Language Policy and State in Morocco: The Status of Berber

Moroccan society has had a long tradition of multilingualism. It is socially and linguistically diverse, and its cultural makeup is one of the richest in North African countries. Its strategic location at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East has made Morocco open to a variety of linguistic influences. Morocco has been invaded by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greek, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spanish, and French. All these civilizations have deeply influenced Moroccan language policy and cultural diversity. The cultural and linguistic context of Morocco is characterized by the significant use of Arabic, as well as the presence of Berber, French, Spanish, and English. Berbers are the indigenous populations of Morocco and have existed in North Africa since time immemorial. Despite its complexity, the language policy of Morocco reveals an overarching monolingualism, with the hegemony of Classical Arabic as the only official language of the country. Recently, however, language education policy in Morocco has attempted to accommodate multilingualism. The linguistic situation of Berber has taken a new twist as it has been incorporated into the realm of Moroccan schools. The new Moroccan constitution also represents a historical turn in that it has acknowledged Berber as an official language, a move that has raised several questions with regard to the real motivation behind it. Berber implementation policy was based on an entirely top‐down bureaucratic model of language policy. Moroccan policymakers and the state seem to be aware of how other dramas are playing out in Morocco and around the world as theories of multiculturalism and effects of globalization are influencing their decisions. However, this language policy encounters many hurdles, from the improvisation to lack of qualified teachers. This article is an attempt to understand the intricate diversity and plurality of Moroccan language situation and the role of the state in Berber language policy. It also examines the invisible politics behind implementing it.     

Converging anticipatory geographies in Oceania: The Belt and Road Initiative and Look North in Fiji

Anticipatory geographies are state-driven initiatives promoting economic hope through the language of rejuvenation, prosperity and connectivity. As a discursive process, anticipatory geographies reconfigure spaces and identities. These narratives have proliferated in an age of intensified connectivity as states aim to imprint their political and economic visions. Oceania has become a site of multiple anticipatory geographies external and internal to the region with the presence of China as an enabling factor. In 2006, Fiji reintroduced a Look North policy to globalize economic connectivity placing Fijian agency at the centre, and in 2015, Beijing included Oceania into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. This work examines the processes when two anticipatory geographies meet. Adapting critical geopolitics, the research presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of Chinese and Fijian texts referencing Look North and BRI. The work reveals the entanglement of anticipatory geographies in Fiji has generated a co-produced discourse of prosperity displaying continuity from Look North to the BRI. Although there is a shift toward defining the Sino-Fijian relationship through BRI, it does not signal an overwrite of an indigenous policy framework. I argue Look North has been ‘re-placed’ into the BRI to co-produce a narrative that permits the ongoing articulation of Fijian interests. With the Belt and Road becoming the defining framework for China's relations with countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, this work suggests Fiji's handling of BRI's impact on its domestic spaces and policies is an indicator of how other states will reposition their promises of economic hope to civil society.     

Communicating temporalities: The Orientalist unconscious,the European migrant crisis,and the time of the Other

The paper analyses communication about the European migrant crisis in East-Central Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, as it was happening on the Facebook platform. In discussions amongst Czechs, the collective Orientalist unconscious shapes what imaginative geographies are communicated, and how. The paper argues for a coupling of the critique of Orientalist imaginative geographies and Deleuzean critique of the pointillistic chronological time. Both, imaginative geographies and the chronological time, acknowledge difference only as the difference from the Same. In the analysed communication, imaginative geographies draw on several notions of temporality that depend on the chronological time. These are the single timeline of progress, tunnels of time, movement towards apocalypse, and repetition of the past. They transform African and Middle-Eastern imaginative geographies and understandings of people migrating from these spaces. They also compose an imaginative geography of Western Europe which collapses under the surge of migrants. It provokes an irreconcilableness between the anti-immigration and pro-migration attitudes of discussants as it leads to emplacing the other attitudinal side in the past time. Therefore, the paper calls for an ethics of the event and the need to acknowledge the heterogeneity of diverse temporalities and accidentality of a present event.     

CONSUMING THE TOURIST GAZE: IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES AND THE REPRODUCTION OF SEXUALITY IN LUGU LAKE

Imaginative geographies engage with the understanding and experiencing of place and place‐based social and cultural specificities through a process of re‐creation and reproduction. In this article, we explore the imaginative geographies of Lugu Lake, a tourist destination in China's Yunnan Province, and of the Mosuo people, the local minority which practices a unique marriage system. We investigate how Mosuo society has been imagined in popular discourses and representations through two cultural labels: matriarchy and free sex. We also discuss how the imaginative geographies of Lugu Lake have restructured the encounters between the local people, especially the young men, and the incoming tourists in the context of tourism development. We interrogate the complex processes of identity formation in which both the tourists and the indigenous people renegotiate and reconstruct their cultural identities within various inside–outside connections and interactions. Our central argument is that the sex encounters between tourists and the local Mosuo are conditioned by popular imaginative geographies of the sexual practices of the Mosuo. But the encounter in tourism between the gazer and the gazed also accommodates complex identity formations and the renegotiation of social relations. The empirical observations are twofold: first, the locality of Lugu Lake has been reproduced with folk and tourist imaginative geographies into an erotic frontier of free sex; second, we also argue that the geographical imagination in this case is a reciprocal process which involves the local Mosuo's renegotiation of place‐based identity, in a pursuit of imagined progress and modernity.     

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape,Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Abstract: Canadian diamonds are marketed as “ethical” alternatives to notorious “blood diamonds”. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethical consumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumption operates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned as moral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in the form of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versus the exploitation of “dark” Africa, pristine, “white” northern landscapes, modernization via commodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning within which the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamonds also has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethical consumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North.     

When things were ‘closing-in’ and ‘rolling up’: the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish war novel The Last September

This paper examines the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. Drawing on Said’s analysis of imaginative geographies as registers of territorial identity, I consider the ways in which Bowen’s text maps Anglo-Irish territorial identity in early twentieth-century Ireland. Reading the text as an authoritative, albeit subjective, record of Anglo-Irish experience in Ireland, I identify four interconnected spaces which constitute the imaginative geography of the novel: the open, empty and isolated country; a wider landscape of resistance and control; a distant but necessary England; and an historical landscape of colonial decline. In conclusion, I outline how the concept of imaginative geographies provides a useful lens through which the often fragmented and conflicted nature of territorial identities, both during and after the colonial period, can be explored.     

Currents,visions and voyages: historical geographies of the sea

This paper offers a prospectus for a version of historical geography that puts the seas and oceans at the centre of its concerns. This is pursued in three ways. First, via a discussion of the epistemological and historiographic perspectives that might be taken on geographies of the sea, which argues that the view from the ocean can develop geographies of spaces beyond the local and the national, and can attend to the relationships between the human and natural worlds. Second, through a consideration of the imaginative, aesthetic and sensuous geographies of the sea that contends that maritime worlds open up new experiential dimensions and new forms of representation. Finally, in a survey of the material and social worlds of the oceans that suggests that new life can thereby be breathed into current concerns with global political economy, material geographies, the relationship between knowledge and located practice, and the intersections of social and spatial difference. The paper also provides an introduction to a special issue on the historical geography of the sea.     

Imaginative geographies of distant suffering: two cases of the Syrian Civil War on television

The paper builds upon distant suffering studies and the ‘analytics of mediation’. It observes how television performances of suffering expose spectators to dispositions to feel, think and act towards each instance of suffering. It analyses the news coverage of civilians’ suffering in the Syrian Civil War that was presented by Czech public television broadcaster. The interpretation of imaginative geographies expands the analysis because of the need for more spatially sensitive approaches to distant suffering. Imaginative geographies coproduce diverse spacetimes and distant suffering studies often overlook how media performances are shaped according to spacetimes where suffering occurs. Two spacetimes are contrasted here; the Syrian Civil War before and after the Islamic State gained prominence in it. In both cases, the aim is to interpret in what ways the distance is translated into difference through imaginative geographies and how it shapes television performances of suffering. The analysis shows that Orientalist imaginative geographies appear in both cases. However, while in the first case imaginative geographies empower pity and dispositions to act towards suffering, in the second case they do not. It is because of the difference between Bashar al-Assad as a local Oriental persecutor and the Islamic State as the global threat.     

Masquerade politics: race,Islam and the scale of Amazigh activism in southeastern Morocco*

ABSTRACT. This article explores the different scalar dimensions of Berber masquerades in southeastern Morocco. By ritually performing Jewish characters and demonstrating philo‐Semitic nostalgia for a former Jewish presence, Berber (Amazigh) activists simultaneously engage different audiences at a local, national and transnational scale. In the first place, they assert themselves as moderate (even secular) Muslims for a transnational audience for whom Muslims' supposed anti‐Semitism has been a mode of excluding them from modernity. At the same time, their performances underline the specificity of Berber culture as part of a national folkloric archive, welcome to a Moroccan national state interested in forging an authentic, national Islamic practice distinct from pan‐Islamic Wahhabism. Thirdly, in allying themselves with Jews, Berber activists distance themselves from a variety of rivals to local political and economic dominance, particularly black “Haratin” whose demographic and economic strength in the southeastern oases has increased since Moroccan independence. In exploring the confluences and contradictions between these different scales of activism, this article points to the internal fractures within social movements organised around religion or ethnicity.     

Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy

Political geographers have recently focused their attention on the performative nature and imaginative geographies of US security strategies. This work has illuminated a number of mechanisms through which geographical knowledge has been interpreted and reformulated to support specific political agendas. This paper builds upon and develops the insights of these recent studies, arguing that current US security strategies are constructed around a policy of integration, whereby states are encouraged, through a range of measures, to mesh with attitudes and perspectives on the world. It assesses the ways in which these integration strategies are being performed, through an analysis of US National Security Strategy documents, the works of writers such as Kagan and Barnett, and the imaginative geographies and popular geopolitical representations of the US and its enemies. This paper contends that these practices combine to produce the effects that they name, bringing to life an imaginary geography that mirrors and supports the particular logics of the US-led ‘war on terror’.     

Gendered Nations: Nostalgia,development and territory in Ecuador {1}

Drawing upon original substantive research, the paper argues for a consideration and analysis of the imagined geographies of gendered nations. Drawing upon Anne McClintock's work on temporality, the article proposes that a gendered spatiality underlies discourses of nationhood. Focusing particularly on national press and government reports over recent years in Ecuador, it is suggested that women appear in the national discourses around nostalgia, development and territory. While previous work has frequently noted the ambivalent position of women in the modern project of nationhood, the way in which this ambivalence is structured around place (and also significantly around 'race' and class) has not received as much attention. Geographers and feminists have not been as attuned as they might to the complex gendered imaginative geographies of the nation, and the multiple ways in which the nation constitutes gendered subjectivities.     

他者,权力与地方建构:想象地理的研究进展与展望

本文通过对相关文献的梳理,对想象地理的理论起源及研究内容进行了总结与分析。根据想象的主体和想象对象的地理尺度差异,国外想象地理研究主要分为两个流派:一是探讨后殖民主义语境下"西方"对"东方"的文化形象的话语建构;二是研究"作者"通过地理文本的生产,以想象的方式对地方的文化形象进行重构的过程。同时,文章通过分析国外近30个实证案例,指出想象地理在地方的文化建构和空间文化意义的生产等文化地理重要话题的研究中都具有重要的作用,并据此对国内想象地理研究提出了展望。     

A political geography of walking in Jordan: Movement and politics

The past 10-15 years has seen the growth of walking groups taking walkers from Amman to rural parts of Jordan at weekends and the development of the Jordan Trail. Through the narration and analysis of everyday accounts of walking, this paper explores political geographies of identity, movement, and territory in Jordan. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that at the heart of a growth of walking for leisure in Jordan are important political questions. How is walking conditioned by situated cultural politics? How can walking unearth intimate and embodied accounts of territory in Jordan? I build upon three developments in political geography to do this. First, research on political geography and walking; second research on everyday political geographies of the Middle East; third, critical and feminist work on territory. Literature on political geography and walking is developed by centring Jordanian walkers and the (post)colonial context of Jordan to explore what walking means under different political conditions and for individual bodies. In doing so I contribute to work on identity and nationalism in Jordan and the importance of the everyday to explore political geographies of the Middle East. I develop critical and feminist work on territory by arguing that walking bodies make and contest territory and in doing so calling for greater synergies between cultural and political geography. These arguments are made in two empirical sections. The first explores how different people talk about walking, the language for walking, and assumptions about walking bodies. The second explores how walking connects different bodies to territory, and creates territorial nationalist narratives, but also how walking can highlight indigenous and embodied relations with territory. This paper concludes that walking is political because it shapes and is shaped by situated political geographies and because it enables embodied and intimate accounts of territory to emerge.     

Performing masculinity in the Moroccan theatre: virility,sexuality and Spanish military culture from the African War to the Civil War

This article explores constructions of Spanish masculinity in the first decades of the twentieth century, as Spain engaged in colonialist wars in Morocco; memoirs and literary texts by travellers, soldiers and military leaders such as Francisco Franco and José Millán Astray are read alongside theoretical works. I argue that, like European Orientalism, Spanish Orientalism projects onto Moroccan men an image of fanaticism, barbaric violence and ultra‐virile yet ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexuality. However, that particular image of masculinity is just as often re‐assimilated into a Spanish national identity that can never quite manage to assert its fundamental difference from North Africa.     

Situating the imperial archive: the Royal Empire Society Library, 1868–1945

This paper explores the Library of the Royal Empire Society from its foundation in 1868 to the mid-twentieth century. It begins by considering the production of imaginative geographies of the British Empire not only by the materials in the collection but also by practices and technologies of assembling, classifying, cataloguing and display which went on in the Library. The architecture, spaces and experience of being in the Library are considered as integral to these imaginative geographies and the role performed by the collection. The second part of the paper considers the ways in which the Library was imagined as a centre of calculation for imperial, economic and geopolitical concerns and some theoretical and methodological issues involved in understanding how and by whom the Library was used. The Royal Empire Society Library offers an insight into the interplay between imperialism and wider concerns about knowledge, vision, order and control, as well as highlighting the importance of recognising the specificity of different types of knowledge space.     

Mixed Outcomes: The Impact of Regional Autonomy and Decentralization on Indigenous Ethnic Minorities in Indonesia

This article examines how indigenous ethnic minorities in Indonesia are being affected by the implementation of decentralization and regional autonomy policies. New legislation transferred responsibility and authority over various issues, including resource extraction and local governance, from the central government to regional authorities at the district level. Members of the growing indigenous rights movement hoped that this decentralization process would allow ethnic minority communities to retain or regain control over natural resources through local‐level politics. Furthermore, some ethnic minorities saw the implementation of decentralization as an opportunity to return to local forms of land tenure and resource management that had been disparaged by the national government for most of the twentieth century. However, these new laws also encourage district level governments to generate income through natural resource exploitation, as they will receive a certain percentage of these revenues. Minority communities could be adversely affected as local governments disregard their land rights in efforts to raise income to cover their new expenses, essentially continuing the practices of previous governments. This article examines the new opportunities, as well as the new threats, posed by decentralization to ethnic minorities throughout Indonesia.     

World Making,Critical Pedagogies,and the Geographical Imagination: Where Youth Work Meets Participatory Research

Renewed interest in the critical geographies of education has raised productive yet under‐examined synergies with reflections taking place among radical youth work and participatory research practitioners. In particular, such intersections point to important ways that the geographical imagination might advance a critical yet creative means of learning through the living material forces of everyday worlds. This paper examines this common ground through a collaborative, London‐based case study exploring young people's sense of home and belonging in the inner‐city. It argues that cross‐overs between the praxis of participatory research and youth work offer generative potential to act alongside young people in the production of autonomous geographical knowledges. Specifically, the case is made for prioritising an imaginative, experiential and intersubjective pedagogical process of “world making”, as an alternative to practices that intervene in, act upon and ultimately “other” the everyday lives of young people.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
Unsettling cities: movement/settlement. John Allen, Doreen Massey and Micheal Pryke (eds)
From colonization to democracy: a new historical geography of South Africa : Alan Lester
Leisure/tourism geographies: practises and geographical knowledge : David Crouch (ed)
Mind and body spaces: geographies of illness, impairment and disability : Ruth Butler and Hester Parr (eds)     

The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: The Soviet Union,self‐determination,and the creation of the postwar human rights system

The USSR played a key role in the establishment of the post‐World War II human rights system despite its repressive and even murderous domestic record. It forged an alliance with the countries of the Global South in support of decolonization, self‐determination, and social and economic rights, policies opposed by liberal states like the United States, Great Britain, and France. These positions were deeply rooted in the socialist tradition. Moreover, when a human rights movement emerged in the mid‐1960s, its members—in its origins overwhelmingly from the intelligentsia—called not for the overthrow of the Soviet Union but for the fulfilment of Soviet law. The language of rights, proclaimed with such flourish in the 1936 constitution and its successor in 1977, served as the weapon hurled by dissidents as they called on the Soviet government to respect freedom of speech and assembly, and national rights, including the right to emigrate. In turn, the international human rights movement developed from the 1960s to the 1990s largely through support for the Soviet dissident movement, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch prime examples. The Soviet experience is critical to any global history of human rights.     

Imagined Country: National Environmental Ideologies in School Geography Textbooks

This essay considers the "imagined geographies" of Britain found in school geography textbooks in the postwar period. The first part of the essay considers the role that school geography plays in processes of social reproduction. It suggests that textbooks represent an important resource through which meanings are negotiated in the everyday lives of teachers and students. The second part of the essay discusses some of the specific "national environmental ideologies" found in geographies of Britain. The essay concludes with a discussion of the wider context in which geographies of Britain are taught in schools.