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Paper short abstract

Drawing on extended research among activists operating on both sides of the Mediterranean, this paper will explore the particular performances of Amazigh masculinity that accompany the fight for indigenous cultural rights and territorial self-determination, from martial militants to elder bards.

Paper long abstract

Since the 1980s, activists across North Africa and the diaspora have militated for the official recognition of the indigenous Amazigh language and culture and for resource and even territorial self-determination in their mountain and desert peripheries. While such activism has taken many forms and occurred in a variety of sites—from the classroom to the newsroom to the music studio to the stadium to the street—even engagement in the more discursive genres of composing poetry or novels or songs have brought activists into direct confrontation with state authorities and rival political groups. Drawing on extended research among activists operating on both sides of the Mediterranean, this paper will explore the particular gendered performances of Amazigh masculinity that accompany such contentious politics. It will trace how contemporary male activists link their militantism to a history of Amazigh resistance to occupying and colonial forces, sometimes portraying themselves and their actions in decidedly martial terms. The paper will argue how engagement in the transnational Amazigh movement has become, for some men, an active response to what is sometimes perceived by them to be a “crisis of masculinity” when, in the context of (post)colonial detribalization, emigration, under-employment, and rural precarity, traditionalized performances of “honor” have become disrupted. Moreover, it will longitudinally trace how such masculine performances change over the lifecourse, as individual men age out of certain forms of embodied confrontation and take on new roles within the movement as elder statesmen and the repository of historical knowledge.