rabat abstracts

7/28/2019 Rabat Abstracts

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Urban generations: Post-colonial citiesVenue: Amphitheatre Cherif El IdrissiFaculty of Letters and Humanities,

Mohammed V University, Rabat01 – 03 October 2004

Abstracts1. Agoumy, Taoufik and Yahyaoui, Mounir (Mohammed V University – Agdal,Morocco and Ecole Nationale d’Architecture-Rabat, Morocco):L’AMELIORATION DE L’HABITAT DES PAUVRES EN MILIEU URBAIN:DISCOURS OFFICIEL ET PERCEPTION LOCALELa préoccupation pour la question de l’habitat pour les couches défavorisées en milieu

urbain en général et son amélioration en particulier n’est pas symptomatique de la période post-coloniale (c.f. les différentes opérations menées par les services de

l’urbanisme dans les années quarante et cinquante du siècle dernier, sous l’initiativeM. Ecochard). Néanmoins après l’Indépendance, celle ci prend toute une nouvelle

tournure avec une urbanisation galopante sans aucune mesure avec la période

coloniale.Après l’accès à l’Indépendance, le discours officiel, tout en tenant compte des

revendications sociales des couches défavorisées pendant les deux décades

précédentes l’Indépendance, a énormément évolué en fonction des événementshistoriques, politiques et conjoncturels, de l’influence des organismes et organisations

internationaux.

Dans ce papier, nous nous proposons de démontrer combien l’inadéquation est grandeentre le discours officiel tel énoncé et la mise en pratique des programmes désignés

pour la lutte contre l’habitat « insalubre » d’une part, et l’ adhésion « partielle » des

partenaires et acteurs locaux, d’autre part.

Notre intervention s’articule autour de l’évolution des stratégies des pouvoirs publicsen matière d’amélioration de l’habitat des pauvres, du discours de plus en plus

peaufiné et répondant aux exigences des organismes et organisations internationaux et

de l’adhésion non totale qui a été, et demeure, une menace a même de mettre en échecles actions des pouvoirs publics en matière d’amélioration de l’habitat des pauvres.

2. Ameli, Saied R (University of Tehran, Iran): Vireal City: Solution and

Destination for Developing CountriesThe new information and communication technology moved society to the new era

called ‘information society’. Tremendous development comes through information

society in which ‘virtual city’ and ‘E. Government’ should be considered as two major results, organized by the Government in the city and national level. Virtual City is the

result of strategic city planning for controlling and managing ‘time’, ‘transformation

of the population’ and inter-communication between customers and public sector inthe city. The actual target is increasing ‘speed, energy saving, security and



satisfaction’ for the advantage of citizens in particular in the megacity. From the

juxtaposition of the real city and the virtual city emerged a new city; conceptualized as

‘Vireal City’ which agglomerates all physical and informational potential of the city andgives opportunity for less destruction of man power and more energy saving and

consequently minimization of working time with much extensive, faster, denser and

tighter connection between customers and public sector (Ameli, 2004a and 2004b).The vireal city is theoretically affected by a ‘dual globalizations paradigm’ (Ameli 2003a

and 2003b). According to this paradigm two synchronic spaces, the real and virtual,

while distinct form each other, appear as two interlinked and complementary spaceswhich cannot survive without each other . Virtual city is all industrial and all

information based and it is the outcome of a ‘simultaneous communication Industry’. The

use of information and communication industries in commercial transactions has grown

tremendously since the mid-1990s; this is particularly true for the use of Internet andecommerce.

An explanation of the popularity of Internet and e-commerce services can

be found in network externality theory (Katz and Shapiro 1985, Capello 1994;

Economides 1996). The network externality theory explains positive consequences of network communication that include those of increasing returns and first-mover

advantages. Increasing returns means the network increases its user value.Subscription to any of web resources enables actors to set up ongoing local and global

communication (Geenhuizen, 2004).

With the emergence of internet, the vireal city is inevitable. Vireal city is bringingcentrality and decentrality of the city resources and city services. Centrality refers here to

reduction of transit time and direct inter-communication between costumers and

public services. It is central because it is more organized and accountable in every

second without any limitation of working day and working hours; services in thevireal cities are 24 hours. Decentrality is also a positive aspect of the ‘vireal city’

because it gives accessibility to the city resources to all, no matter how near or far,

and without any advantage or disadvantage for those who live in the central city andthose who live in the periphery or even in another city, region and countries around the

world.

Here my argument is that the vireal city planning is an opportunity for all advancedcities to take over their city problems in particular in megalopolis and the megacity of

developing countries through virtualization and virealization of the city services

which eventually will minimize unnecessary transformation of the population.

However, like the real city, vireal city needs actual city planning, otherwise like the poor cities of the developing world which have grown up without any structural city planning

the vireal city will become more fragmented and disintegrated.

3. Azadarmaki, Taghi (University of Tehran, Iran): Iranian Modernity throughTehran as a concept and Contemporary EventThe main object of the paper is to discuss how Iranian modernity is a particular kind of Modernity in the world, manifest in the influence of "Tehran" as a modern city with

different interpertations. In terms of Iranian intellectual discourse, with different views

from left to right we, can see that intellectuals such as Malkom, Said Jammalledin

Asadabi, Jamalzadeh, shariati, Ale-Ahmad, and others got many ideas from the



situation of Tehran and the influence of this city. I am going to to discuss this topic from a

historical perspective.

4. Bargach, Jamila (Ecole Natonale d’Architecture-Rabat, Morocco): “PlannedCity and the Question of Memory”

Cities are, in part, a product of historical processes as both historians andanthropologists inform us. Fernand Braudel, Arnold Toynbee or André Leroi-Gourhan

speak of the cities’ memory when locating the genesis of their birth whether on the

long or short term, the differences between the functionality of the morphology of each and show the extent to which cities produce and live by their proper memory.

This latter is embodied in those who reside in them and who then pass such

heritage/knowledge from generation to generation, it is a living entity that

characterizes these spaces as special. Some cities, like human beings, may beeccentric, exclusivist while others more generous and open. It is out of such collective

memory that an “urban identity” is forged, that identity politics and belonging to a site

are embedded. It is out of the contemporary landscape in post-colonial cities with its

much known problems ranging from inadequate housing, shantytowns to poverty thatemerged the philosophy of ‘new cities.’ In Morocco, Sala-Jadida is similar to a

Chandhigar in India or to a Brazilia in Brazil. Sala-Jadida is a newly planned city,erected in an area far from the now ‘old’ Salé, the site of centuries of history. The

paper I propose here will explore and locate the elements that constitute (or are prone

to constitute) a communal identity in the true example that this planned post-colonialagglomeration happens to be. Theoretically, the paper questions the existence, role

and function of communal memory in Sala-Jadida especially when taking into

consideration the fact that it is out of this element that governance and identity politics

are mustered. Post-colonial planned cities as a solution to overpopulation and miserywithin ‘organic’ cities produce other processes of violence and alienation that will

also be discussed in this paper.

5. Bekkaoui, Khalid (Faculty of Letters, Fes): An/Other TangierIn the 1860's, Haj Ahmed Ben Abdeslam, the head of the Wazani confraternity and

supreme spiritual authority in the late 19th-century Morocco, divorced his Muslimwives and left the scared city of Wazzan for Tangier, hoping to discover there a

suitable bride among the European female community. He was soon enamoured of a

British girl, Emily Keen, and, despite opposition from all sides, he married her. The

paper investigates the impact of this intercultural marriage on the creation of an/Other Tangier, a space of international intrigue and cultural transgression

6. Bekkari, Hanae (Tanger Medina Foundation, NGO, Tanger, Morocco): Postinternational TangierTanger a connu plusieurs configurations spatiales de par les différentes occupations

mais le petit Socco a toujours été le coeur du système spatiofonctionnel de la citéromaine avec le cardo décumanus, jusqu’à l’époque internationale en tant que centre

« capitaliste », en passant par la place de l’église, place de la Mosquée, Souk …

Actuellement, le petit Socco reflète encore la réalité Tangéroise sur le plan social,

culturel, patrimonial et urbain.



A travers l’analyse des transitions anciennes et actuelles, nous pouvons déchiffrer la

réalité urbaine Tangéroise.

7. Belghazi, Taieb (Mohammed V University – Agdal, Morocco): Festivalisation of urban space in Morocco

This paper discusses the phenomenon of festivalisation of Moroccan urban space inrecent years. It addresses the issue of how festivals constitute a site of struggle for the

definition of the city’s identity through its construction as a charged symbolic field

and a space of governance. The paper gives particular attention to the ways in whichdiscourse on festivals is deployed by the state and by NGO organisations including

Islamist associations and how this discourse represents an instance of the contest of

culture.

Through a discussion of the festivals organised by the Ministry of culture and Fes Saisassociation, the paper also discusses the ways in which “Eventising the city” also

stages it as a brand, a cultural good that is marketed in ethnic terms.

8. El Kechebour, Boualem (Built Environment Laboratory, Faculté de Génie civil,Université des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumédiène (USTHB),Alger.): FRAGILISATION DE LA VILLE D’ALGER : CAS DE LA GESTIONURBAINE DE LA ZONE DE BAB EL OUED Résumé

L’objectif de cette étude est de prouver que la fragilité des villes algériennes post

coloniales, et en particulier la ville d’Alger, est la conséquence de la faiblesse de la gestion urbaine. L’étude commence par un historique et une présentation de la ville

dans son contexte régionale, ensuite par une analyse des principaux problèmes

d’urbanisme induits par des pratiques socioéconomiques et des gestions populistesayant provoquées en partie l’inondation du 10/11/2001 dans la zone de Bab El Oued.

Elle se termine par des recommandations sur la gestion urbaine de la ville d’Alger et

par une vision prospective de la ville en rapport avec son potentiel et l’impact del’introduction des nouvelles technologies de l’information. L’identification des

problèmes de la ville nécessite la connaissance de son passé, son présent et ses

perspectives de développement futur, conformément à la politique de la gestion dudéveloppement durable.

Mots clés : Alger, Bab El Oued, fragilisation, ville post coloniale, vulnérabilité,

gestion urbaine.

The aim of this survey is to prove that the fragility of the Algerian post colonial cities,and in particular Algiers city, is the consequence of the urban management weakness.

The study starts with a historic and a presentation of the city in its regional context,

then by an analysis of the urban main problems induced by socioeconomic practicesand populists managements having provoked the flooding on the 10/11/2001 in the

Bab El Oued zone. It ends by recommendations on the urban management of Algiers

city and by a prospective vision on city in relation with its potential and the impact of the introduction of the new technologies of Information. The identification of the

town problems requires the knowledge of its past, present, and future development

perspectives, in accordance with the sustainable development policy.



9. Bellaoui, Ahmed (Cadi Ayad University, Morocco): La fabrication urbaine áMarrackech: Facteurs et strategiesFruit d'un système complexe et multiforme d'acteurs institutionnels et privés, lafabrication urbaine à Marrakech obéit à des logiques très diverses et parfois

contradictoires.

A la croisée des enjeux et logiques des uns et des autres, celle-ci a pour corollaire la production d'un espace urbain hétérogène ou coexistent une série de macro-formes

d'habitats et de quartiers qui font de Marrakech un ensemble de " Villes dans la Ville";

autrement dit, une ville sans unité sans personnalité.

10. Benhayoun, Jamal Eddine (Faulty of Letters Tetouan): Terrorism and theMy paper examines what is essentially a recognisable and problematic connection

between terrorism and the city. The events of September 11, 2001, May 16, 2003,March 11, 2004 (to name but a few) make it clear that terrorism is a form of violence

conceived and devised within and against what can be qualified as urban culture.

While it is imperative to stand in defence of such cities as New York, Casa Blanca,

Madrid, and Istanbul, etc. and to mourn the loss of human life as occasioned byextremism and hatred, it is also equally important, even more urgent, to redefine these

cities in terms of the social and ideological tensions developing and proliferatingwithin them under the cracked veneer of liberal lifestyles and material prosperity. In

other words, my point is to highlight and, therefore, not to deny the connection

between terrorism and the city. The city is a space that can be championed for theideals most of us cherish in much the same way as it can be indicted for the forms of

violence and attitudes of intolerance emerging out of it. The city is not only a place

where some of the finest expressions of the human mind can be felt, enjoyed and

admired but also a place where the harrowing stories of violence, crime and socialinjustice seem systematic and incessant.

11. Bensaid, Driss (Mohammed V University – Agdal, Morocco): La culture citadinedans la ville post- coloniale marocaineDe l’indépendance du pays en 1956 à 1994, date du dernier Recensement Général de

la Population et de l’Habitat, le poids démographique de la population citadine est passé de moins de 30% à plus de 51% de la population totale. Cette tendance sera

maintenue, au moins, jusqu’en 2065, date prévue par les démographes pour

l’achèvement de la transition démographique et la stabilisation des mouvements de la

population.Si les causes et, surtout, les effets économiques et sociologiques de ce changement

rapide sont relativement connus et analysés, les effets culturels de cette urbanisation

accélérée restent, à notre sens, mal connus et peu étudiés. Sur le plan culturel et celuides valeurs, la ville post-coloniale répond toujours à des schèmes et à des modèles

construits autour du patrimoine et des espaces précoloniaux et coloniaux au niveau

des comportements, de l’habitat et des différentes expressions artistiquesstandardisées. Les nouvelles formes d’expressions culturelles citadines, leurs

nouveaux canaux de transmission, leurs espaces favoris requièrent de la part du

sociologue, une attention particulière. Les attentats terroristes du 16 mai 2003 à

Casablanca dévoilent un aspect inédit d’une nouvelle culture citadine basée sur la



violence et l’exclusion.

Dans cette intervention, notre objectif est d’essayer de comprendre et d’analyser le

contenu et le sens de quelques formes de la production culturelle, matérielle etsymbolique des espaces citadins qui fonctionnent en dehors de l’idéal type de la ville

marocaine coloniale et précoloniale . A ce titre, notre attention sera portée, à partir des

nouveaux espaces urbains post-coloniaux de Rabat et de Casablanca, sur les modes etles expressions culturelles des jeunes issus des villes nouvelles, des bidonvilles, des

quartiers périphériques de ces deux villes. Du langage, des chants, des blagues et des

graffitis nous tirerons nos principaux matériaux qui front l’objet de notre analyse.

12. Berriane, Mohamed (Mohammed V University – Agdal, Morocco): Nador: de laville - garnison espagnole à la ville rifaineL'origine de Nador remonte au début du siècle dernier. Elle a été fondée par lesEspagnoles en 1909 et ce à la fois pour des raisons militaires et stratégiques

qu’économiques. Parti de presque rien, cet organisme urbain jeune a connu un

accroissement spectaculaire puisque sa population qui était de 28.950 habitants en

1960 a été multipliée par plus de 6 en 34 ans, alors que la population urbainemarocaine dans son ensemble, même si elle a augmenté considérablement, n’a

progressé que 4 fois et demi au cours de la même période.Mais l’intérêt de l’étude de la ville de Nador dépasse cette problématique relevant du

spectaculaire, de son poids économique évident ou de la problématique de

développement régional et local. Cette agglomération a une spécificité qui lui est propre et une forte originalité qui en fait un cas difficilement classable. Elle a souffert

pendant toute la période coloniale de l’ombre de Melilla, pour connaître une véritable

explosion à partir des années soixante, mettant justement à profit la proximité de

l’enclave pour développer tout un pan de son économie urbaine. Son modèle decroissance s’appuie sur les éléments déjà identifiés pour d’autres villes, mais intègre

des éléments propres à Nador tel que les recettes de la contrebande, de l’émigration

internationale et de l’argent illégal recyclé. Elle cumule les paradoxes dont le plusremarquable est le décalage entre une ville sous-équipée et apparemment pauvre et les

flux de savoir-faire et d’argent dont elle est le réceptacle.

Cependant malgré cette forte originalité, son cas peut être généralisé à plusieurs autresvilles du nord. En effet, Nador porte la marque d’un certain individualisme rifain qui

se manifeste par le désordre et l’anarchie de la croissance urbaine, la persistance

d’une économie de type familial, le refus de l’urbanisme planifié et la prise en charge

par différents groupes sociaux des déficiences en équipements publics. Ledéveloppement d’une économie parallèle accuse cet individualisme par l’apparition au

sein de la ville d’une véritable ville illégale. Or, ces caractéristiques mises en évidence

pour la ville de Nador ont été relevées dans toutes les petites villes en gestation dansle Rif oriental. Nador illustre ainsi un type de ville rifaine et méditerranéenne du

Maroc.

13. Brown, Duncan (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa): Narrative,Memory and Mapping: Ronnie Govender’s “At the Edge” and Other CatoManor StoriesIn “At the Edge” and Other Cato Manor Stories, Ronnie Govender offers a series of



narratives of life in the urban settlement of Cato Manor from the 1940s until its

destruction in 1958/9. Against the strict delineation of identity, the control of space, a

state narrative of racial separation and displacement, and an official cartography (of race and economics), Govender sets an unofficial cartography of knowing, belonging

and growing, a stature in ordinary character, an oral-influenced mobility of

storytelling, a carnivalesque chorus of voices, the ingenuity of tactic - as well as thedesolation of suffering and destruction which was to follow the bulldozing of Cato

Manor and the forced removal of its residents. While the stories deal specifically with

the destruction of Cato Manor, they resonate with larger claims about South AfricanIndian identities, without simply essentialising or valorising them, and without

constructing them as identities of exclusion or glossing over areas of difficulty or

prejudice; questions of alienation, belonging, immigration, exoticism and indigeneity

swirl through the narrative landscape of the collection. Govender’s stories speak powerfully to the postcolonial city of today.

14. Bouayad, Larbi (Ecole Natonale d’Architecture-Rabat, Morocco): La tentation

urbaineEn 1950, sur les trente premières villes du monde, le tiers était situés dans les pays du

sud et près de 60 % de la population urbaine mondiale était concentrée dans les paysdéveloppés. En 2000, plus des trois quarts des plus grandes villes du monde se

trouvent dans les pays du sud et les villes des pays développés hébergent moins du

tiers des 3 milliards d’urbains que compte la planète.Bien avant l’avènement du 21ème siècle, la moitié des populations de l’humanité a

succombé à la tentation urbaine sans acquérir, pour la plus part, le statut d’urbanité :

plus des 2/3 de ces populations, en quête d’une intégration urbaine et dans des

conditions indigentes, ne peuvent l’atteindre. Les chiffres prévoient pour 2025 uneaugmentation des populations urbaines dépassant les 2/3 de la population mondiale.

Les ¾ des mégapoles de la planète de plus de 10 millions d’habitants seraient situées

dans l’hémisphère sud. La planète Terre présenterait alors l’aspect suivant :- des bidonvilles avec des quartiers-pôles super gardés dans l’hémisphère sud ;

- des villes cybernétiques entourées de périphéries dangereuses dans

l’hémisphère nord.A ce rythme, nous pouvons nous attendre à l’émergence progressive et persistante,

avant la fin de ce siècle, de la ville Terre : espace urbain hétérogène et stratifié.

Ces perspectives nous interpellent à plus d’un titre :

N’y a-t-il à l’horizon de notre humanité que le seul mode de vie urbain ?Qu’en est-il des autres modes de vie rural et pastoral ?

Sommes-nous condamnés à vivre dans des villes inégales et multiformes ?

Les planificateurs urbains contemporains1 affirment que « lorsque l’on planifie uneville nouvelle, une autre ville informelle vient s’imposer par une porte dérobée :

comment rendre vivable cette ville informelle ? ».

La ville informelle qui s’impose aux côtés de celle planifiée est-elle un mal nécessaire ?

Comment affronter ces problèmes de face et de tous côtés dans une approche

de solutions multilatérales ?

Peut-on substituer à l’exode rural celui urbain par une promotion de



développement local intégré et complémentaire ?1 - Notamment Mme BANASOPIT Mekvichai, professeur à l’Université Chulalong

Korn de Thaïlande, un des « témoins du Sud » du PRUD (Projet de RechercheUrbaine pour le Développement) dont le colloque de clôture s’est tenu à Paris du 5

au 7 mai 2004.

15. Chadli , Mostafa (Faculty of Letters Rabat): La representqtion de la cite post-coloniale dans les medias, les literature et les artsL’objet de cette communication est de pouvoir cerner les diverses representationssymboliques de la cite marocaine, de type post-colonial, dans les medias, les

literatures et les arts, notamment les art plastiques.

Il s’agit de comprendre et d’interpreter les multiples representations symboliques,

puis de les reevaluer, dans le contexte global de leur production, de leur diffusion etde leur reception. En somme, il va falloir les relier a une systematique plus vaste, qui

est celle de la culture, et de l’imaginaire qui sous-tend la dite culture.

16. Chorfi, Abderrahmane (Ecole Natonale d’Architecture-Rabat, Morocco): Rabat:de la médina à l’aire métropolitaineL’intervention comprendra 2 partiesLa première résumera les transformations de la ville pendant la période coloniale en

ce qui concerne notamment Les phénomènes socio-économiques engendrés par la mise du Maroc sous

protectorat. Les nouvelles formes de conception urbaine introduites au Maroc par la

colonisation Française Les spécificités de l’action urbaine à Rabat

Dans la 2ème partie l’exposé portera sur les différentes évolutions urbaines enregistrées

au cours de la 2ème partie du XX siècle. Il sera notamment fait état de l’essor de l’agglomération en un vaste ensemble urbain continu polycentré

comprenant Bouknadal, Salé , Rabat et Temara de l’émergence en cours d’une connurbation allant de Kenitra à Casablanca de l’inscription de façon durable dans le tissu de types d’habitat nés dans la

période précédente tels que les bidonvilles et les tissus dits clandestins de l’existence sur le plan morphologique d’une grande diversité de tissus de la mise entre parenthèse des modèles urbains correspondant au mouvement

moderne. des problèmes de renouvellement urbain, du patrimoine, de l’insalubrité …

L’exposé s’intéressera en conclusion, de façon plus générale, à la question de laspécificité des villes des pays anciennement colonisés.

17. Dahane, Mohamed (Faulty of Letters Rabat): Cinéma et culture urbaineLe rapport ville / cinéma est une donnée importante de l ’ évolution des sociétésmodernes. Produit de la ville (les opérateurs des frères Lumière ont d’abord filmé

l’arrivée d’un train à la gare de Ciotat à Lyon), le cinéma a influencé le devenir de

celle-ci, et profondément modelé la culture urbaine.



L’ objet de cette communication est de réfléchir sur les rapports qui unissent ville et

cinéma dans un contexte marqué par le sous-développement, en l ' occurrence dans les

pays du Maghreb. Nous chercherons à montrer comment les cinéastes ont abordé lesujet de la ville dans leurs films et quels types de rapports sociaux urbains y

apparaissent. Nous aborderons la question de la culture urbaine, concept clef de la

sociologie urbaine (cf. les travaux de l’ Ecole de Chicago) et la manière dont lecinéma en rend compte dans le contexte spécifique du Maghreb. Nous illustrerons

notre propos par des extraits de films.

18. Dellal, Mohamed (Faculty of Letters Oujda): The African Postcolonial MyopicDiscourse; or Postcolonial Governance and the Discourse of SilenceAfrican postcolonial urban centres have become contact zones where too many new

subject positions have taken root. Like all melting posts they are a space likely tohelp fuse (hybridize) new ethnicities, new cultures and social classes even. This

fusion is a process, usually, completed at vertiginous speeds taking short decisions

makers, and accumulating thus problems that develop into grievances. Unable to

provide legislation to cope, equitably, with these problems, the decision makers resortto silencing opponents (potential sources of trouble) or putting a blind eye to the

growing problems of these subjects. At best, and when some good will is shown, thehandling of these problems is mediatized for ideological purposes. The purpose of the

present paper is to present examples of such myopic attitudes as show in the African

writings and media productions. This narrative of Politics of silence has, indeed, beendealt in writings such as Soyinka’s The Interpreters, Armah’s The Beautyful Ones,

Achebe’s Anthills, Awrid’s Trebulations1, Emecheta’s Double Yoke and too many

other works. TV programs have also tried to offer space for the plight of ignored and

silences voices2. Yet some of these spaces have been used out of politicalopportunism. Cases of rural territories that have either been ignored or appropriated

and used as Trojen horses in battles essentially geared towards voicing the plights of

urban subjects, are common ground.Unmapping the Imperial Centre:1 My translation of his only novel in Arabic, Al Hadith wa Sajan.

2 Reference is made here to a 2m.tv program on rural women. 2000.

19. Dupre, Karine (Tampere University of Technology, Finland): Behind theFacadesOn March 19, 1946 Guadeloupe, an island located in the Caribbean, changed its status

of a French colony to that of a French Overseas Department, after more than three

centuries of colonial rule.

Based on the principle of assimilation, the change of status seemed at first glance tohave unified both metropolitans and the islanders, for assimilation was understood for

some as the proper mean to restore the French republican devise –Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity-in the island; and, for others, as the only way to integrate this newdepartment into the country. As such, cultural discourses at that time also appeared

somehow unilateral, at the image of the Guadeloupean elite’s majority that did not

call for independency (in this sense closely following the Martiniquais leader AiméCésaire), as well as at the image of the French administration and politics that were

willing to raise up the level of Guadeloupe (in terms of equipment, roads, health,



social equality, etc.) to that of France. Yet, in its implementation and in details, almost

60 years after the “assimilation law” passed, one can only wonder whether such

assimilation truly existed in the post-colonial cities of Guadeloupe, even in the earliesttimes of decolonisation.

Because it may concern both crucial need (e.g. of shelter) and aesthetics, architecture

has been chosen in this paper as the specific cultural discourse to be examined toassess the impact of assimilation in Guadeloupe after 1946. Indeed, architecture not

only reflects one society’s pragmatic answers to its natural milieu (climate and other

geophysical conditions) and to the milieu this same society developed (throughchoices of production and economy), but also refers to politics, to power, to ideals,

whether they be artistic, hygienist, cultural, etc. In other words, architecture should be

understood here as clearly referencing to the different identities one society might

contain and to the intermingled relationships bonding them to each others.In Guadeloupe, where colonial discourses traditionally emphasized dichotomy

between colonisers’ buildings and those of the colonized, architecture became

obviously a challenge in the post-colonial period. Besides, as much as the largest

cities of Guadeloupe have gathered much more interest than smaller cities andvillages by the evident underlining desire of representation, cultural discourses –and

here architecture- in the largest cities were/are often much more readable than in thesmaller cities and villages. Yet, since 1946, urban growth and population growth have

considerably modified those notions of cities, towns and villages; as well as they

displaced the focus of cultural discourses. Therefore, this paper proposes to analyzearchitecture as a cultural discourse during the post-colonial period (1946-2003) in the

context of two town centres of Guadeloupe, Gosier and Trois-Rivières. As such, the

attempt is not only to describe and analyze “the façade”, but also the inside voices.

20. Edwards, Brian T. (Assistant Professor of English and Comparative LiteraryStudies Northwestern University, Evanston, IL USA)How do competing representations of the post-colonial city reveal contrasting logicsabout urban space? How have dominant U.S. political and economic projects for the

Global South, in general, and North Africa, in particular, emerged from ideas gleaned

from American representations of the North African city? In what ways have postcolonialMoroccan filmmakers recast U.S. representations of urban space, and what

link might we seen between these meanings made from the vantage of the postcolonial

city and the post-colonial redeployment of practices of looking?

In order to address this series of organizing questions, this paper will look at thelegacy of the 1942 Hollywood film Casablanca in Moroccan cinema and juxtaposes

U.S. and Moroccan cinematic representations of Moroccan urban space. Although

the hypercanonical Warner Bros. film was named after and set in the major Moroccancity, the film’s representation of what it called a “city of hope and despair” was based

more in Orientalist cinematic tradition than ethnographic research. As such, Warner

Bros. responded to a series of major film representations of North African space that preceded it, particularly Algiers (US, 1938) and the French classic Pépé le Moko, as

well as a minor film being made simultaneously on Warner Bros.’ own lots: the

remake of the colonialist film The Desert Song, from which the Casablanca

production borrowed stage sets. The major Hollywood film thus participated in and



extended French colonial practices of understanding urban space, and has an

entrenched relationship to Orientalism as a technology of looking. The film,

completed and premiered in the immediate wake of the U.S. military landings in North Africa in November 1942, also has a major place in U.S. thinking about its

newly discovered global reach and responsibilities. “Casablanca” thus names the

peculiar collusion of U.S. cultural production and post-1942, post-colonial foreignrelations, a major and precise moment when U.S. texts become worldly in a new

way. It is, no less, a word that Warner Brothers thought they held a copyright on and,

in an extreme version of representation-as-ownership, went so far as to claim as muchin 1946 when the Marx Brothers were filming A Night in Casablanca. Director

Michael Curtiz’s representation of Casablanca as a city at the empty center of an

emerging American globalismat the center of the city is a roulette wheel in Rick’s

multilingual Café Americain, where hypocrisy and double dealing are the ethoscaststhe city as a place of transit for foreigners, and for Moroccans a place imagined in the

temporal lag time familiar from the colonialist tendency to commit Africans to the

past of the “primitive.” The latter is connected to the conservative response to the

immediate challenges of the film’s contemporary American context. The complex yetreadily apparent ways in which Casablanca brackets or suppresses concerns of gender

and race is a way of distracting viewers from a more potent possibility repressed bythe film. Namely, that the African American Sam as a racialized subject of U.S.

colonialism might enter into a conversation with the colonized Moroccan subjects

who are relegated to the film’s background. Both are placed in the temporal lag of “racial time.”

Whatever its relationship to material or architectural reality of the city of Casablanca,

the Hollywood film has exerted an interesting presence in postcolonial Moroccan

cinema, one which this paper follows. The paper thus employs a critical practice of following the global flow of cultural production, an elaboration of Arjun Appadurai’s

conceptualization of the global movement of ideoscapes, and motivated in part by the

critical attempt to disrupt the imperial logic at the center of Warner Bros.’ massivelyinfluential film. I offer a reading of two films by the Moroccan filmmaker ‘Abd al-

Qader Laqt‘a, al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida (Love in Casablanca, 1991) and the 1999

film Les Casablancais, making reference as well to the Moroccan debate in responseto Laqt‘a’s controversial project. At the center of Laqt‘a’s project is an exploration of

the relationship between cinematic space and urban space, and it is telling and

important that his 1991 film plays off of and reinterprets the 1942 Hollywood film. In

so doing, within a scene that I analyze, Laqt‘a recasts the American representation of Casablanca (as occupying racial time lag) and rewrites American culture itself as

moribund precisely because of the intertwined relationship of cinema to political

culture. That this original and trenchant critique emerges from the work of a director whose vision of the urban space moves beyond the usual dichotomy identified by the

Urban Generations conference (namely city as site of encounters, culture, citizenship

vs. city as site of misery, etc.) demonstrates an exciting vision at work. By examiningthe urban space created within Laqt‘a’s cinematic vision, and understanding it as a

significant revision of Casablanca’ s vision of Casablanca, I argue that there is a

rewriting or recasting of dominant (neo)colonial logics about urban space. That this

possibility emerges in relation to the post-colonial city should also be seen within the



critical terms of globalization (of the Appadurai, Public Culture school), for it

suggests that the global flow of cultural production is not a one-way street, and

demonstrates how traveling ideas and representations may be recast significantly indifferent contexts.

21. El Harrouni, Khalid (Ecole Natonale d’Architecture-Rabat, Morocco): Lepaysage urbain entre mémoire, usages et projets. Cas d’une ville moyenne,Midelt (*)A l’origine, la ville de Midelt est un gros bourg fondé par la colonisation en 1917dans la vallée de l’oued Outat; les grandes étapes de son urbanisation sont encore

lisibles. En fait, la ville a connu plusieurs événements au cours de son histoire qui ont

façonné sa structure urbaine; elle est considérée comme le produit des populations

qui l’habitent, qui ont marqué le paysage et qui en ont forgé l’identité. Son évolutionest issue de structures héritées du passé et de l’action des acteurs et des groupes

sociaux qui ont le pouvoir de la transformer. Ceci s’est répercuté ainsi sur son paysage

urbain.

L’article tente de comprendre les diverses transformations des processus urbains decette ville moyenne, comment et par qui, elle a été pensée, construite et habitée. Il

s’agit de retracer les processus de sa configuration urbaine selon deux angles delecture. Le premier aborde la ville comme objet d’histoire urbaine en appréhendant

son paysage urbain par les séquences, les perspectives et les lieux, et sous deux

entrées, à savoir le cadre bâti et les espaces libres.Le second examine une société, qui par le rapport qu’elle a entretenu avec l’espace

environnant, a produit, marqué le paysage, transformé ou conservé les structures plus

anciennes, par conséquent qui a généré de l’urbain.

L’objet concerne la restitution du processus historique de formation et detransformation de la ville de Midelt en s’appuyant sur les matériaux historiques ainsi

que les photos d’archives, le relevé urbain et architectural. L’article tente également

de retracer une mémoire d’une ville moyenne, de recomposer les traces et de les situer dans l’histoire de la région. Une partie de cette contribution s’insère dans une

réflexion plus générale de comment aborder également les objets architecturaux et

urbains issus de l’époque coloniale.L’identification et la reconnaissance des éléments qui constituent le paysage urbain,

reposent sur le recours à l’analyse historique et morphologique du processus de

formation et de transformation de la ville.

22. Elkouche, Mohamed (Faculty of Letters-Oujda): Paul Bowles’ Tangier and Fez :

The Agony of Transition from Colonial to Post-Colonial TimesWhile it is generally true that Paul Bowles was much interested in Morocco and itsArabo-Islamic culture, as his fifty-two years’ residence in this country well indicates,

it is also true that Tangier and Fez had the greatest and most exceptional attraction for

him. This special admiration for these two historic cities can be proved not only by hisfrequent and passionate references to them in many of his interviews and writings

(including his autobiography, travel accounts and short stories), but also by the fact

that he chose to commemorate each city in one specific novel of his —Tangier in Let

It Come Down (1952), and Fez in The Spider’s House (1955). Yet, the natur e of this



commemoration remains somehow questionable because in both novels Bowles seems

to deplore the impending encroachment of (post-colonial) modernization in Morocco,

along with its concomitant disintegration or collapse of the nature of thiscommemoration remains somehow questionable because in both novels Bowles seems

to deplore the impending encroachment of (post-colonial) modernization in Morocco,

along with its concomitant disintegration or collapse of the colonial order as well asthe traditional way of life.

Even a cursory look at Bowles’ prefaces* to both novels is apt to draw the reader’s

attention to this author’s sense of regret and disappointment at the passing of a ‘sweet’colonial/pre-colonial era and the coming of a ‘deplorable’ post-colonial one. While

introducing Let It Come Down, for instance, he states that this novel was first

published “at the very moment of the riots which presaged the end of the International

Zone of Morocco. Thus even at the time of publication the book already treated a bygone era, for Tangier was never the same after the 30th of March 1952. The city

celebrated in these pages has long ago ceased to exist, and the events recounted in

them would be now inconceivable.” The word ‘celebrated’ in this quotation is highly

indicative of Bowles’ ideological standpoint as it hints at his yearning and nostalgicdesire for the Tangier of colonial times.... Such implicit dissatisfaction with the

postcolonialMorocco is also expressed in his preface to The Spider’s House. Commenting

disapprovingly on the projects of the nascent liberation movement in Fez, he writes

that “the Nationalists were not interested in ridding Morocco of all traces of Europeancivilization and restoring it to its pre-colonial state; on the contrary, their aim was to

make it even more “European” than the French had made it....” He adds at the close of

this preface that: “The city is still there. It is no longer the intellectual and cultural

center of North Africa, it is merely one more city beset by the insoluble problems of the Third World.”

The above prefatory statements from both novels raise a number of questions that are

greatly pertinent to the discussion of Bowles’ perception and discursive representationof two central Moroccan cities, whose cultural and political metamorphosis he

witnessed with passionate and alarmed ‘Western eyes’. Some of these questions may

be formulated as follows: What are these “insoluble problems” from which Fez hassuffered after independence, according to Bowles? Why is Bowles so nostalgic in his

desire for the colonial Tangier and (pre-colonial) Fez? Can such desire be stigmatized

as romantic and Orientalist? To what extent is Bowles a reliable or objective witness

of the changes these cities underwent? Why did Bowles continue to live in Tangier uptill his death, despite his dissatisfaction with its post-independence realities? Was not

his identity as an American problematized and hybridized by this experience of selfexile

in an alien Oriental city?These and other related questions will be tackled in this paper, whose chief aim is to

analyze Bowles’ views and judgements about the transformations that took place in

Tangier and Fez after Morocco’s independence in 1956. The opinions he expressed inhis autobiography and numerous interviews** will be contrasted with the discourses

of the aforementioned novels so as to show clearly the pictures he had in mind about

each city. The ideological significance of his representations will be also considered

so as to see if his apparent preference of (pre-)colo nial Morocco to post-colonial



Morocco is not just an aspect of his affiliation to the hegemonic/Orientalist ideology

of the West.

* It is worth mentioning that these prefaces did not appear in the first editions of bothnovels. Bowles wrote them retrospectively more than 25 years after the publication of

each novel.

** Bowles’ autobiography Without Stopping was written in 1972, and the vastmajority of his interviews were given after 1964. These texts contain a lot of

references to the realities of Tangier and Fez both before and after independence.

23. Graiouid, Said (University Mohammed V, Morocco): Post-ColonialInteractions: Urban Communication, Globalization, and Moroccan Identities“It is in the city that contemporary popular culture – shopping and video arcades,

cinemas, clubs, supermarkets, pubs, and the Saturday afternoon purchase Saturdaynight clothes – has its home” (Iain Chambers, 1986, Popular Culture: The

Metropolitan Experience, New York: Methuen, p. 17).

This paper will explore ways in which urban communication contributes to the

construction of Moroccan identities. The paper sets out from the premise that theexpansion of urban communication is accompanied by a re-negotiation of power

positions among traditional and emergent social players. The on-going deregulation of the public sphere has created openings that dominant and emergent systems and

groups struggle to appropriate. What is new, though, is that contemporary postcolonial

interactions rely equally on visual, aural, oral, and print cultures. While tillthe mid-eighties, Moroccans were heavily dependent in their media consumption on

partisan press and one state-controlled television station, audiences today are avid

consumers of global TV programs, local and international print media, and the

Internet. In the last few years, the urban landscape also gave in to the power of globalcapital and city dwellers are now interpellated by outdoor advertising. In the same

way, the deregulation of telecommunications sector has brought the number of phone

subscribers from about one million to eight millions in less than five years. As a finalcourse, the Parliament has recently passed a law that will deregulate the audio-visual

market, a fact that will further empower private interest groups at the expense of

public service.Parallel with this revolutionizing expansion in urban communication in Moroccan

cities, there has historically been a traditional marginalization of communication in

urban planning and an even more pronounced failure to develop coherent urban

communication policies. Decision-makers have traditionally been more concernedwith issues of control and censorship than with how urban communication affects

social behavior and relations. Similarly, very little research has been done to

determine the dynamic relationship between communication and urban ideology, thecity and the formation of popular culture, or the interaction between global capital and

post-colonial generations.

This paper will use data gathered through a fieldwork research conducted amonguniversity students in three Moroccan cities to begin the task of understanding ways in

which urban communication and urban values are interrelated. The paper will also use

secondary data to trace future shifts in urban interpersonal communication. Cutting

across both objectives, the paper will reflect on the interaction between global



communication and emergent post-colonial identities.

24. Gupta, Suman (The Open University, UK): Reconfiguring the Post-ColonialCity: Discussions/Representations of the Impact of Outsourcing in theMainstream Mass Media

In both the British/American and the Indian mainstream broadcast and print massmedia there has been a prodigious amount of discussion of the implications of

outsourcing information services by British establishments to India. To a significant

degree such discussion has addressed political and economic repercussions – in termsof job losses, legislative prerogatives, workers’ rights, quality of services, advantages

to business, etc. However, almost invariably, apart from the surface political and

economic concerns addressed, such discussion also: (a) draws upon certain cultural

assumptions regarding the spaces/people who provide outsourced services and thespaces/people who use such services; and (b) offers observations about the cultural

changes that are becoming manifest or can be expected in both as a result of this

relationship. These cultural assumptions and expectations are naturally informed by

the colonial and post-colonial histories involved, and revolve around theunderstanding that the spaces/people in question are (especially insofar as those

providing outsourced services go) urban. A discussion of these issues cannot proceedon the assumption that mass media texts are transparent windows giving a view of the

distinctive cultural interactions that have emerged with the outsourcing phenomenon.

Arguably, the fact that mass media texts have chosen to pick up the phenomenon as a public-interest matter – and have attempted to accommodate it within media frames

that construct , as much as convey, the nature of that public interest – has an important

role to play in the development of this phenomenon. The cultural assumptions and

perceptions regarding people/spaces and post-colonial urbanity involved isappropriately examined only by attention to both the nuances of outsourcing itself and

the manner in which it has been taken up in the mainstream mass media.

In this paper these issues are examined with reference to a number of indicativeIndian and British mass media texts.

25. Hakim, Hassan (Faculty of Letters Oujda): Unruly Presence and NarrativeAmbivalence in Ben Okri's Short StoriesBen Okri's short stories, especially “Disparities” and "Hidden History", may be seen

as an entry point to the analysis of the immigrant Other as ‘latent’ in and anterior to

the Western metropolitan centre and its discourses. The homogeneity and universalityof the metropolitan centre get shattered into ‘fragments’, 'hidden histories' and

epistemological ‘disparities’. In its representation of itself as the Identical and the

Same, as the centre in itself and for itself, the imperial centre is no longer conceivedas an origin, a totality sufficient onto itself. It is opened in its own representation. The

invisibility of the immigrant Other who inhabits the imperial space as an absent

presence disturbs the present/presentation of social relations with anincommensurable and unruly otherness.

As he unmaps metropolitan space, the Other therefore destabilises the terrain on

which Western appropriating strategies are conducted. To re-map the centre’s

geographies and identities can be an act of resistance especially when metropolitan



space is re-described from within the perspective of the Other. This social unmapping

contests the terms on which the narratives of the centre are constructed ; the formal

devices of representation played a great role in naturalising and legitimating theworldview and status quo of the imperial centre. To re-describe the centre from within

otherness is to dismantle the ontological, social and cultural inscriptions on space.

The centre transforms thus into a ‘constellation of delirium’ in Fanon’s words, wheredislocation, violence, racism but above all ‘absence’ and ‘ellipsis’ rupture order,

presence, space and temporality. The oxymoronic conceptualisation of the Other as

absent/present defines the immigrant Other as never present , never now. Okri’s postcolonial narrative strategies institute accordingly new stances about identity.

‘Uncanny’ happenings do erupt to destabilise the mental topologies which construct

identities. The postcolonial Other becomes a hobo, an unusual picaro who, for

instance, explores and unmaps the worldview that frames the centre. With hisspaceless presence, the hobo unsettles the discourses that delimit the metropolis and

its daily activities. As he roams space with his unruly presence, he keeps subverting

the social habitus and the cultural topographies of the metropolitan map.

Though ‘unrepresentable’ , the Other does not unsettle the centre to celebrate the periphery. Okri’s postcolonial strategies of resistance seek to embrace a perspective

whereby identity, space and temporality may be rendered contingent, shifting anduncertain. Otherness becomes a haunting presence that undermines even the language

of the Enlightenment body politics: the right to citizenship and the right to

representation. History transforms into a palimpsest; totality turns into contingency;incontrollable phenomena resist sociological analysis.

In dealing with the absent Other of the metropolitan centre, Okri's stories not only

undermine the universal consensus of human rights and social equality as an

impossible political and social utopia, they touch upon the limits of the finite thoughtof the Same, upon the inadmissible and the uncanny. They point to the uncertainty

and ambivalence at the heart of the self and other, centre and periphery to institute

that which exceeds the “historical”, the “social”, the “rational”, and above all the“Manichean”.

26. Hamdoun, Mohammed (University Paris 13): E-twinning: From town-to-towntwinning to global twinningThe movement of town-twinning agreements was emerged just after the Second

World War. It was based on the utopian view that war could be avoided if official

diplomacy was either replaced or sustained by direct contacts between the peoplesthemselves.

It was further motivated by the experience of the leagues of the national committees

in inter-war period: Those committees mustered popular support for an abstract idea but in no way organised better understand between peoples. This reflection was the

basis of the most Franco-German twinning agreements after the war. Another aspect

of the international context was the East-West division of the Cold War, whichcommunist and left-wing municipalities in the West tried to circumvent by reaching

agreements with East European cities.

And lastly from the seventies onwards the same municipalities tried to break their

isolation by reaching agreement with municipalities of similar complexion in the



West. This took place within the context of a growing acceptance of European

construction and its possible benefits for de-industrialised areas.

Cities in less developed countries (LDCs) tried as well to establish such twinning withmunicipalities in the West and elsewhere. As a result in local government,

developments are increasingly influenced not only by the national level but also by

global change and by decisions made at the supranational and international levels.Vice versa, towns and cities are becoming global players. Internet as a medium has

largely improved this city networking. In our paper, we tend to anlyse this new

phenomenon and to see how Internet has turned city-to-city twinning, often calledetwinning,

into global twinning, taking into consideration examples from (LDCs) and

two antagonistic forces: the local and the global.

27. Hamdouni, Mohamed (Ecole Natonale d’Architecture-Rabat, Morocco):Mimicking Colonial Design: The Rhetoric of Urbanism in ContemporaryMorocco

In the mid 1980's the Moroccan State initiated a new politics of urban design. The paper discusses that politics and argues on the base of discursive and architectural

evidence that despite its apparent rejection by post-colonial Moroccan architects theFrench colonial architectural legacy has been a central source of inspiration for

contemporary architectural policy and practice. Taking the lead from observations in

the field, and leaning on two case studies, the paper presents the different componentsof this architectural reformulation and analyzes the visual rhetoric it entails. Hence it

reveals how a process which is presented by the actors as a return to a true identity

rooted in the Arab-Islamic cultural traditions, should be understood instead as a

postcolonial self orientalization. In its conclusion it points out the different agencies atwork and the theoretical questions that are raised by this process

28. Hamza, Ait (Mohammed V University – Agdal, Morocco): Mohammed : Espaceoasien et urbanisationL’urbanisation des espaces présahariens, si elle ne date pas d’aujourd’hui, reflète la

brutalité des transformations qui ont bouleversé le monde oasien au Maroc. S’iln’existe plus aucun espace inaccessible à l’influence urbaine, l’espace d’habitat

continu, sur plusieurs dizaines de kilomètres, le long du Dadès est particulièrement

intéressant par les problématiques qu’il pose à l’aménagement. La multiplication etle gonflement rapide des centres urbains à l’intérieur ou sur les marges desgrandes oasis, est un fait frappant. L’élargissement des centres urbains (Kelaât

Mgouna, Boumalne et Tinghir), la création d’autres noyaux urbains pour

accompagner le découpage communal et l’extension des zones à vocation touristiqueentraînent l’espace oasien d’une logique de modernité à multiples effets.

29. Harras, Mokhtar (Mohammed V University – Agdal, Morocco): RuralMigration: Effects on Moroccan citiesThe objective of this paper is to show how local officials and elected representants

perceive the effects of rural migration on the the cities; the way this migration affects

the cities, as well as to analyse their view about the new rural profile into the city and



the dialectic between rural and urban. These ideas would be developped on the basis

of a qualitative data that has been collected through focus groups held in many

Moroccan rural and urban areas. The analysis of a Moroccan local elite would belargely privileged.

30. Ivaska, Andrew (Concordia University, Canada): Contesting Postcolonial“National Culture” in a Cosmopolitan Dar es Salaam: The Short Life of aTanzanian Ban on “Soul”In the early postcolonial period, Dar es Salaam witnessed the development of newcultural practices around “global” mass-cultural forms, including mini-skirts, “soul”

music, wigs, and beauty contests. The popularity of the practices, debates and

controversies surrounding these forms grew up against the background of struggles

accompanying important shifts in the social landscape of Tanzania’s capital: thechanging nature of public space in a rapidly expanding Dar es Salaam, women’s work

and mobility in the city, the state’s increasing control of paths to resources and power,

and crises of masculinity and youth in an era of urban joblessness. These

developments coincided with the growing profile of the Tanzanian state’s nationalcultural project, which featured a series of bans on (at various times) wigs, cosmetics,

mini-skirts, tight trousers, bell-bottoms, beauty contests, soul music and “Afro”hairstyles as forms antithetical to “national culture” and embodying a dangerous

“urban decadence.” Igniting extraordinary and wide-ranging debates that spilled

beyond the national cultural question, these contests over culture saw young peoplemaking claims to “modern” lives in the city that clashed with the state’s increasing

emphasis in the late 1960s and early 1970s on rural hard work as the path to “modern

development” and the appropriate scene for the performance of Tanzanian citizenship.

In this context, this paper focuses particularly on the debate surrounding a 1969 banon “soul” music in Dar es Salaam. Embedded in multiple agendas and rhetorics, this

debate involved not only state officials, young Tanzanians distressed at the ban, and

“concerned” residents of the capital, but also African-Americans living in and passingthrough Dar es Salaam. Situating this episode in the contexts of the national cultural

project, the gendered concerns about young women in the city that accompanied it,

and Dar es Salaam’s position as a nodal point along global networks of cosmopolitanstyle, I take two tacks in analyzing the debate. First of all, I consider the state’s

curious ambivalence with regard to Afro-American culture and the ways in which

young urbanites’ performed attachments to non-national icons like James Brown

competed with official attempts to “nationalize” urban identities in a capital city seenas a problematic cultural space. Secondly, in exploring the ban’s emergence in

connections to concerns about “schoolgirls” in Dar es Salaam nightclubs, I suggest

that the national-cultural focus of much of the debate was a vehicle for underlyinganxieties around sexuality, urban space, and women’s mobility in the capital. These

anxieties, I contend, made up an abiding, underlying force behind not only the ban on

soul music, but the longer series of “decency” campaigns of which it was a part.Throughout the paper, I attempt to elaborate on this late-1960s moment in Dar es

Salaam as one which saw the postcolonial state continuing a colonial practice of

constructing the city as a threatening, decadent and feminized space – an effort which

the capital’s cosmopolitan cultural terrain made increasingly difficult and contested.



This paper is based upon a variety of primary source material, including government

and party documents, letters-to-the-editor, oral interviews, and political cartoons.

31. Kharmich, Hassan (Ecole Natonale d’Architecture-Rabat, Morocco): LAMEDINA MAROCAINE ENTRE TRADITION ET CONTEMPORANEITE

Face aux amples mutations sociales, économiques et spatiales qu’a connue la médinamarocaine pendant les deux dernières décennies, il y a lieu de se livrer à une nouvelle

lecture de cet espace urbain pour en analyser les nouvelles composantes et en

comprendre les dynamiques et les logiques à l’oeuvre. Ceci nous permettra de voir nos tissus anciens selon leur finalité propre et leurs spécificités internes et par là,

mieux redéfinir leur place et leur statut dans le nouveau contexte urbain, en tenant

compte des réalités en mutation.

Notre lecture du paysage médinal, sera plus centrée sur l’homme-habitant pris dansson cadre familier d’existence, que sur l’espace-support pris isolement, tout en

privilégiant l’examen des phénomènes d’appropriation, des pratiques spatiales et des

modèles d’habiter ; convaincus que le cadre bâti, la structure sociale et le modèle

d’habiter font partie l’un de l’autre et se donnent mutuellement forme et signification.A la quête de cette véritable signification, on tentera de rechercher si les manières de

vivre et d’approprier l’espace dans les médinas marocaines sont en continuité ou enrupture avec le modèle traditionnel ou si l’on assiste à l’émergence de nouveaux

modèles de références ? De même on essayera de mettre en exergue les mécanismes

régulateurs des inadaptations entre le bâti et le vécu ?C’est dans ce contexte, d’une part, de continuité et d’aliénation par rapport au modèle

d’habiter traditionnel, et d’autre part, d’acculturation et d’adhésion à de nouveaux

modèles de référence que notre proposition de communication s’inscrit.

32. Khayati, Abdellatif (Faculty of Letters Fes): Ali Zawa and Casablanca’s OtherSpacesThe paper will take the ‘spatial turn’ within cultural studies—the emergence of both anew, interdisciplinary object of study and a new conceptual tool for social and cultural

analysis—as its starting point of analysis. Then it will explore the nature of

Casablanca’s cityscape and its relation to social identities, arguing that theconstruction of social space plays a constitutive role in the (re)production and

(re)configuration of social relations.

More specifically, the paper will focus on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopias’

to account for the heterogeneous character of space, that is, its cultural logics of ‘emplacement’ as well as ‘displacement.’ Like utopias, heterotopias are related to

living real places, ‘but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of

relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.’ Unlike utopias, however,heterotopias don’t have the curious property of being imaginary, unreal spaces; they

are ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the

real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, aresimultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.’

It is this sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we

live that Nabyl Ayouch’s Ali Zawa, it seems to me, performs. The film aims to show a

group of kids—real homeless kids—trying to survive in an uncompromising



Casablancan cityscape, where the youngest kid, Ali Zawa, wields special energy and

resourcefulness. More interestingly, in showing this story Nabyl Ayouch’s point about

the desires, the dreams and the complaints of these homeless kids in relation tosociety can best be understood in terms of Casablanca’s heterotopic site—this other

site inhabited by the outcasts—where such normative spaces of emplacement as the

home, the school, and the workplace are contradicted, inverted and displaced. In thisfilm, the evocation of the margins is simultaneously real, metonymic and metaphoric;

it defines a politics of location that calls those of us who would participate in the

formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces—theheterotopias—where we begin the process of revision.

33. Kaioua, Abdelkader (Inspection Régionale de l’Aménagement du Territoire et del’Environnement- Casablanca, Morocco): CASABLANCA , MÉTROPOLEINDUSTRIELLE EN PLEINE RECONVERSIONCasablanca, concentre l’essentiel de l’industrie moderne du Maroc. Plus de la moitié

des établissements productifs y sont localisés, ils occupent 60% de la population

ouvrière nationale. Son espace d’implantation est très complexe, il concerne la quasitotalité du territoire .

Au cours des deux dernières décennies, des mutations profondes ont été opérées dansle choix des sites de localisation . L’industrie se développe par desserrement et

délocalisation des espaces traditionnels vers les zones péri-urbaines, sans respect des

orientations de la planification urbaine en cours depuis le début des années quatrevingts.Le jeu des acteurs, la pénurie du sol et la spéculation constituent l’élément moteur

dans la dynamique spatiale des industries. Ceci induit un certain nombre de

dysfonctionnements et de carences dans le fonctionnement du tissu urbain dans sa

globalité. Une requalification des zones d’accueil de l’investissement industriel versde nouvelles fonctions interpelle les décideurs de la gouvernance de la métropole qui

se penchent sur un plan stratégique de développement intégrant la nécessaire

reconversion des espaces industriels de la métropole casablancaise.

34. Kiwan, Nadia (University of Southampton, UK): Music, Migration, andTranscultural Capital in Changing City SpacesMaghrebi music in and beyond the post-colonial city. The main focus of the second

paper is cultural creation in Paris and more specifically, music and artists linked to the

Maghreb. The post-imperial city that Paris represents allows us to regard it as a site

of cultural encounter, clearly visible amongst artists working, living or passingthrough the city. Yet, there are notable differences in the relationship between artists

and their city which I shall demonstrate with a number of case studies. For example,

for groups such as l'Orchestre National de Barbès or El-Gafla the role of Paris as a sitefor encounter and cultural 'metissage' was key to their formation and continuing

success. In this sense Paris seems very much to be a post-colonial city, in that cultural

diversity has become an almost banal aspect of cultural life in the city. In a differentmanner for musicians initially based in the Maghreb such as Cheb Khaled, Cheb

Mami, Souad Massi and MBS amongst many others, Paris tends to be regarded as a

sort of 'passage obligé' if they want to succeed in their artistic careers. Here, it would

seem that Paris is more colonial in its role. Whether one chooses to stress the colonial



or the post-colonial aspect of the relationship between Paris and artists originating

from the Maghreb, one cannot ignore the diversity and richness of cultural and

musical life in Paris. On the other hand, our fieldwork has shown that although the possibilities for cultural encounter in Paris takes place amongst artists, this is less the

case for audiences. Whilst some venues such as the Cabaret Sauvage tend to favour

the social and cultural mixing of publics from in and around Paris, many venues suchas the Zénith in Paris, amongst many others, and their organisers are unable (or

unwilling?) to encourage socio-cultural encounter. The result is often that certain

venues and organisers cater for the tastes and expectations of the 'European-origin'audiences whilst other venues and organisers cater solely for audiences of North

African background. Thus it would seem that it is above all, the artists working in

Paris and elsewhere who are at the cutting edge of cultural encounter and innovation.

The context of the globalisation of cultural flows and products further enhancescertain artists' key role in altering the traditional 'taken for granted' post-colonial

relationship between Paris and the Maghreb. This process is taking place when artists

of North African and/or sub-Saharan African origin do no longer and not necessarily

look to Paris or France in terms of their careers. This observation is confirmed by anincreasing number of artists who are either signed or tend to tour in other parts of

Europe (notably the UK). Their activities suggest that in some ways Paris may belosing its centrality as the post-colonial hub for North African/African music and

cultural production more generally. The concluding part of this paper, based on casestudy

interviews, will suggest reasons why this may be the case.

35. Lebaddy, Hasna (Faculty of Letters Rabat): Narrative Generations: From thePre-Colonial Folktale: “ Aisha Jarma” to the Postcolonial Film: “ Douiba”One difference between the pre-colonial and the postcolonial city can be illustrated bythe difference between Tetouan and Casablanca as commented on by a woman who

lived in Tetouan in the first half of the twentieth century and who had the opportunity

to accompany the household of a judge to Casablanca. A few years later, when shereturned to Tetouan, some of the women asked her what Casablanca was like. After

thinking about it for a while she announced: ‘A Sidi Beliot, Dar Beida bla hiot .’Beginning by invoking Casablanca’s patron saint, Sidi Beliot, she then went on to pronounce the most outstanding feature for her of the city itself; that it had no walls or

that it had spilled out well beyond any attempt to impose a confining definition on it.

Walls of every kind are what the protagonists of Moroccan women’s tales are often

presented as having to contend with. Aicha, the protagonist of so many women’s talesin Morocco, is the one who seeks to transgress both the confines of her father’s house

and those of the metmoura or underground silo within which the sultan’s son places

her once they get married, through her ability to manipulate words and to outwit themen in her life. It is this ability which distinguishes the heroines of these tales, more

so even than their physical beauty. Texts, such as Aicha’s tale, can best be

understood if one takes into consideration the context within which they were told bythe communities of women within the households of the walled-in medinas, for whom

the tales involved a dialogic process enabling them to come to terms with their

position within that society. Such a context, like the walls of the medina, served to

both confine them and also to enable them to define themselves. By bringing the tales



outside the walled-in medina and placing them within the context of the postcolonial

city, which refuses to be confined or defined so conveniently, isn’t one

decontextualizing them and subjecting them to misinterpretation?This paper will discuss some of the degradations involved in transforming the precolonial

folktale: “ Aicha Jarma” into the postcolonial film: “ Douiba”, focusing on the

transformation involved and paying particular attention to the different audiencesconcerned. Within the old houses of the walled-in medinas the basic unit was the

community of women, who depended on such protective and confining notions as city

walls to both come to terms with their identities and also transgress those imposed onthem, through the effective manipulation of words. By uprooting the tale from such a

context and forcing it to inhabit a different form—more suited to the mass media

associated with the postcolonial city—the dialogic relationship between the audience

and the tales has necessarily been lost. In the process, the tale has been condensed,reinterpreted, and considerably transformed, thus undermining the themes which it

had originally gone to some length to convey. It can even be argued that the tale has

been altered to conform to an Orientalist view of Moroccan culture.

36. Madani, Mohmmed (Faculty of Law Rabat): Les jeunes et le repertoire del’action collective dans la ville marocaineCette contribution vise a travers la notion de repertoire d’action collective (Tilly)

l’etude de quelques actions collectives menees par des jeunes dans la ville marocaine

ces dernieres annees.La musique apparait dans ce sens comme l’une des formes routinisees d’expression

d’une cause. Nous utiliserons l’exemple de la condemnation d’un groupe de jeunes

amateurs de hard rock accuses de satanisme a Casablanca.

Le duxieme exemple a trait a la trnsnationalisation de la protestation. Latransnationalisation

de la vie politiqque est un phenomene nouveau dans la ville marocaine

: il y a quelques annees on a vu apparaitre des Ong trns-nationales : transparencyMaroc, Attac Maroc, Amnesty International Maroc, etc. et uis on a vu apparaitre les

reseaux des nouveaux combatants transnationaux. C’est la filiere perverse de la

transnationalisation.

36. Mansouri, Driss (Faculty of Letters Fes): Les soubassements culturels desconflits de la coproprieteDans cette communication nous nous appesantirons pas sur les aspects juridiques dela copropriete, dont le statut oscille dans la conscience populaire entre la propriete et

la location. De la les problemes auxquels se trouvent confrontes les syndics pour

financer les charges des espaces communs (entretien du jardin, electricite, ascenseurs,etc.). D’autres problemes sont lies aux litiges relatifs a la plomberieet aux bruits, mais

aussi a l’education des enfants.

37. McLeod, John (University of Leeds, UK): ‘Millennial Currents: postcolonialLondon writing in the 1990s’This paper explores the representation of London by 1990s postcolonial writers as a

space of determined creativity, muted celebration and continued resistance to the



city’s social conflicts which have emerged from Britain’s colonial legacy and postwar

racialising turn. It contrasts the gloomy predictions of David Dabydeen and

others at the beginning of the decade concerning London’s social and culturaldifficulties with the ‘millennial optimism’ with which it closed, articulated chiefly

through the public support of the work of Zadie Smith, Meera Syal and others.

Writers during the 1990s turned to London as a potentially utopian site of transcultural creativity which offered the means to imagine new images of the city

beyond the divisive logic of racism and discrimination, and also nation; and in

projecting London in this way, figures such as Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar andBernardine Evaristo offered a powerful and transformative cultural retort to a series of

enduring social difficulties (epitomised most brutally by the murder of Stephen

Lawrence in April 1993). 1990s writers pointed to the social and cultural problems

which have endured into a new century while they also looked forward to therefashioning of London as a transcultural space of social possibility at the turn of a

new century. As Bernardine Evaristo writes in Lara, ‘the future means

transformation’.

38. Meinhof, Ulrike Hanna (University of Southampton, UK): Music, Migration,and Transcultural Capital in Changing City SpacesThis workshop/ symposium consists of 3 interlinking papers by Nadia Kiwan, Ulrike

H. Meinhof, and Zafimahaleo Rasolofondraosolo, based on research conducted as part

of an EU Fifth Framework project on Changing City Spaces: New Challenges toCultural Policy in Europe. An important part of our project investigates the

relationship- its interpenetration or discrepancy - between 'top-down' cultural

policies directed towards cultural diversity in Europe and the 'bottom-up' creative

energy of im-migrant populations in post-colonial capital cities in Europe. Our theoretical reflections will be grounded in two comparative and contrastive case

studies with immigrant musicians living in Paris who are originating from the

Maghreb (especially from Morocco and Algeria) and Madagascar, and of musiciansfrom the Maghreb and Madagascar who pass through Paris as part of a

transnational 'world music' circuit.

Paper 1Ulrike Hanna Meinhof: Transnationalism and cultural capital

The first paper by Ulrike Meinhof establishes the theoretical basis for understanding

the effects of global flows of migration by focusing on the city as a conceptual frame

of reference. It establishes the basis for the two consecutive case studies of two verydifferent migrant networks, interlinking Paris as a post-imperial city with its postcolonial

counterparts in Morocco, Algeria and in Madagascar. It argues that the

cultural diversity of the contemporary city makes the city rather than the nation stateinto a powerful conceptual tool for imagining the interconnections and

interdependencies of the contemporary world. Cities are places of negotiation,

encounter and new creative energies, but equally of social exclusion and seclusion.Whilst there is a great deal of theoretical understanding of the significance of modern

city spaces and their transnational interconnectivities and flows , there is still a lack of

detailed empirical work which connects these concepts to the practical everyday

reality of the diverse people living in the cities. Researchers of particular ethnically



defined im-migrant groups and their locally and transnationally interconnecting

networks, for example, need to be alert to the methodological risk that such framing

devices may reinforce traditional notions of diasporically displaced but internallycohesive ethnic communities. With our detailed studies of particular sub-groups of

im-migrants - those of musicians and the cultural actors who support them - we can

demonstrate the ways in which strategically activated, locally and transnationallymanaged networks constitute in fact a powerful transcultural capital which is

rewarding in socio-cultural as well as economic terms. In strategically using cultural

and linguistic diversity and multiple transnational affiliations, im-migrant artists andother cultural agents can successfully circumvent the pressures of total assimilation

into a new nation state on the one hand, and free-floating cosmopolitanism on the

other. Ethnic, cultural and national origin as well as multiple local, transnational and

multi-cultural affiliations thus can provide a repertoire of options. In that sense themusicians and cultural actors that we studied may well be amongst the prime

examples for a genuine structural transformation of the transnational public and

private sphere.

39. Mentak, Said (Department of English, Oujda): The African GeographicalRepresentation of the Post-colonial City: Connecting Public Space with GenderIdeologiesThe word "city", according to The Dictionary of Human Geography, is originally

understood as "a European urban settlement containing a cathedral and the seat of a bishop". First, this religious sense is ironically inverted by the geographical

knowledge of the city itself where some public places are reserved for the expression

of individual desires and fantasies. The moral geography of the city is thus

encroached upon by an atmosphere of tolerance that allows for a sharing of publicspaces–such as streets, buses, buildings, and clubs–with different people not

necessarily belonging to the same community. That is, diversity has generally become

the distinctive trait of the city. Second, though the criteria for identifying cities ismostly determined by an administrative act, population size is a factor that cannot be

ignored to differentiate a village from a city. In the same way population growth

contributes to the making of a city, it also destroys the traditional aspect of the villagelife which is based on stability, security, and sense of belonging to a knowable world.

The city is then a world where strangers mingling in public spaces generate fear and

anxieties. Finally, the city is a European settlement. In this sense, taking into account

Africa which was colonized by European countries one would support Triulzi's ideathat the African city is a "site of memory" of colonisation and a synthesis of the

colonial city which grew opposite the African native town. It is after all a forced

synthesis of modernity and tradition. Yet, the African urban generations who are bornand grown up in cities hardly notice the synthesis; the city for such generations opens

ways for new freedoms, for possible individual achievements, and for challenging

autonomy. On the other hand, it is important to stress the fact that the look of postcolonialcity, in spite of its apparent randomness, reflects political decisions as to what

should be visible and what should not.

The African novelist, being seriously concerned with colonial and post-colonial

issues, has given importance to the African city as a site/sight of conflict of cultures



and of resistance or submission to European values. The African novelist is concerned

here with the urban constitution of African identities. However, he has been recently

criticised for his subjective, and hence limited, male position. The city becomes a siteof patriarchal order, sexist and racist in its ideology. For instrance, Sango in Cyprian

Ekwensi's novel People of the City is very much careful not to marry a girl of the city

because his mother has already warned him that girls of the city are all prostitutes!Therefore, the representation of the post-colonial city in the African novel testifies to

the close connection between public space and gender ideologies. Such a

representaion also shows how urban geography draws on a gendering of knowledgeabout cities.

For the sake of unity, I have chosen to tackle the issues discussed above through the

novels of Nigerian writers, who are mostly concerned with Lagos. The writers I have

selected for the purpose are Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, BenOkri, and Buchi Emecheta. The names of the novelists in question clearly show the

two different generations of African writers who differ in their conceptions of the

post-colonial city. The analysis of the selected texts is based on the following

principal issues:The urban constitution of identities

The gendering of knowledge about the post-colonial city

40. Omoniyi, Tope (University of Surrey, Roehampton, UK): “Outsourcing and theReconstitution of Habitus, Field and Identity”An incredible amount of discourse and counter-discourse have been generated on the

subject of immigrants and immigration particularly to popular Western destinations.

The host-guest social and cultural interface is the context of varying relational

transactions which invoke Anderson’s conceptualisation of the nation as an ‘imaginedcommunity’ (1991). Within these, descriptors such as economic migrants, asylumseekers,

refugees, aliens, foreigners, and immigrants define segments of or the entire

population at the core of migration while terms like nationalists, fascists, Nazis,racists, purists and victims have been used to describe those opposed to immigrants

and immigration. These construct differing perspectives of agency. Arguably, with the

reverse migration associated with outsourcing, globalisation may be said to haveeffected a reconstitution of habitus within a new field (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992;

cf. Habermas 1984) for identity construction. The remodelled habitus may in principle

be characterised as a challenge to essentialist perspectives on identity considering that

collaborations between two distinct work cultures, ethics and other social practices potentially rub-off on each other with a de-essentialising effect. Furthermore, some of

the activities are de-territorialised such as transactions conducted by videoconferences,

and on-line through customer-support networks. These activities contrastwith on-ground transactions between outsourcers and contractors in specific country

locations. There are also transactions between contractors and the call-centre staff

they recruit to fulfil their obligations to clients. There are cross-cultural transactions between trained call-centre staff and the outsourcer’s customers. These transactions

evidently involve a complex web of political, economic, cultural and social

relationships. Previous sociolinguistic studies of call-centres, for instance Debora

Cameron’s (2001) have focused on describing the communicative practices of the



sector. In this paper, I shall examine the ways in which habitus is reconstituted within

interactions in the new field created by outsourcing, and the effect that such

reconstitution has on the identities of Southern producers of knowledge and their Northern clients. I shall present the report of an initial investigation of one case of

outsourcing by a global IT company with a branch in Southeast England.

ReferencesAnderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Community. London: Verso

Bourdieu, Pierre (1985) "The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups." Theory and

Society 14 (1985): 723-744.Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press

Cameron, Deborah (2003) Good to Talk?: Living and working in a Communication

Culture. London: Routledge.Habermas, J. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Polity Press, Cambridge

41. Oni, Duro (Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization, Nigeria): The

Dwindling Fortunes Of The Cinema In Post Colonial LagosUrban generations in post-colonial cities have been characterized by the development

of certain monuments, architectural edifices and socio-cultural infrastructuralfacilities. Most of these have, over time, gone into extinction, though their relevance

to the urban milieu is not in question. Restoration of these legacies, in particular the

cinema, would assist in the sustainable socio-cultural linkages of at least theimmediate urban community.

Recently, a Nigerian Entertainment Business conglomerate, Silverbird Productions,

opened a set of cinema houses in Victoria Island, a high brow area of the Lagos

metropolis. The event took many observers of the cinema in Nigeria by surprise. Thiswas due mainly to the fact that the cinema in Nigeria had been considered as going

into extinction, over taken by the emergence of the video films in the nineties.

The paper examines the historical emergence of the cinema in Nigeria, particularly inthe Lagos metropolis from the colonial period to the present. While discussing the

cinema in general, the emphasis in the paper is on the physical structure of the cinema

houses.From the Victorian period, emphasis on entertainment of a Western nature was a

prominent feature of the Lagos social life (Echeruo, 1977). Such entertainment

included operatic productions known as Christian cantatas and film shows. In order to

indigenize the entertainment industry, the local community proposed the erection of the Glover Hall, opened in 1893. This began the development of such spaces in

Lagos. Subsequently, other venues were constructed for the showing of films and

other forms of entertainment. These have included the Casino in Yaba, Pen in Agege,Metro in Somolu, Super in Surulere, Tarzan in Orile, Plaza in Lagos Island and the

Cinma Halls of the monumental National Theatre in Lagos.

An examination of the variety of the films screened from the period of the late 19th

Century, reveal the predominance of “cowboy films” of the Western world, the Indian

films from Bollywood, the Chinese films of the Kung Fu Era and more recently the

Nigerian Nollywood video films. These films were shown in a variety of cinema

houses that cut across social strata. While the rich went to the more expensive cinema



houses, the poor took solace in the often run-down cinema houses in the suburban

areas and the ghettoes.

Apart from very few cinema houses still operative, our investigation reveals that over seventy five percent of them from the colonial period are currently housing churches

and other places of worship and in some cases have been converted into lock up

shops. There are several reasons that can be adduced for this development. First arethe socio-economic conditions that made it impossible for celluloid films to be made

in Nigeria, after the first attempts by such people as Ola Balogun, late Hubert Ogunde

and late Ade Love. Secondly is the rather strong campaign by the religious groupsassociating the socio-economic problems in Nigeria to the hosting of the 2nd World

Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77) in 1977, which may be

partly responsible for the non-rehabilitation of the National Theatre complex, venue

of the festival, by the Nigerian government?While some optimism may be shared about the return of the cinema the question to

ask is that will the emergence of the Silverbird Cinemas houses bring about a

reintroduction of celluloid films? This is not likely to occur as the culture among film

makers has shifted to the making of video films which are marketed essential for home consumption, given the high costs of making celluloid films in a depressed

economy. So, the Silverbird Cinemas are likely to continue to screen Western, Indianand Chinese films for a long time to come, thus contributing to the continuation of the

colonized city now further sucked into a globalized economy.

Be that as it may, cinemas are, however, still relevant in this discourse, as itscontinued survival will stem down the inimical social, demographic, economic and

spatial problems occasioned by the near absence of recreational facilities in the Lagos

metropolis.

The paper will also attempt to identify spatio-temporally the cinema houses of the past, map them out and propose modalities for their resurgence as a vital component

of the recreation of a rapidly developing urban city of Lagos.

42. Procter, James (University of Stirling, UK): Maggie and the metropolis, orThatcher and diasporaThatcherism has been debated at length within politics, sociology, economics andcultural studies. However, little has been said about the generative impact of

Thatcherism within the context of literary and cultural representation. This paper

examines the representation of Thatcher and the city within postcolonial black British

writing and film between the late 1970s and early 1990s, from the 'Tatcha' poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson, to the 'Maggie Torture' of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic

Verses. The metonymic link established between the metropolis and Thatcher within

this generation of cultural production runs counter to the dominant imaginary of Thatcherism, with its cultural investment in the rural landscapes of heritage England.

By reading Maggie's metropolis through the representations of the city's postcolonial

migrants, this paper aims to generate a debate about the conjunctural significance of diaspora aesthetics and theory during the 1980s.



43. Rasolofondraosolo, Zafimahaleo and Meinhof, Ulrike Hanna (University of Southampton, UK): Transnational ancestors: Malagasy musicians and theirlyrics in post-colonial settings.In our third paper we will explore in detail the ways in which the lyrics of im-migrant

songwriters in France register their transnational experiences, and how these

'discourses of song' interconnect with the every-day life experiences of the artists. Our main focus will be on the cultural production of musicians of Malagasy origin but

will include some comparative and contrastive references to our other case study as

well. We will present an exemplary selection from the repertoire of contemporarysongs by Malagasy im-migrants in France (presented in the original and in

translation), which will demonstrate that in most cases the inspiration for the themes

and the choice of language for the lyrics depends on the continuing connection with

the country of origin - both real and imaginary, and to a far lesser extent on theexperience of migration. On the other hand, our interviews and ethnographic

observations of musicians (and related cultural actors) revealed a high degree of

integration into their new place/country of residence and considerable 'savoir faire'.

Our paper will analyse what may be seen as a paradoxical conflict, by referring to twoforms of 'transnationalism' introduced in the first paper, - a model of diasporic

displacement filled with nostalgic memories - and a model of transnational capitalwhere cultural origin is seen as strategically enabling. Drawing on our interview data

and observations we are also able to comment on the extent to which the musicians

themselves experience this duality as a conflict or paradox between their every-dayand their artistic life, or by contrast, whether they experience them as interconnecting

features of a multi-facetted transnational existence which provides them above all

with an enhanced cultural repertoire affecting all aspects of their lives.

The paper will include exemplary performance of such music by Dama, one of the co-author's of this paper, himself an established musician with extensive links to

the musicians researched.

44. Ross, Eric (Assistant Professor Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco):Touba: A Trans-Colonial Sufi MetropolisTouba, in Senegal, is the “capital” of the Mouride brotherhood (tarîqah). It wasestablished in 1887, at the very beginning of the colonial period, but has really only

grown as a city since Senegal’s independence in 1960. Touba is one of the fastest

growing cities in Senegal and, with approximately half a million inhabitants, it is now

that country’s second largest city. Moreover, Touba is an autonomous city, benefitingfrom a special legal status which places it under the nearly exclusive jurisdiction of

the brotherhood. This paper will argue that Touba is the product of a specific

religious and social project which effectively transcends colonialism and modernity as paradigms.

Touba is categorized as trans-colonial because its historical trajectory as a place

transcends the usual compartmentalization implicit to the colonial process, i.e.: there being “pre-colonial”, “colonial” and “post-colonial” conditions. Touba started out as

an isolated spiritual retreat (khalwah) in the wilderness, deliberately removed from the

social and moral compromises associated with the colonial order. Yet, in the first

decades of the 20th century the Mouride brotherhood came to an accommodation with



the French authorities. The brotherhood was henceforth to be a major institution of

what we would term today “civial society and Touba emerged as one of the principal

instruments of its social, cultural, political and economic strategies. The Mourides’cultural resistance to colonization, intitially the spiritual project of one man, became a

platform for a dynamic process of economic growth (and of capital accumulation) and

social empowerment.Touba is modern in the architectural and urbanistic sense of the term. The building of

Touba’s large central Mosque was initiated in 1926 and completed in 1963. The

laying out of a city to surround this shrine is an even more recent phenomenon,marked by three successive planning schemes: 1958-63, 1974 and 1994. Both the

central shrine and the city have been built using modern methods and materials,

exemplified by such processes as recourse to building contractors, the use of

reinforced concrete and, more recently, the creation of a Geographic InformationSystem to manage real-estate transactions and the distribution of public utilities.

Touba’s rise as an urban centre has also been conditioned by such modern social

factors as the creation and mobilization of a mass movement of national scale, the

expansion of a colonial cash-crop economy, railway construction, rural-urbanmigration, and, most recently, monetary remittances from migrants abroad. The city’s

growth is currently being financed with funds raised abroad by Mouride disiplesinvolved in a variety of trades and businesses, and channelled through formal and

informal international financial institutions. With Mouride communities established

in cities throughout Africa, Western Europe, North America and the Indian Ocean, theMouride metropolis is increasingly a global city.

Yet Touba is foremost a Sufi city. It is a Sufi city to the extent that it was founded by

a Sufi shaykh in a moment of mystic illumination and that it has been designed and

built by the Sufi brotherhood he established. Touba is named for Tûbâ, the tree of paradise of Islamic tradition. This archetypal tree articulates Islamic conceptions of

righteous life on earth, divine judement and access to the Hereafter. The city of

Touba actualizes this spiritual construct. Important aspects of its topographicalconfiguration, such as the vertical and horizontal alignment of its monumental central

shrine complex, its radiating avenues and encircling ring roads, and the actual trees

that mark its urban landscape, relate directly to the archetypal tree called Tûbâ. Byusing a semiotic approach to the analysis of landscape, one can explain this

relationship by recourse to the neo-Platonic emanationist pheneomenology which

underlies many other Sufi cultural expressions. Thus in Touba, modernity is

configured according to metaphysical principles one usually associates with premodernsocieties. Not only was the colonial condition subverted in the interest of

resistance, but post-colonial modernity has become an instrument of spiritual

fulfilment at the global scale.

45. Sabil, Abdelkader (Faculty of Letters El Jadida): Choukri, Mrabet andCharhadi or the Lost (Urban) GenerationWriting or rather being translated within an international zone, Tangier, Choukri,

Mrabet, and Driss ben Ahmed Charhadi, through the expatriate, Paul Bowles, have

successfully managed to answer to the urgent need to go urbanized/western with the

hope to escape the throes of marginalization. Still as a part of this world, they could



never achieve identity because they have been 'used'/'abused' and even reduced to

mere 'province(s) of knowledge'.

This paper tries to discuss a number of issues related directly to the lives of Choukri,Mrabet, and Charhadi in Tangier, with a particular emphasis on their desperate

attempts to gain in identity or to go Western/urbanized.

46. Sakhkhane, Taoufiq (Tiznit college): Cities of Sand, Cities of Salt: TheDestabilization of Geography and the Deregulation of HistoryBetween Salman Rushdie and Abderrahman Munif As a construct, a hyphenated existence between Kierkegaard's logic of factuality and

desirability, postcolonial geography has never ceased to dog consecutive generations

of postcolonial theorists and critics. The victories of history, if one may call them

such, are often disfigured, if not defeated, by the contortions and disruptions of geography. "Great expectations" have all come to a naught for "the beautiful ones are

not yet born". Besides, the endeavors to blur the distinctions between the colonial city

and the native quarters in order to carve out a new geographical entity have at long

last resulted in a shift in the neocolonial paradigm.If in the colonial era, the discrimination between the colonizers and the colonized

often fleshed out in the way space was managed and that the native city was oftenviewed as the heart of resistance and identity while the European city was looked

upon with envying eyes as the locale that threatens such identity, it was hoped that

with independence there would be one and the same city. However,as Naomie Klein has lucidly argued, a new architectural configuration has emerged

so that yesterday's lords and potentates have mapped out for themselves new locations

and sites where a deeply entrenched division between the destitute and the very few

wealthy rules supreme.All concepts are part of their time, and postcolonial geography is no exception.

Nestling quite finely in synonymity with a number of socio cultural conditions as

exile, migrancy, deracination, displacement, historical weightlessness, and what somecritics have tended to term "extraterritoriality", the term has fluctuated between the

poles of loss and reclamation. Indeed, like Saleem Sinai, the unself

conscious hero of Salman Rushdie Midnight Children , such a geography has beensaturated with unrequired and not much solicited honors, only to be meted out with a

lot of disgrace and shame. And like Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha , a great

portion of postcolonial intellectuals have emigrated to the West as a place of residence

and work, and thus reinstituted, whether by volition or under coercion, the Eurocentricmyths of the Western metropolitan centers as the emissary and beacon of light to the

four corners of the globe. Their presence at the heart of Europe, at the nerve of what,

to paraphrase from Edward Said, used to rule the waves, and at the academic circlesof a newly emergent imperial power has partly fulfilled Thomas Carlyle's dream about

London as" the rendez-vous of all the children of the Harz-Rock, arriving in select

samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere, by steam and otherwise, to season here".Moreover, their tense affiliations with their countries of origin have marked them as

restless, transgressive and Janus-like critics and writers whose project has been a

relentlessly incessant endeavor at casting doubt on all categorical designations,

essentialist discourses and ideologies of imperial domination. Thus, occupying an in



between position has lent these critics and writers a radical edge that cuts across

dogmas, orthodoxies and taboos.

Between Abderrahman Munif, the denaturalized Arab writer, and Salman Rushdie,the Indian novelist, there is the same concern with geography ... Through a variety of

works, Munif expressed with great perspicacity and elegance the verso to the belief in

one geography, namely, how it can turn into an anathema. Likewise, Rushdie stressestime and again upon the ravages brought upon geography. By considering

Abderrahman Munif's quintet Cities of Salt and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

I will try to disclose how both novelists provide , each in his way, a picture of thecities of sand, cities of salt.

47. Slocum, J. David (New York University, USA): Post-9/11 New York as Post-colonial CityThe attacks of September 11, 2001, specifically on the World Trade Center in New

York City, can be seen as a moment of double destabilization of the status of

contemporary cities as post-colonial or imperial entities. More obviously, that day’s

events and their aftermath confirmed that the Western and Northern metropolis, andseat of empire, was itself subject to actions and processes not directly initiated by it

but from “outside.” Yet of equal import, the day’s events -- and, especially, their visual representation through technological media -- illustrated the instability

fundamental to the very dualisms upon which colonial or imperial cities, social

relations, and identity claims are founded; as Tom Conley puts it, these shifting andephemeral mediations “impose and simultaneously take away a sense of identity and

belonging on a vast and anonymous public.”

The theoretical underpinnings of this position are Homi Bhabha’s formulations

regarding the contingency of identity and meaning in contemporary experience. For Bhabha, the transnational is a space and site for translation of meaning generated by

difference. Difference, however, exists both between national or other, say urban,

formations and within those specific formations and the subjectivities given meaningthrough them. Some of the very dualisms conventionally essential to urban discourses

(city/country, center/periphery, public/private) are problematized in the process.

Bhabha’s theorizing has a decidely culturalist emphasis that richly informs analysis of media production and especially consumption. The eventual positioning of Western

media viewers/consumers vis-à-vis 9/11, and the construction/contextualizing of the

day’s events, sought to re-establish both meanings about New York as imperial city

and the subjectivities drawn from them. Especially important here was the resultingconstruction of terrorism, especially through a discourse of civilizational (i.e.,

irreconcilable cultural) conflict, and the vast mobilization of political, economic, and

military resources to combat its purported threat. It should be noted that preoccupation with the figure of the terrorist as archaic actor out of joint with Western

modernization epitomized the deflection of attention from the structural economic,

social and historical conditions of the post-colonial world in favor of the pathological,often culturally defective individual actor.

To be added to scrutiny of these constructions is a recognition that technologies of

media are not neutral in their operation. Media theorists since Guy Debord have

posited spectacle as an ongoing and self-perpetuating process of culturally- and



ideologically-specific consumption and, as such, the basis for establishing and

regulating specific social relations and practices. While identity and belongingness

may be still be rooted in a politics of place shaped partly by post-colonial socioeconomic political realities, in other words, contemporary subjectivity should also be

approached as a media effect -- arguably, as a technologized re-colonization of the

imagination.The aim of the proposed presentation is to examine the September 11 attacks on New

York as an occasion for de-naturalizing the colonial and imperial relations permeating

the modern/contemporary world. The specific texts to be drawn upon for the presentation are included in the “9/11 Virtual Casebook” developed at New York

University following September 11 in order to preserve some of the breadth and

variety of media texts produced about and after that day. Ultimately, the goal is to use

these media texts and discourses about New York City as the basis for discussing theinstability of contemporary belongingness and subjectivity that the attacks upon the

city evidenced and that the thoroughly mediated post-colonial city foregrounds.

48. Stobie, Cheryl (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa): Somatics, Space,Surprise: Creative Dissonance over TimeThis paper explores issues of liminality, hybridity and transition, all of which call intoquestion the confidence of the colonialist enterprise. Referring to Homi Bhabha's

notion of the Third Space, Marjorie Garber's discussion of the potential of the "third,"

and Njabulo Ndebele's vision of social change in the South African post-apartheidcontext, I develop the notion of "creative dissonance" as a conceptual tool. I examine

two examples from the past to illustrate this notion. The first example is of 12th

century church architecture from England and Ireland, elements of which call into

question various binaries such as sacred and profane. The second example is Bushman paintings in South Africa, particularly those of therianthropes, which illustrate

Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-animal." I then turn to a consideration of the

cityscape of Durban as representative of contemporary social shifts within SouthAfrica. Using visual material and written descriptions to convey a sense of a city in

flux, I examine the position of gendered human subjects in this setting. I conclude by

discussing the representation of the city of Tangier by South African human rightslecturer, Barbara Adair, in her debut novel, In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot. I

speculate why at this moment a South African author should choose to write a novel

about life in Tangier, and the significance of this postcolonial dialogue.

49. Tarlo, Emma (Research Fellow, Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies,The Open University, UK): Hijab in LondonThe covering or uncovering of Muslim women’s bodies has long occupied a centraland controversial place in the discourses and representations of Orientalism,

feminism, religion and Islamic revivalism. This paper will attempt to move beyond

discourses about Muslim women, to the discourses, practises and self-representationsof Muslim women living in London where the meaning of hijab is articulated and

contested in a number of different sites: homes, work places, public institutions,

religious spaces, the comedy club, the streets. Based on ethnographic interviews with

Muslim women from a variety of backgrounds and on documentation of two recent



“Hijab campaigns” launched in London in response to the French proposal to prohibit

the wearing of religious symbols in state schools, the paper will explore how ideas of

public/private, religious/secular, universal/particular, male/female, Islam/West areexpressed and enacted through the hijab in London and how these visual and verbal

expressions are products of a complex interplay of local and global forces,

representations and events.

A conference jointly organised by:Rectorat of Universite UniversiteMohammed V - Agdal

FACULTE DES LETTRES ET DESSCIENCES HUMAINES

Universite Mohammed V - Agdal

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Globalization, Identity Politics,and Social Conflict Project

KONRAD ADENAUER

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