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Paper Short Abstract:

Through a critical, intersectional, transnational, and transhistorical approach, I will explore different narratives and counternarratives of Blackness in contemporary Morocco, focusing on the connections between local meanings of race and global imaginaries of Blackness.

Paper Abstract:

My paper, which is located at the intersection of visual/digital anthropology and critical race studies, aims to investigate the images and imaginaries of Blackness in contemporary Morocco. In the popular imagination, as well as in academia and the art world, Africa is often separated into two disconnected worlds: North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. This geographical and epistemological separation, reified and institutionalized in the colonial era, is first of all a racial fracture. Under the French colonial administration, the Sahara became a sort of "color line" separating the "White" Africa (Afrique blanche) from the "Black" one (Afrique noire). The "Saharan Divide" is also linked to historical dynamics within the continent, such as the trans-Saharan slave trade. Morocco played a major role in the slave trade but slavery and its legacies (in terms, for example, of anti-Black prejudices) are still a taboo in Morocco which represents itself as a color-blind society with no racism. Nevertheless, in the past few years, Blackness has become a crucial political and cultural issue, taking on different meanings and embracing new (counter)narratives. The question of "race" is thus a complex and controversial topic in contemporary Morocco, which touches on many aspects (from economics to religion, from geopolitics to national identity to cultural and artistic expressions and gender issues). Through a critical, intersectional, transnational, and transhistorical approach, I will explore different figures of Moroccan Blackness (Gnawa, Sub-Saharan migrants, Black Moroccan activists, and artists), focusing on the connections between local meanings of race and global imaginaries of Blackness.