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Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb


Abdelmajid Hannoum Critique of Anthropology 2009 29: 324 DOI: 10.1177/0308275X09336702 The online version of this article can be found at: http://coa.sagepub.com/content/29/3/324

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Article

Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb


Abdelmajid Hannoum
University of Kansas, USA
In memory of Clifford Geertz Abstract This article examines the formation of French colonial culture in the Maghreb and the power relations it has generated. Through an analysis of colonial knowledge, the author shows the different and changing discursive strategies put in place to comprehend and control the local population. He also argues that the effects of this colonial knowledge continue in the present and, far from debunking it, national reactions by historians helped make colonial categories and understanding part of the present. Keywords Arabs Berbers French colonialism historical knowledge nationalism racial theories

The notion of culture used in this article is a common one with considerable currency among anthropologists and cultural studies scholars, thanks in large part to the work of Clifford Geertz. Human beings, Geertz once notes, are by denition symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals (1973: 140). However, human beings are not only creators of symbols and meanings, but paradoxically they are caught in, and dependent on that which they create. Geertz contends that: Man is an animal suspended in webs of signicance that he himself has spun (1973: 5). Mans dependency on culture also means that his behavior is not only regulated by biological needs, but also more so by systems of meanings that Geertz calls programs (1973: 44). The main objective of this article consists in showing how colonialism has introduced and imposed its own webs of signicance into the colonies and especially to show the conditions under which the colonized became caught in webs of signicance that they themselves had not spun. Needless to say, these colonial webs of signicance were neither xed nor homogeneous. On the contrary, they were made of different and at times even conicting elements, the implementation of which was conditioned by colonial politics and subtle and overt power dynamics. Therefore, a discussion of culture, whether colonial or not, needs to take into consideration the constraints, the limits, and the rules that govern relations between various subjects. While the article discusses colonial power relations, its goal is not to examine the dynamics of those relations in postcolonial France, but rather in the Maghreb. In scholarly terms, the metropole has always been more
Vol 29(3) 324344 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X09336702] The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

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325 Hannoum: Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb

fortunate than the colonies, in both the past and the present. Whereas the (post) colonial in France has been examined mainly through the issue of immigration (Silverstein, 2004; Silverstein and Chantal Terwault, 2006), and Islam (Scott, 2007), the (post) colonial relationship within the Maghreb has been relatively neglected despite its enormous importance. The article is thus a preliminary investigation on how the colonial continues in the contemporary Maghreb, especially in Morocco and in Algeria. The goal, let us be clear, is not to offer another narrative on the Maghreb, but rather to engage an anthropological critique of the discourse of both colonialism and nationalism.

On colonial culture
The Maghreb had known Europe mostly, if not exclusively through colonial modernity that is to say the dominant French culture of the period from 1830 to 1962. Yet colonial modernity has different faces. Thus, for instance, until 1870, colonial modernity was initially and mostly racial in character. Ironically, comprehending or imagining Algeria (and by extension the Maghreb) through racial categories gave birth to a more complex, richer view of society.1 In the case of Algeria, for instance, the entire population was seen as astonishingly diverse. During his visit to Algeria in 1841, Alexis de Tocqueville noted this diversity:
a prodigious mlange of races and customs: Arabs, Kabyles, Moors, Negro, Mahonais2 [sic], and French. Each of these races that agitates together seems to be in a space much more narrow to contain it, [each] speaks a language, wears [specic] clothing, and has different morals. (Tocqueville, 1951: vol. 5, 191)

In 1843, a more in-depth study by Louis-Adrien Berbrugger gives a fuller description of the inhabitants of Algeria (Berbrugger, 18435). Tocqueville met Berbrugger during his visit and deemed him not the most catholic mind, but the man who lived longer with the Arabs (1951: vol. 5, 207). This judgment seems justied when one looks at Berbruggers work of this period. It reects a familiarity with Algerian social life, yet it also betrays a clumsy understanding of the race theory of his time. Berbrugger talks about Algerian races, but by this expression one concludes that he means Algerian racial types. Nevertheless he labels all of them the Semitic race, except for blacks and what he considers remains of a white European race, to wit, the Vandals. Around this time, the Comte de Gobineau in France and even in the larger Europe was the most articulate and inuential race theorist whose work had an impact even on the rst half of the 20th century (Arendt, 1966: 1715). After he notes that the West African race shares what he calls the structure of the monkey, Gobineau judges them to be better than the inhabitants of the New World, who are absolutely hideous (1967: 107). Gobineau puts Europeans on the pedestal:

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326 Critique of Anthropology 29(3) Not only are these peoples more beautiful than the rest of mankind, which is I confess, a pestilent congregation of ugliness; not only had they the glory of giving the world such admirable types as Venus, an Apollo, a Farnese Hercules; but also there is a visible hierarchy of beauty established from ancient times even among themselves, and in this natural aristocracy the Europeans are the most eminent, by their grace of outline and strength of muscular development. (1967: 1078)

Between the rst and the second, between the beautiful and the ugly, between the superior and the inferior, there is the Semite race, which is a mixture of whites and blacks, where beauty and ugliness meet, the second alters the rst, the inferior undermines the superior, and ultimately the good turns bad as a result of this contact. For Gobineau, the Semites are indeed an eloquent demonstration of how mixing creates degeneration, which is fatal to a race and therefore to civilization. As human races are unequal and exclusive of each other in this view, intermarriage is strongly warned against. Berbrugger applies the racial framework of Gobineau to the population of Algeria. The newly invented concept of Semite is put to use here. Yet there is something remarkable in this early colonial text. It portrays an astonishingly diverse population. It viewed the country as inhabited mostly by a Semite race. This Semite race is itself diverse; it is made up of Jews, Turks, Moors, Coloughli, Berbers and Arabs. Berbrugger gives a description of each. First, he depicts the Jews, who constitute, according to him, one quarter of the total population. Berbrugger describes their physical characteristics. In his estimation, they have:
. . . an aquiline noise, black beard, magnicent eye albeit always false, white and smooth tint.. . . It is easy to recognize them by their air of deceit (fourberie) and humility, by the inclination of bodies bent forward, by the severe and semicircular features that frame their black eyes and that are particular signs of their race. (Berbrugger, 18435: 5)

Berbruggers representation of the Jews contrasts with his representation of the Turks. Not only because they do not have physical characteristics of their own, but also because, unlike the Jews, the Turks, he notes, are politically dominant. Indeed, Berbrugger maintains that the Turks are a mixture of Albanians, Maltese and various renegades from Europe. However, unlike the Jews, the Turks, according to him, are not deceitful; on the contrary, Berbrugger states that they are excessively honest, even when they are merchants and traders. As for the Moors, they stand in opposition to the Turks and to the Jews. They are lazy and accepting of domination, unlike the Jews who are active, acting, intriguing, the Moors are nonchalant and apathetic (Berbrugger, 18435: 7). Berbrugger also notes that the Moors have two enemies: the Arabs and the Berbers. However, the Moor also has a relative in the form of another group of the Algerian population: the Couloughlis. The Coloughlis are descendants of Turkish fathers and Moorish mothers. Berbrugger describes them as having the nonchalance of the Turks and

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327 Hannoum: Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb

the lymphatic temperament of the Moors. But they also have qualities that set them apart from both the Turks and the Moors and, in fact, from all of the rest of the inhabitants of Algeria. Those qualities are excessive naughtiness and profound ignorance (Berbrugger, 18435: 8). The Berbers, on the other hand, appear in this text as heterogeneous with profoundly diverse origins. Berbrugger writes:
They were formed either from both the Libyans and the Getules or from the emigration of the Medes, the Armenians and the Persians, mentioned by Salluste, the historian, on behalf of the authority of the Punic books of Hiempsa, or even from Tyriens, the Salentins and other elements whose remains are lost in time. (18435: 9)

They have their own moral characteristics that make them distinct from the rest of the population:
They are most bellicose and the most indomitable barbarians of this part of Africa. Their body is skinny, but very nervous and very robust. The postures of the body are not without elegance. The roundness of the head is remarkable, the features of their faces are short, and it is especially this characteristic that distinguishes them from Arabs. The expression of their gure is rude and savage. Their eyes show some type of cruelty, too much conrmed, any way, by the acts of brigandage they carry without repugnance. (18435: 9)

Indeed, in Berbruggers text we are far from the representation of the Berber as a primitive European, Christian indigne, in total opposition to the Arab that we nd in the literature of the ofcers of the Arab Bureaux (see Hannoum, 2001) and in the literature of the civilian regime (Hannoum, 2008). Instead, the Berber in his text is opposed to everybody else, he treats the rest of humanity as his enemy (18435: 9). In war and conict, the Berber is brave, but awfully cruel with his enemies, Berbrugger notes disparagingly As for the Arabs, Berbrugger depicts them as descendants of the conquerors who ruled Spain and most of Africa. They are generally cultivators, he notes. But a group of them are considered Bedouin and nomads: neither civilized nor primitives. They live in the desert and wander with their tents from place to place. The Arab cultivators, Berbrugger observes, are much closer to us, as shown by their social organization. Berbrugger considers all Arabs a group by themselves and he calls them a nation, despite relations of enmity between them. He writes:
Even though they are divided into societies or independent tribes that are often even enemies, we can however consider all of them as one body of a nation. (18435: 8)

Now, how could one distinguish the Arab, say from the Moor, the Coloughli, the Turk and the Jew? Berbruggers description of the Arab may appear positive, especially compared to later colonial representations both in the work of the Arab Bureaux such as Daumas (1847) and in the work of historians of the civilian regime, such as Ernest Mercier (1875) and Emile-Felix Gautier (1927):

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328 Critique of Anthropology 29(3) The Arabs are of average height and a remarkable force. Their physiognomy is expressive; their eye is sharp and animated, their skin color is brown, sometimes it is olive skin, rarely black like the one of the Negro. However, even when they have this characteristic [of blackness], it is the only resemblance they have with the Negro race. The type of their women is more or less the same as the male one. Their face is less rounded than the face of the Moor. The features are much more pronounced, but less agreeable. Their gait is less light and their gesture reminds often of the nobility of the antique gesture. Their hair is generally black. (18435: 12)

Berbrugger also discusses the moral qualities of Arabs and compares them to other groups, especially the Berbers. These two groups are different from each other in this text, but not really opposed to one another. Arabs are brave and excessively audacious, Berbrugger notes. They are condent, he continues, and unlike the Berbers, the Arabs treat their defeated enemy with mercy. Furthermore, the Arabs tend to observe their religion, a virtue in the view of Berbrugger. He also approvingly notes that they venerate the elderly. Arab women are also depicted in positive light:
Arab women, distinguished by their fortune, dress up very nobly. They wear shorts made of very ne fabric, underpants, and some type of silk vest and on top a long colored robe to the knees, extremely large sleeved. (18435: 15)

Clearly the description of the Arab in Berbruggers text is hardly negative. Compared to other races, if anything, they seem to constitute the nobility of Algeria. However, what is most striking about this text again is not only the application of Gobineaus racial theory to the population of Algeria, but rather it is the impressive demographic diversity that it reects. This diversity was soon mysteriously erased in the literature of the Arab Bureaux and was replaced by a literature regulated by the dichotomy Berber versus Arab. The latter dichotomy served as the main discursive device of the colonial discourse on the Maghreb, and not just Algeria. However, it has survived even in todays Maghreb, and is solidly entrenched in its forms of postcolonial culture (Hannoum, 2001, 2003). Berbruggers text prompts us to ask: why in its early phase did colonial discourse account for Algerian demographic and cultural diversity, albeit with racialized lenses? Why, by the 1930s, had the colonial discourse become more reductionist and presented a population made only of two races that are opposed to each other Berbers and Arabs? The answer may be found in the fact that after 1871, and with the disappearance of the Jews as natives,3 the colonial discourse, while still racialized, concentrated around the nation and used the opposition Arab versus Berber to demonstrate the impossibility of nationhood in the Maghreb. Indeed, after 1871 a signicant shift happened in French colonial modernity: the introduction and, in fact, the triumph of the modern ideology of nationhood. On 11 March 1882, the most authoritative text about the concept of the nation was delivered as a public lecture at the Sorbonne by Ernest Renan, once a major racial theorist, and more

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329 Hannoum: Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb

specically of anti-Semitism (Renan, 1947; see also Hannoum, 2008; Renan, 1864).4 However, Renans text on the nation articulates new understandings of the modern polity and speaks about new relations in a way that clearly undermines the concept of race. Renan identies the principle of this new form of belonging and this novel form of identication; it is the nation, which he denes in the following manner:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. There are two things, which in reality are only one, that constitute this spiritual principle. One is in the past; the other is in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to assert the undivided heritage that we have received. (Renan, 1947: 9034)

The new understanding soon affected the reality of Algeria. From 1870 onwards, North Africa was seen as a region that had never organized itself nationally mainly because of its purportedly tribal nature. The Arabs, in the work of Gautier, one of the most notorious colonial historians, are nomadic by denition, incapable of founding cities, but able and in fact eager to destroy them (Gautier, 1927; Hannoum, 2008).5 On the other hand, as a European population, the Berbers were cursed by the presence of invaders, especially the Arabs who had always prevented them from forming a viable nation. Berbers, as well as Arabs, live in tribes, either in tents or in villages. Both Berbers and Arabs cannot conceive of existence beyond the tribe. Tribalism thus became a hallmark of primitiveness and backwardness. Nationhood, on the other hand, was the mark of modernity, civility and, ultimately, rational progress. Racial ideology, however and more specically the Arab versus Berber dichotomy became part and parcel of a colonial discourse about the absence of nationhood in northern Africa. This discourse reordered North Africa and established a new relationship a tertiary one between Arabs and Berbers on the one hand (antagonistic as conquerors are to the conquered) and between both kinds of North Africans and the French on the other. The Arab is an enemy, a negation of Europe; the Berber is a remote parent of Europeans, a primitive. Taken together, they are placed in a position of racial and social inferiority, for both lack the cultural concept of nationhood. One can clearly see what kind of power relationship is hidden behind and beneath this cultural perception of the colonial state vis-a-vis the population it governs.

On postcolonial power
Colonial knowledge functioned as a means by which to order the colonies and to make them understood, so that effective colonial policies would be informed and founded on solid, empirical grounds. This is also to say that this knowledge was produced in a specic historical context with the intent to understand and control colonial reality. If this understanding and

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control failed (as evidenced by the collapse of the colonial system), one would expect a dismissal of this same knowledge that either failed to maintain control or, which does not amount to the same thing, caused the failure by its myopia or its errors. Yet an important question still cries out for an answer: if the colonial public no longer exists, one may assume that the colonial knowledge discussed above has also disappeared, or at least is considered no longer accurate and thus no longer relevant? It is most surprising that colonial knowledge became increasingly effective, albeit at times invisibly so, only after the departure of the French. The colonial signifying objects still constitute a postcolonial public, most notoriously a national one, who consume them in the form of French modernity. Hence another crucially important characteristic of colonial knowledge, or any form of modern knowledge for that matter the creation of imaginaries, of realities that produce subjects who themselves reproduce the same realities, albeit with changes and alterations. One might well ask then: how, why and under what conditions colonial objects still participate in the making of a (postcolonial) public? What are the dynamics, the rules and constraints of such making? The postcolonial period brought about a new situation: when the formerly colonial scholars retreated to French institutions, the formerly colonized national elite inherited colonial institutions such as the University of Rabat, the University of Algiers, the University of Oran, the University of Tunis, and even institutional or bureaucratic organs such as Hesperis, Tamuda and Revue Tunisienne. Further, the national elite, the inheritor of the colonial state, was still in a state of dependency, given that the journey to French institutions had become a necessity, a rite de passage not only for any would-be intellectual, but also for any would-be politician or ideologue. In other words, colonial culture not only stayed where it was born and developed, but it was also consumed as a commodity to enhance ones symbolic capital. One can even make a general, but still accurate, remark and state that the educational system was inherited from colonialism, as were most of the forms of modern governance and state surveillance. Yet, at the same time, most of the intellectual effort was directed against the colonial legacy. Thus, ve years after the independence of the last North African country, then Algerian president Houari Boumedienne declared at the rst Pan African symposium:
To reject the counter truths spread by colonialism, to bring proofs from the past and the intellectual presence of Africa, such was from the outset our struggle, a task to which we have assigned its place and its role. (Boumedienne, 1995: 87)

Boumedienne represented, at least in Algeria, this willingness to cut off from the colonial past. However, his condition of a postcolonial subject, made him unable and in fact unwilling to think outside of colonial

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parameters: indeed, he never spoke French in public, nor did he ever visit France, and during French ofcial visits he always made recourse to the traditional Algerian burnous beneath which, however, one could still see the European suit. This is different from the attitude of the king of Morocco, Hassan II, who visibly enjoyed speaking French in front of an audience of French journalists, and who often boasted of speaking French better than a French-born person. In these contrasting cases, it is clear how the actions of the former colonized are nothing but reactions. This means that the culture of colonialism still governed and imposed attitudes and behaviors, in opposing ways, even on its most fervent detractors. The Maghreb, despite the once promising Third World revolutionary experience of Algeria, can only be added to the list of those regions that have not overcome the terribly powerful colonial culture in postcolonial contexts across the globe, from the Pacic (Thomas, 1994), to Amazonia (Taussig, 1987), to Indonesia (Anderson, 1992). Whether through the political or intellectual elite (often fused in the case of the Maghreb, especially immediately following independence), colonialism has become a focal point of competing Maghrebi national discourses. In other words, colonial categories, as articulated in various discursive formations (whether nationalist, religious or variants thereof), not only contain the colonial categories of race and nation, modernity and progress, a certain vision of time, and the profane and sacred, but are often reformulated to t the postcolonial condition. The point is seen most evidently in the postcolonial era, when the formerly colonized have categories of their own to think about themselves, to contest the colonial Other, to resist him, but the same categories of colonial modernity linger. Or, as Pierre Bourdieu succinctly puts it:
When the dominated apply to what dominates them schemes that are the product of domination, or, to put it another way, when their thoughts and perceptions are structured in accordance with the very structures of the relation of domination that is imposed on them, their acts of cognition are, inevitably, acts of recognition, submission. (Bourdieu, 2001: 13)

Postcolonial power is marked by a horizontal, not a vertical, relationship, no matter the constraints and maneuvers of the so-called native. It remains limited, yet at critical junctures it can even be effective in the face of strategies and tactics of postcolonial struggle and human liberation. Nowhere is this relationship more apparent than the domain of language. Small wonder, as language is often seen as one of the dening characteristics of a nation. Colonial language, in this context French, retains a profound symbolic charge. It provides the new masters the nationalist elite with the language of power, giving meaning and in turn allowing for the proprietary monopoly of knowledge and resources both symbolic and material vis-a-vis a mass whose most salient characteristic is precisely the absence of such language. Let us discuss three examples: one from

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literature, the second from political rhetoric about education and the third drawn from historiography (the textual form of the national discourse). By language I do not mean langue in the sense given by Ferdinand de Saussure that is, as an abstract, a virtual system of signs but rather an actual system of signs, precisely that which Saussure (1984) calls langage, language-in-use, language as practiced in communications, in literature, and in all types of speaking and writing. The importance of language as an ideological project vital to the nation-state is better seen, I believe, in the domain of artistic creation, especially in literature, and even more specically in the novel. In the Maghreb, an impressive body of literature is written in the language of the colonizer. More importantly, the canons of Maghrebi literature are invariably articulated and penned in French. In 1969, in his brilliant book LIdologie arabe contemporaine, Abdallah Laroui laments the condition of North African literature in French (which he calls French North African literature) for being expressive not of national values, but of a culture of somewhere else. However, Laroui makes one exception: Kateb Yacine (1965: 176). Yacine may beg to differ; indeed, he states that I represented to this day an aspect of the alienation of the Algerian culture. I was considered a great writer because France has thus decided (Yacine, 1994: 73). Yet there is no doubt that Yacine, despite or because of his specic writing about the Algerian situation, emerged as the father of the Maghrebi francophone literature. As the Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laabi once put it, we all came out of Nejdma,6 in an indirect reference to Dostoevskys statement we all came out of The Coat of Nicholas Gogol. Yacine once wrote, French is a booty of war. This expression has been repeated by francophone Maghrebi writers such as Djebar (1985) even though, in practice, Yacine actually refused to write in French after independence and chose instead the Algerian dialect, which he considered more Algerian than either Arabic or French. For him, writing in French was justied only by the fact that he wrote to tell to the French [in French] that I am not French. After independence, Yacine took a more critical stand towards francophonie, a stand ignored by those who repeat his phrase about French being a booty of war. This is to say that Yacine stored, or recycled the booty of war once the war for independence reached its goal. Yacines act can be clearly seen as an attempt to achieve cultural liberation. But for other francophone writers, the booty of war, instead of being owned, has come to imprison its taker. Consider Mohamed Dib, one of the most notorious francophone Maghrebi writers, who only a few months before his death asserted that writing in Arabic was shameful:
The Algerians who write in Arabic should be ashamed to write in an archaic language which is for the Algerians as Latin or Greek is for the French. (Dib, 2003)

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If an Algerian responded, Algerians who write in French should be ashamed to write in a foreign language which is for the Algerians as German is for the French, he or she would not make sense in this context, nor would he or she be given a prestigious page of the Magazine Littraire to express such a view. Language is always linked to power (Barthes, 1978). It is not only a means of communication, or an assembling of words that translate things; it is, rather, a cultural system in and of itself. Let us quote Benjamin Whorf:
Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness. (Whorf, 1956: 235)

French is not, then, a medium that gives one access to modernity; this claim is rather an expression of its ideology. French is rather a cultural system, with specic categories, that determines subjectivity itself and creates an understanding of the social world. This is to say, that while in the colonial period it was understandable that French was a booty of war, since the Algerian writer needed to express his protest and, in the case of Yacine, his refusal to be French, or rather French colonized, in the postcolonial period, the same language ties the Maghrebi writer to a system of domination that continues in the present. All the more so as writing in French is always at the expense of the national language be it Arabic, Berber or a Maghrebi dialect. The booty of war, then, is not booty but a Trojan horse, with colonial categories playing the role of Greek soldiers. In fact, it is not booty at all since it is intimately linked to its origin, to its multiple and contested sites of power, where postcolonial French institutions of language, of publishing, of distribution, of francophonie are solidly established in the metropole. It is obvious what type of cultural dependency this creates. Cultural creation, especially in the case of literature and more so in the case of the novel is very much associated with the formation of the nationstate, as Anderson (1992) has reminded us. But in the case of Europe or, to be more specic, in the case of France this nation-state was given substance from within its own territory by French writers formulating and articulating French bourgeois values. French itself was established in France at the expense of other languages that it eliminated or marginalized. This process, long and difcult in some parts, short and easy in others, was deftly called by Weber a White mans burden of francophonie, whose rst conquests were to be right at home (1976: 73). However, whereas for obvious reasons the process of Frenchication was exclusive, indiscriminate in France, it became selective in northern Africa. French was taught to Europeans and was also the privilege of small lucky local elite (Gosnell, 2002). It was (and it still is) deemed modern,

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clearer and scientic.7 The same French myth of clarity and precision that developed in the time of the rise of French as a dominant language (Swiggers, 1990) was redeployed in the colonies. However, the myth of clarity and precision was given greater power by the fact that French was the language of importance and prestige. Indeed, as a colonial language, it was the language of power itself, of the rulers, of the masters. Since colonial times to the present an impressive Maghrebi cultural production has been dened by French post/colonial institutions. This shows the paradox of nationalism in the Maghreb, which claims it is Arab (and/or Berber) but expresses itself in a colonial language, and that same expression is decided in Paris by its publishing houses. The German or English literary canons do not and could not possibly be dened in France for the Germans or for the English. This is why even Yacine, arguably the most powerful Maghrebi francophone writer, bluntly alludes to the institutional difculties facing a writer: after he spoke about his disheartening experience publishing in the French press, he stated: What one calls francophonie is a neo-colonial political machine that does nothing but perpetuate our alienation. I have always denounced it despite what my detractors say (Yacine, 1994: 132). Yacine was indeed well placed to see that French in Algeria was operating a similar transformation of ideologies to those accomplished in France. Be that as it may, writing in French is essentially writing to the French public, making the Maghrebi writer a soldier of the fth column (lgion trangre,8 as Nouvel Observateur surprisingly labeled them). The Maghrebi writers, unlike their Indian peers for instance, do not have a place in the French literary establishment. They are taught neither in French high schools and only marginally in universities. Being themselves products of the colonial imaginary, their effect on the French imaginary is less than minimal, despite the fact that the authors advocate are those of francophonie. Therefore, authors are looked at with paradoxical suspicion by the national ideologue who accuses them of providing the literature of folklore.9 These authors remain, in the end, writers for a small, liberal, Frenchied elite. They reach the national elite because of language, and because they are, after all, an expression of national culture after independence. Yet they are as far from the masses as a foreign language is for a people. For despite, or maybe because of its high symbolic capital, which makes it a desired and a highly competitive commodity, the masses of the Maghreb do not speak French and they do not even know it well enough to read it.10 This takes me to the second issue of political discourse on language and culture. In May 2000, during a lecture on the situation in Morocco given by US ambassador Edward Gabriel, the then president of Al-Akhawayn University and a former minister of education was asked about the state of education in Morocco in front of a small audience of students and faculty. His response was:

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335 Hannoum: Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb We admit that we failed in the educational project. This failure has to do with the fact that we were in charge of educating a multilingual population. In Morocco, Arabic is not spoken, but what we nd instead is three languages: Moroccan dialect, Berber, and French. We formulated the educational program as if all Moroccans speak the same language.11

He then proposed a solution:


What should be done is to educate the people according to the language they speak. Therefore, those who speak French need to be educated in that language, others speak Arabic, they should be educated in it, and others speak Berber, they needed to be educated accordingly.12

The Moroccan diplomat was not, in fact, stating his vision of Moroccan education, but was expressing the cultural situation in Morocco, which he describes as a failure. In other words, he confessed our failure in education and, surprisingly, proposes the same failed program as a solution. The linguistic divisions are the result of colonial rule. Both Arabic and Berber have come to be dened in relation to French. In practical terms, languages are endowed with different and unequal symbolic capital, mainly because of the ideologies associated with them. There is no doubt that French is, by far, considered the language of the elite. It is the language that allows access to and the ability to monopolize important positions in Moroccan (as well as in francophone Maghreb) society mainly because it is deemed to be the language of modernity of science, and of savoir faire and savoir vivre. Arabic is second, and even secondary. Its relative importance stems mostly from the fact that it is seen as the language of Islam, sacred in the view of the masses, but useful in the eyes of the state. It is the language by which state ideology is articulated and communicated. Berber (or rather the ensemble of dialects referred to as Berber) is a language with minimal symbolic capital. It is mostly the language of those masses located in the periphery of the nation-state both physically and metaphorically. Language in education has always been the strongest means by which a state assures linguistic hegemony and homogeneity in modern liberal societies. The vision of the Moroccan diplomat, which is an ofcial vision, shows that the institutional power of education is seen as means by which to assure the continuation of socioeconomic inequalities. Linguistic divisions must be abridged to achieve social justice, one may think; however, what the Moroccan diplomat suggests as a solution is the same problem, namely to maintain these divisions and therefore with them the differential access to power and social positions intact. Yet, as stated above, French remains, as it used to be, a symbolic good of competition that not many could afford. It constitutes the currency that can give one access to greater and better material goods. This does not mean those who do not speak it or know it are free from colonial culture. On the contrary, French becomes a symbol in and of itself with maybe a greater impact on the minds of those who do not speak it. The value of a

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commodity may become more appreciated by those who do not possess it. Those who have it keep it, jealously. Those who do not have it, dream of it, constantly. This will take me to the second question which is the question of national history. The most authoritative national historical narrative of the Maghreb Larouis The History of the Maghreb (1977) was written in French. Semiotics shows that the form of a narrative is as meaningful as its content and that form and content cannot be separated, the way they were in the old philological tradition. There is quite a cultural paradox in a national narrative that argues in French that the Maghreb is Arab and Muslim, and that it has had a unity and a culture of its own. This discrepancy between the form and the content can be explained only if the national is examined not as a discourse of resistance and challenge, but rather as a genealogical narrative that owes its very existence to the colonial. It then follows that, given the form and the content of the national narrative, it is not a counterhistory (of the colonial), but rather it is a postcolonial history. Therefore, the national, like the colonial, stands as the counter history of the precolonial (and thus in this case Muslim) historiography. This should come as no surprise as the colonial dismissed Muslim historiography (using solely an argument of authority) as lacking historicity (Gautier, 1927). The national historian followed suit most of the time. Abdallah Laroui, arguably the most inuential Maghrebi national historian, sets as a goal for himself (and for the nation) to articulate its history and thus dene its present. He does so argumentatively against colonial historiography and against what Laroui himself calls Khaldunism. By Khaldunism, Laroui means the framework of analysis, but also the theses, and even the narration itself found in the work of Ibn Khaldun. Why Ibn Khaldun? Not only because, to a certain degree, Ibn Khalduns historiography was a colonial phenomenon, but also because the historiography of Ibn Khaldun itself was one of the rst, and indeed one of the major cognitive casualties caused by colonial administration. Indeed, LHistoire des Berbres, a French colonial text that bears the name of Ibn Khaldun, is rather a transformation and an appropriation of the Arabic historiography of Ibn Khaldun, through the act of translation (Hannoum, 2003). The historical narrative structure of Ibn Khalduns work in Arabic is not regulated by modern rules of narration: beginning, plot and end. Its narrative grammar is not the same either. The Greimasian model of narrative actors does not apply (Greimas, 1983). Instead, what one nds is a narrative continuation in which there is no beginning, no end, no hero, no villain, no opponent, nor helper. Further, whereas the Khaldunian narrative pertains to a type of a historical discourse that Foucault calls the discourse of the race war (as different from the racist discourse) (Foucault, 1997: 6061), the colonial discourse of the late part of the 19th century was rather a counter-history, precisely because of its introduction of the

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narrative of the race struggle and also because it paid attention to that which was obscure and to those supposedly without glory. The colonial narrative was undoubtedly one of these counter-histories, not only because it transformed a discourse that, mutatis mutandis, may be called a discourse of sovereignty, that is the Khaldunian discourse, but also because it pays attention to those who, according to counter-colonial narrative, were left in the shadow, those glory-less people, in our case the Berbers. The colonial historical discourse (based on, yet opposed to, the Muslim historical discourse) narrates the racial struggle between Arabs and Berbers. It also goes on demonstrating the misery, humiliation and above all domination of the Berbers at the hands of Arabs. Whereas the Muslim discourse, especially in its Khaldunian form, is a discourse that speaks about the glory of the Berbers, which is ultimately the glory of the suzerain who has been since the 11th century a Berber, the colonial discourse makes the suzerain disappear and he is replaced by the people, the Berbers, by the race (Hannoum, 2008). The aim of this is to link race to the colonial enterprise and thus for the latter to present itself as the savior of those who had no glory and who were found in the shadows in the time of the conquest, the time of liberation, to use the same colonial language. Initially, at the time of the conquest, the French army claimed to liberate the Berbers from the Turks, and later, at the time of colonization, the settler called for the liberation of the Berber from the Arab. The latter liberation took on more signicance, especially in colonial historiography from Mercier (1875) and more importantly from Gautier (1927), and even later with Brunschvick (1946). But again, this colonial discourse is one of both liberation and race struggle. This is what the national historian inherited a discursive colonial situation, itself the result of an entire age of colonial cultural production. This colonial cultural production is nothing more and nothing less than a narrative called: the Maghreb. About this, the discourse of the national historian is rather ambiguous. On the one hand, his narrative too celebrates the glory of the Berbers, it brings him out of the shadows; on the other hand, this glory is an unhappy one, it was never achieved and thus it is a misery created by those who make it the result of Arab domination. It is rather the work of Rome in the past (as evidenced, for the national historian, by the numerous revolts against it) and continued in the present by France, as evidenced by colonial occupation that created a state of retardation even after the departure of the French. In Larouis narrative, the history of the Maghreb was not a history of struggle between dominating Arabs and dominated Berbers (this is the colonial argument repeated in the national), but rather a history of class struggle undertaken within a national territory, threatened by an imperialist Other Rome (whose heritage, even in the Maghreb, colonial France

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claimed, this is the colonial myth hiding in the skirts of the national discourse). To quote Laroui:
The Moors were dispossessed peasants who chose freedom; the Numidians were free peasants and farm workers who periodically avenged themselves on their exploiters. It was on the one hand a national, on the other a social, protest. Roman development of the land brought not only forced sedentarization, but also exhaustion of the soil, deforestation and social debasement. (1977: 55)

One can see how the category Berber, so dear to colonial authors, is replaced in the above quote by other names: Moors and Numedians, where each of the terms is endowed with a socioeconomic meaning, not a racial one. However, despite or because of this effort to de-legitimize the colonial discourse of the race struggle, Laroui could not ignore the very important question of the origins of the races, which is part and parcel of the colonial discourse. In fact, the category of origin itself is a colonial category. As seen earlier, the colonial discourse traces the origins of Berbers to Europe. The thesis of the European racial origin of the Berbers makes the race struggle not only between Berbers and Arabs, but also between the latter and Europeans, who, by it, are given the legitimacy to be here to liberate. Laroui offers, rather, a narrative of diversity, mostly socioeconomic. Laroui assumes that the purported cultural unity stemmed from the Sahara and contact with the Mediterranean, which resulted in the end of cultural diversity (itself relative, given the Eastern origins of Mediterranean countries). Thus, the problem of origin of both cultures and inhabitants are differently solved; both are originally diverse and both are originally Oriental. The Phoenicians did not play any role in a civilizing mission, Laroui argues, but only brought urban commerce to an agricultural society. Nevertheless, and as a result of this contact, Laroui continues, one nds at center stage the formation of monarchies in the north, which in some ways ultimately created a discontinuity between the east and north. Thus, one can nd the three geographical divisions of North Africa: the Sahara, the east (where a number of colonies developed), and the north, where local monarchies established themselves, he notes. This division, already established by the Phoenicians, became more agrant during the two centuries of Roman occupation. While the east was under occupation, in the south the Sahara had become a refuge for those who chose freedom instead of submission to Rome, Laroui concludes. It is clear to see here how, instead of the historical narrative of the struggle of races, Laroui maintained (and in fact imported) the narrative of the class struggle. The transition from one the race struggle to the other the class struggle was natural because the narrative of the struggle of classes itself has its origin in the narrative of the struggle of races. Marx wrote to Engels saying but, our class struggle, you know very well where we found it: we found it in the [work of] French historians when they narrated the race struggle (quoted in Foucault, 1997: 69). The national historian operated here, then, the same transformation created by the European

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historians of the 19th century vis-a-vis the discourse of race struggle. This means that, even within the framework of the nation, epistemological discontinuities are nothing but continuities of the former colonizer. What happens in Europe, sooner or later, happens in the (post)colony. It is also clear how this discourse is fraught with colonial categories, some of which may not seem so. Categories such as foreign, occupation, domination, liberation all denote the national body. In colonial narrative, they were introduced to maintain the thesis of the Arab (race) invading and dominating the Berber (race) who were liberated by the French (nation). The terms foreign, occupation and domination draw their meanings only from within the frame of the national semantics that establishes who is us and who is others, what territory is occupied and what territory is or has to be liberated. Whether the population of the region referred to in Muslim historiography as Ifriqiya thought of these events in such language at the time they occurred, no one asked. However, for the sake of clarity, given the absence of the major category of the nation, the absence of its associated categories must have been also absent in the pre-colonial Maghreb. Equally absent from previous pre-national writings is the name Maghreb itself. The name was made most popular by Emile-Felix Gautier, and behind it there is a whole colonial politics of naming that had to isolate a French zone called the Maghreb to make it distinct from what is not French, and give it a personality of its own that cuts it off from other colonial entities, eastwards, westward and southward, in a complex game then called geopolitics. Laroui himself seems well aware of this, or why else would he write: The idea is to trace the genesis of the concept of the Maghreb and discover how it ultimately took on an objective denition (1977: 14)? Yet he does not show how the name itself is colonial and because it is so the name itself is an appearance of colonial power. For, as Nietzsche poignantly put it: One should conceive of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the ruler: they say this is this and this, they seal every thing and event with a sound, as it were, take possession of it (1967: 26). Regardless of the national historians impressive intellectual strength, and even high acuteness, he accepts colonial naming, repeats these names and reiterates colonial categories, even when he does so to refute them. In so doing, colonial power displays itself in a postcolonial cognitive act. The question now is: Could it be otherwise? In any case, here one can see the pervasive power of the colonial over the national and cannot but accept the argument of Anderson (1992) that nationalism in the Third World is a colonial import and that the nation was also imagined on the colonial model. Such an argument, I believe, was misunderstood by Partha Chatterjee, who argues for a thesis that would rather give credit to the Third World and restore its agency. He maintains, as a counter-argument, that the Third World did not seem to have even sufcient agency to imagine itself (Chatterjee, 1996). While one can understand that Chatterjees account, which is consistent with the theory of

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omnipresent power of Foucault, Andersons view does not undermine the agency of the Third World, nor does it even undermine the idea that power is everywhere. On the contrary, one should look at the term imagination and understand it as a philosophical and more specically phenomenological concept. To imagine is not to create ex nihilo, but rather to restructure semantic elds (Ricoeur, 1994). Even Foucault concedes that an idea is born out of an idea not out of the absence of an idea (Foucault, 1972). Therefore, what the nationalists have imagined, that is created whether in Algeria, India or elsewhere, is a transformation of available colonial semantics. Yet such transformation bears within itself the unequal power relationship between what is transformed and what it is transformed from. The concept of the nation, with its key categories of unity, territory, language, history, progress, modernity and even will, are all colonial modern categories, despite their restructuring in national narratives. Nationalism in Europe was transformed out of the semantics (or the content) of what Anderson calls print capitalism. Third World nationalism is a restructuring of colonial semantics. It is one idea created out of another. Anderson does not maintain that nationalism in Europe is the same as nationalism in Indonesia. Rather, nationalism in the Third World was an import and, because of this, it had to adjust to where it was imported to. Yet the national ideologue (in the form of historian, writer, politician or all of the above) had nothing available to him but those same colonial categories that he oftentimes reversed and, in so doing, not only reproduced but also perpetuated. Such national discourse, created out of the colonial semantics, in reaction to it, and often against it, has been espoused by the nation state. It constitutes the discourse of the nation. It remains, as of today, the main and maybe the sole legitimate reference on the history of the Maghreb. It offers a national narrative, but also a colonial critique. Because it does so, it is called by its authors and its readers alike a decolonization of history. But such a narrative, as we saw, is not decolonizing. For, in order to be so, the historian needs to manage either to become epistemologically able to ignore the colonial which is impossible given the effective postcolonial power axis shaping the imagined national community or the historian must become a critic and engage in an examination of colonial discursive practices in and of themselves, in order to deconstruct them and show how they have participated in the making of a postcolonial culture, in whose webs the national subject is still caught or rather suspended. Such a project is possible only now, because it links itself to other postcolonial histories and anthropologies, especially in India and Latin America, where different conditions gave birth to a postcolonial epistemology. Last, I would like to make it clearer that the above critique does not mean that the national historian missed the point, and did nothing but perpetuate colonial symbolic domination. The culture of nationalism the national historian articulated and helped to put in place may be what was

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needed in the period following independence, when nationalism constituted the cultural and political horizon of what was then called the Third World. Compared to the colonial condition, nationalism offered what one may call an ideology of hope. However, what a half century of nationalism has indeed revealed, through violent events within and outside of the borders of the nation, should make one think that nationalism should be subject to a rigorous critique to show its limitations and lay down the necessary conditions to go beyond it.

Toward a conclusion
A system of domination consists of a set of symbols that are present and hence naturalized in different cultural guises. It has effective, sometimes even everlasting, consequences, both symbolic and material. Symbols of domination, because they are often naturalized, permeate all aspects of social life; hence the tremendous power they exert on bodies and ssured or colonized minds. Colonial knowledge, as it survived in its customary forms as well as those that are disguised in what appears to be an anticolonial discourse, are generative of what Bourdieu calls symbolic power. Here, symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or that they themselves exercise it (Bourdieu, 1991: 164). I have interrogated in this article the culture of colonialism and its continuation in the postcolonial era, the culture of nationalism. Thus, the article has privileged the analysis of the culture of the state, and has not tackled the issue ethnographically, from the bottom up that is, from the level of the masses. Most are either Arabized or Berberized, and in most cases dialecticized, meaning they do not even speak a distinct language. This equation provides insight into the culture of the state and the nationalist projects it has weathered. Yet the masses undoubtedly have a different discourse, and have lived in ways that defy the elite gurations. A colonial language is intimidating for a non-French speaker, but not the other way around. Even the Islamist discourse that seems to be viscerally anti-colonial reproduces colonialism and its power relation by making French the focal point of its narratives, as the marks or signatures of cultural imperialism. This is to say nothing of the Islamist movements, whether that associated with the Adl wa al-Ihasan in Morocco, al-Nahda in Tunisia or Jabhat al-islamiya li a-Inqad, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), in Algeria. France is an adversary whose presence is personied particularly in what the Algerian masses call hizb fransa, which usually denotes the nationalist elite. The relationship that Islamist movements envision is not only one of equal adversaries, but one of asymmetrical power. The project of the Islamic nation is not thought of without this relation; and France is never far from view, often placed in a higher zone of the uid structure of

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power relations, a power that obstructs even its own agentive capacities. Thus the actions of Islamic movements are always reactions. The same sympathizers of the Islamist movements would undoubtedly dream of the hellish heaven of France, and continue to board boats of death to cross the Mediterranean guided by colonial myths. Even on the level of the masses, France governs not only attitudes, but also actions that are reactions to the colonial mirror. Postcolonial power may be exerted without intent that is, without strategy or tactic and that may be one of its other dening characteristics.

Notes
1 Actually, even of European societies themselves. In the case of France, for instance, racial diversity required that the state account for inequalities and antagonisms. When France was reduced to a nation, racial diversity disappeared and, with it, racial claims, demands and protests. It was as if the nation hid the inequality of races with a unitary national ideology of which the bourgeois are the only real beneciary. This is not the case, for instance, in the United States, where racial claims are highly present. 2 This may be only a typo for the term Mahomais, a variation of the French term Mahometans, that is, Muslims. But why would Tocqueville consider them a race? The term race may have been used loosely to mean also type. 3 In 1871, the French government issued the Decree Cremieux by which all Jews of Algeria were considered French. This occurred after an earlier failed attempt in 1864 to open French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. Given the small percentage of those who took on French citizenship, only 1 out of every 1000, the French government took the more drastic measure in 1871. 4 See, especially De la part des peuples smitiques dans lhistoire de la civilisation (Renan, 1864). For a discussion of Renan and his contribution to the formation of Orientalism, see Edward Said, Orientalism (1979). 5 To mention just the most authoritative colonial texts on the issue, see Ernest Mercier, Histoire de ltablissement des Arabes en Afrique septentrionale (1875), EmileFelix Gautier, Les sicles obscurs du Maghreb (1927). 6 Nedjma (1956) is Kateb Yacines most acclaimed novel. Unlike the work of previous Maghrebi novelists such as Mouloud Feroun or even Mohamed Dib, Katebs novel constituted a break in that it was a national, not a colonial novel. In it, he portrays a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Algeria which, despite or because of successive conquests, became stronger and more distinct neither French, nor Arab, nor Turkish. 7 As Moroccans, our philosophy teacher explained to us in high school how French is a language of clarity and precision by giving us an example. In Arabic, he said, when one describes the weather, one says: al jawwu jamil (the weather is nice). This is neither clear nor precise, he noted. In contrast, the French expression is. When one describes the weather, one says: aujourdhui, le ciel est bleu (today, the sky is blue). He explained to us how the latter sentence is more descriptive and thus more clear and precise. 8 This is an interesting use of metaphor by Nouvel Observateur, as the lgion trangre was the military regiment with only foreign recruits from the colonies.

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343 Hannoum: Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb 9 The accusation was generalized to all francophone literature by Laroui (1967), who noted one exception Kateb Yacine. The term folklore is a pejorative one in the language of nationalists, who in the name of modernity, considered part of local culture unworthy of the nation. Folklore, literally popular culture, is a culture in its own right. In fact, it is more local than national culture, which owes its expression, and existence to colonial culture. 10 This remark by no means applies to the generation of French Maghrebi writings in French in France. 11 Eight years later, in February 2008, after a forum on education, the Minister of Education of Morocco made a public announcement about the failure of education in Morocco. In 2008, one would have expected the failure announced in 2000 to have been addressed, not a return to the conclusion already reached in 2000. 12 The case of Berber he mentions is not clear and is highly problematic, to say the least, as there are varieties of Berber dialects, and no written tradition.

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Abdelmajid Hannoum is assistant professor of anthropology and African Studies at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He is the author of Colonial Histories, PostColonial Memories (2001), Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (forthcoming), and other essays on colonialism, culture, historical anthropology, and the epistemology of social science. [email: ahannoum@ku.edu]

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