Reading Together the Aesthetics and Politics of Decolonization: A View from Morocco

The attempt to decolonize Arabic thought haunted a generation of Maghrebi intellectuals who were predominantly steeped in French colonial schooling and were largely influenced by the metropole's intellectual trends of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper focuses on two Moroccan intellectuals: Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) and Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009), both considered ‘radical critics’ who invented a decolonial language of Arabic critique in both Arabic and French that draws on local and global paradigms. Laroui's philosophical and historical works, mostly written in French, are widely studied and translated, but his literary works written in Arabic are little known or studied. In the case of Khatibi, whose critical and literary works are in French, the combined analysis of the critical and the literary remains limited. This paper proposes a comparative ‘reading together’ of Laroui's novel Al-Ghorba (Exile, 1971) with Khatibi's La mémoire tatouée (Tattooed memory, 1971), while engaging with questions of the aesthetics and forms of creativity that expand the critical field for both authors. I argue that reading Laroui and Khatibi's literary works together can shed important light on their decolonial aesthetics and politics, particularly on how they perceived the unfinished project of decolonization as being aimed at imperial hegemony as well as at the internal exclusions of ethnonationalism.