethnic” communities) were included, in funding for cultural institutions. In contrast to the organizations our larger project focuses on, this paper examines contemporary “ethnic” cultural institutions in Metropolitan Vancouver, and specially, Japanese Canadian and Chinese Canadian institutions. Raising questions of power and co-option, the paper examines the extent to which they embrace the collaborative anti-racist, anti-colonial principles of the movements that fought for their inclusion in state funding or if they reproduce the state’s depoliticized conceptions of culture.
