Morocco from a Colonial to a Postcolonial Era

Abstract

Women of color have long used the transformative power of writing and theorizing through their bodies to speak back to the pervasive racist and sexist hierarchies in hegemonic cultures. I extend this argument in the specific context of Muslim feminism that is theorized outside orientalist and patriarchal frames of reference. In this article, I turn to a performative autoethnographic approach to look at the Moroccan era, ‘Now and Then,’ through my grandmother’s lens, that of a Moroccan woman erased from the written history of Morocco. Drawing on ‘theories of the flesh,’ I privilege my grandmother’s voice and her embodied experience that transmits her story of resistance and survival under French colonization. Through ‘fleshing,’ my Moroccan grandmother reclaims her lived experiences and deconstructs the hegemonic universalist knowledge of feminism and struggle. It is important to foreground the political urgency of surveying the theoretical frameworks of Arab and Muslim scholars in order to create new ways of understanding communication in postcolonial/neocolonial settings.