Empire or umma writing beyond the nation in Moroccan periodicals

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of Moroccan Arabic periodicals and French colonial periodicals circulated during the 1930s and 1940s. I examine the divergent representations of Moroccan culture that these periodicals offer and consider the significance of these representations for the development of Moroccan francophone and Arabic literature.;Moroccan periodicals in Arabic demonstrate a triangulated circuit of intellectual and literary cross-pollination between Europe, Africa and the Arab Middle East. Moroccan writers of the colonial era differentiated between French culture and colonial culture, and they also enthusiastically engaged intellectual and literary developments elsewhere in the globe, notably in the Arab Middle East, which was itself engaged in dialogue with Europe. These periodicals thus complicate the dialectic of colonizer versus colonized and discourage the reading of Moroccan postcolonial literature as nationalist or as primarily responsive to colonial cultural imposition. From their very first publications of the colonial era, Moroccan writers conceived of themselves as contributors to a culture imagined internationally.;On the basis of these periodicals, I argue that Moroccan literature was from its inception receptive to literary, social, and intellectual innovations from Europe and that, paradoxically, colonial writers expressed Tess affinity with Metropolitan French culture than did their Moroccan contemporaries. Contributors to the Moroccan periodicals, who represent the first Moroccans to produce printed texts of any kind, strove to establish a medium for equitable dialogue between Europe, the Arab Middle East, and Morocco. Colonial agents sought to impede such multi-continental dialogue with censorship laws targeting Metropolitan, Moroccan, and Arab Middle Eastern publications. Colonial writers reinforced these administrative impediments to dialogue by misrepresenting the "colonized" as incapable of artistic or intellectual production. In contrast, Metropolitan French writers cooperated with Moroccan writers, representing them sympathetically in their writings and helping them found their first periodical in Arabic.;This transcontinental cooperation can be understood as an early expression of transnationalism, by which I mean a sense of identity that transcends the nation-state. I argue that Moroccan literature today continues to be marked by such a transnational sense of identity, which is to be perceived in representational modes, in use of language, as well as in extra-textual trends such as overseas marketing and extensive translation. This study proposes that Moroccan literature was always already post-national and that its two currents today---one in Arabic, one in French---both represent the tributaries of Morocco's earliest printed documents in Arabic.