Affect and the History of Colonial Morocco: Afflictions and Exile in Sīdī Mufaḍḍal Afaylāl’s Diary During the Spanish Occupation of Tetouan (1860–62)

Abstract:This article places affect at the centre of the history of Spanish colonialism in Morocco. Building on the kunnāsh (diary) of the scholar Mufaḍḍal Afaylāl, who was exiled during the Spanish occupation of Tetouan (1860–62), I interrogate the exiled body as the locus of the tension between the poetic and the politic, as a site of knowledge and world-making. I lay out the afflictions Afaylāl described in his writings, and the different (healing) practices he put in place – all of which reveals the plurality of the medical notions and practices that made up mid-nineteenth-century Moroccan culture. The analysis complicates the customary ways in which religious notables’ behaviour in the face of colonialism has been conceptualised, and shows that embodied and affect-oriented practices (in addition to sustained scholarly learning) articulated the Islamic ‘cosmopolitan republic of letters’ in which Afaylāl belonged.