Hauptinhalt

"Multilingualism as a Framework to Study the Maghreb: Moroccan Literature as a Case-Study"

Karima LAACHIR

The contemporary ideological divide between diverse members of the Moroccan intelligentsia has become dangerously embodied in the linguistic divide (mainly Arabic/French), which has serious repercussions on the cultural and political sphere.  Arabic has come to represent regressive/Islamist forces and French, progressive, secular, westernised and democratic ones: an arbitrary opposition which obscures the complex realities on the ground. The paper seeks to demonstrate how, in multilingual contexts like that of Morocco, literary tastes and practices defy linguistic divides and offer a more nuanced understanding of the co-constitution of languages and cultures in the way, for example, authors draw on multilingual sources and influences.  It examines closely how postcolonial novelists from Morocco incorporate various literary models/genres including local oral narrative forms and how this incorporation stems from a lived experience of multilingualism and its wider practices of reading/writing that go beyond linguistic and cultural divides.