Author: Aziz BineBine
Publisher: Haus Publishing
ISBN: 191220889X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
A memoir from a political prisoner in Morocco's notorious Tazmamart prison. On July 10, 1971, during birthday celebrations for King Hassan II of Morocco, attendant officers and cadets opened fire on visiting dignitaries. A young officer, Aziz BineBine, arrived late and witnessed the ensuing massacre without firing a single shot, yet he would spend the next two decades in a political prison hidden in the Atlas Mountains—Tazmamart. Conditions in this now-infamous prison were nightmarish. The dark, underground cells, too small for standing up in, exposed prisoners to extreme weather, overflowing sewage, and disease-ridden rats. Forgetting life outside his cell—his past, his family, his friends—and clinging to God, BineBine resolved to survive. Tazmamart: 18 Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison is a memorial to BineBine and his fellow inmates’ sacrifice. This searing tale of endurance offers an unfiltered depiction of the agonizing life of a political prisoner.
Author: Susan Gilson Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521810701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
A richly documented survey of modern Moroccan history that will enthral those searching for the background to present-day events in the region.
Author: Nasrin Qader
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823230503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Narratives of Catastrophe tells the story of the relationship between catastrophe, in the senses of "down turn" and "break," and narration as "recounting" in the senses suggested by the French term récit in selected texts by three leading writers from Africa. Qader's book begins by exploring the political implications of narrating catastrophic historical events. Through careful readings of singular literary texts on the genocide in Rwanda and on Tazmamart, a secret prison in Morocco under the reign of Hassan II, Qader shows how historical catastrophes enter language and how this language is marked by the catastrophe it recounts. Not satisfied with the extra-literary characterizations of catastrophe in terms of numbers, laws, and naming, she investigates the catastrophic in catastrophe, arguing that catastrophe is always an effect of language andthought,. The récit becomes a privileged site because the difficulties of thinking and speaking about catastrophe unfold through the very movements of storytelling. This book intervenes in important ways in the current scholarship in the field of African literatures. It shows the contributions of African literatures in elucidating theoretical problems for literary studies in general, such as storytelling's relationship to temporality, subjectivity, and thought. Moreover, it addresses the issue of storytelling, which is of central concern in the context of African literatures but still remains limited mostly to the distinction between the oral and the written. The notion of récit breaks with this duality by foregrounding the inaugural temporality of telling and of writing as repetition. The final chapters examine catastrophic turns within the philosophical traditions of the West and in Islamic thought, highlighting their interconnections and differences.
Author: Tahar Ben Jelloun
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 014303572X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by internationally renowned author Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of the Prix Mahgreb. Crafting real life events into narrative fiction, Ben Jelloun reveals the horrific story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies in underground cells with no light and only enough food and water to keep them lingering on the edge of death. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun narrates the story in the simplest of language and delivers a shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity and the impossible endurance of the human will.
Author: Susan E. Waltz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520332873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Independence from colonial rule did not usher in the halcyon days many North Africans had hoped for, as the new governments in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria soon came to rely on repression to reinforce and maintain power. In response to widespread human rights abuses, individuals across the Maghrib began to form groups in the late 1970s to challenge the political practices and structures in the region, and over time these independent human rights organizations became prominent political actors. The activists behind them are neither saints nor revolutionaries, but political reformers intent on changing political patterns that have impeded democratization. This study, the first systematic comparative analysis of North African politics in more than a decade, explores the ability of society, including Islamist forces, to challenge the powers of states. Locating Maghribi polities within their cultural and historical contexts, Waltz traces state-society relations in the contemporary period. Even as Algeria totters at the brink of civil war and security concerns rise across the region, the human rights groups Susan Waltz examines implicitly challenge the authoritarian basis of political governance. Their efforts have not led to the democratic transition many had hoped, but human rights have become a crucial new element of North African political discourse. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.
Author: Colman Hogan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527565513
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The camp is nothing if not diverse: in kind, scope, and particularity; in sociological and juridical configuration; in texture, iconography, and political import. Adjectives of camp specificity embrace a spectrum from extermination and concentration, to detention, migration, deportation, and refugee camps. And while the geographic range covered by contributors is hardly global, it is broad: Chile, Rwanda, Canada, the US, Central Europe, Morocco, Algeria, South Africa, France and Spain. And yet—is to so characterize the camp to run the risk of diffusing what in origin is a concentration into a paratactical series of “identity particularisms”? While The Camp does not seek to antithetically promulgate a universalist vision, it does aim to explore the imbrication of the particular and the universal, to analyze the structure of a camp or camps, and to call attention the role of the listener in the construction of the testimony. For, by naming what cannot be said, is not every narrative of internment and exclusion a potential site of agency, articulating the inner splitting of language that Giorgio Agamben defines as the locus of testimony: “to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living.”
Author: Mahi Binebine
Publisher: MacLehose Press
ISBN: 9780857058249
Category : Kings and rulers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
It is the final year of the twentieth century and King Sidi is dying . . . Mohamed has been the king's fool for thirty-five year, his closest counsel, privy to his deepest secrets and most intimate thoughts. It is an honoured position for which many would pay a hefty price. Something Mohamed understands only too well, for this closeness has indeed come at a terrible cost. The threat of imprisonment looms, even as the once-mighty monarch draws his final breaths. In the last days of this all-powerful tyrant of the twentieth century, his faithful court fool takes stock of the decades he spent in the Moroccan king's service. For the many years of corrosive love and loyalty have left certain indelible wounds . . . Translated from the French by Ben Faccini
Author: François Burgat
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526143461
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
Understanding Political Islam retraces the human and intellectual development that led François Burgat to a very firm conviction: that the roots of the tensions that afflict the Western world’s relationship with the Muslim world are political rather than ideological. In his compelling account of the interactions between personal life-history and professional research trajectories, Burgat examines how the rise of political Islam has been expressed: first in the Arab world, then in its interactions with European and Western societies. An essential continuation of his work on Islamism, Burgat’s unique field research and ‘political trespassing’ marks an overdue challenge to the academic mainstream.
Author: Shereen El Feki
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307907430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)** If you really want to know a people, start by looking inside their bedrooms. As political change sweeps the streets and squares, the parliaments and presidential palaces of the Arab world, Shereen El Feki has been looking at an upheaval a little closer to home—in the sexual lives of men and women in Egypt and across the region. The result is an informative, insightful, and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society. Sex is entwined in religion, tradition, politics, economics, and culture, so it is the perfect lens through which to examine the complex social landscape of the Arab world. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, from sex work to same-sex relations, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the region and brings new voices to the debate over its future. This is no peep show or academic treatise but a highly personal and often humorous account of one woman’s journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate and, in the process, to better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking research, Sex and the Citadel gives us a unique and timely understanding of everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing before our eyes.
Author: Brahim El Guabli
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 153150146X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
Moroccan Other-Archives investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma play in reconstructing stories of three historically marginalized groups in Moroccan history: Berbers/Imazighen, Jews, and political prisoners. The book shows how Moroccan cultural production has become an other-archive: a set of textual, sonic, embodied, and visual sites that recover real or reimagined voices of these formerly suppressed and silenced constituencies of Moroccan society. Combining theoretical discussions with close reading of literary works, the book reenvisions both archives and the nation in postcolonial Morocco. By producing other-archives, Moroccan cultural creators transform the losses state violence inflicted on society during the years of lead into a source of civic engagement and historiographical agency, enabling the writing of histories about those Moroccans who have been excluded from official documentation and state-sanctioned histories. The book is multilingual and interdisciplinary, examining primary sources in Amazigh/Berber, Arabic, Darija, and French, and drawing on memory studies, literary theory, archival studies, anthropology, and historiography. In addition to showing how other-archives are created and operate, El Guabli elaborates how language, gender, class, race, and geographical distribution are co-constitutive of a historical and archival unsilencing that is foundational to citizenship in Morocco today.
