Paper short abstract:

This paper describes the persistent tension in Amazigh imaginations of cultural belonging in North Africa and the diaspora between a trope of Mediterranean liminality and an increasingly dominant discourse of authenticity and indigeneity, exploring the affordances and entailments of this ambivalence

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the persistent tension in Amazigh imaginations of cultural belonging in North Africa and the diaspora between a trope of Mediterranean liminality and an increasingly dominant discourse of authenticity and indigeneity. While the Mediterranean characterizes an Amazigh—and broader North African—sense of being betwixt and between Europe and Africa, between the Atlantic world and the Middle East, the discourse of indigeneity grounds the Amazigh experience within a set of delimited ancestral territories subject to a history of Roman, Arab, and French settler colonialism. If the Mediterranean frame underlines the dynamic and inclusive qualities of the Amazigh language and its proximity to other regional creoles—from lingua franca to Algerian colonial sabir to Maltese to Darija—a parallel language ideology attempts to purify an entextualized and authenticated Tamazight from its Arabic and Latinate lexicon and transliteration history. Drawing on several decades of archival and ethnographic research with Amazigh activists and everyday speakers in southeastern Morocco and the French diaspora, I trace the history of these two oppositional frames as they emerge in the pragmatics of colonial rule and decolonial resistance. I show how tropes of the Mediterranean and indigeneity continue to divide the contemporary Amazigh movement. I argue that the coexistence of these two cultural ideologies—one open and inclusive, the other closed and exclusive—likewise helps explain how Amazigh activists have ambivalently situated themselves within geopolitics of doing ad undoing, sometimes in outspoken support of the global war on terror, sometimes at the vanguard of movements of anti-racism and social justice.