2 - The Trace and Its Narratives

Summary

This chapter looks at both language and racial thinking and the ways one affected the other. Race was an important category of colonial modernity used to conceive of other people in relation to Europe and in relation to themselves. Introducing racial thinking was thus a significant way to reconfigure the population not only of Morocco or even of the entire region of northern Africa, but also the populations surrounding them, in what became known as Black Africa on the west side and the Arab Middle East on the east side. Because of the fluidity of colonial conceptions of race, language became an important marker of race in the region. Hence, the constructed opposition of Berbers versus Arabs was also perceived as a linguistic relation that was imposed as antagonistic and hegemonic.