How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, the analysis in Making Morocco focuses on interactions between state and society. Jonathan Wyrtzen demonstrates how during the Protectorate period, interactions among a wide range of European and local actors indelibly politicized four key dimensions of Moroccan identity: religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid monarchy. This colonial inheritance is reflected today in ongoing debates over the public role of Islam, religious tolerance, and the memory of Morocco’s Jews; recent reforms regarding women’s legal status; the monarchy’s multiculturalist recognition of Tamazight (Berber) as a national language alongside Arabic; the still-unresolved territorial dispute over the Western Sahara; and the monarchy’s continued symbolic and practical dominance of the Moroccan political field. "Making Morocco paints a compelling picture of this country's extraordinarily complex twentieth-century history. Jonathan Wyrtzen explores interactions between Moroccan leaders and their colonizers and the responses of subaltern groups, which ranged from anticolonial jihad to individual efforts to exploit contradictions within colonial policy. The book pays special attention to practices shaping the identities of Arab and Berber, male and female, and Muslim and Jew. A work of stunning erudition, drawing on a vast range of archival and original sources, including Berber oral poetry and Arab-language newspapers."—George Steinmetz, Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan "Making Morocco is an imaginative and original analysis of how modern Moroccan identity (or identities) developed between 1912 and 1956. Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the interaction of state and nonstate actors and institutions shaped and politicized what he defines as the 'colonial political field' and continued to influence the formation of Moroccan identity in the postcolonial period. Wyrtzen offers a convincing explanation of how the Alawid dynasty survived the colonial period and regained its position as the center of power after independence. Wyrtzen focuses not only on the nationalist elites but also on rural Berbers, Jews, and women as active participants in the contested field of Moroccan identity. Especially innovative is his use of Berber poetry as a way to understand non-elite identities."—Daniel J. Schroeter, University of Minnesota, author of The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World "This book is a compelling account of struggles over identity during French colonization in Morocco. It is a must-read for anyone in search of a greater understanding of interactions between those in power in the colonial state and marginalized subaltern local groups. Jonathan Wyrtzen combines a rich, well-crafted, finely grained narrative with a rigorous sociological analysis. The Berber oral poetry skillfully discussed by the author speaks volumes on anticolonial sentiments in rural areas and resistance to colonial encroachment. Making Morocco is a major contribution to the study of French colonialism in North Africa."—Mounira M. Charrad, University of Texas at Austin, author of the award-winning States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco "In Making Morocco, Jonathan Wyrtzen takes a refreshing approach within the realm of sociological histories. The sociological concepts and categories he uses are well chosen and deployed with sophistication and a good underpinning theoretical understanding. His use of a variety of archives and archival material is also to be commended, particularly the way in which he draws on oral histories and poetry to build specific understandings of the politics of identity among people less likely to leave behind written records. This book's organization around issues of identity provides a distinctive entry point into the wider debates on state formation."—Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Warwick, author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination Jonathan Wyrtzen is Assistant Professor of Sociology and History at Yale University.

Review of Jonathan Wyrtzen's Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (2015)

Colonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territory and infrastructural development carried out between 1907 and 1934, dramatically transformed the social and political context in which collective identity was imagined in Moroccan society. Prior scholarship has highlighted the struggle between colonial administrators and urban Arabophone nationalist elites over Arab and Berber ethnic classifications used by French officials to make Moroccan society legible in the wake of conquest. This study turns to the understudied question of how rural, tribal communities responded to state- and nation-building processes, drawing on a unique collection of Tamazight (Berber) poetry gathered in the Atlas Mountains to illuminate the multiple levels on which their sense of group identity was negotiated. While studies of identity in the interwar Arab world have concentrated on how Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, and local nationalisms functioned in the Arab East, this article changes the angle of analysis, beginning instead at the margins of the Arab West to explore interactions between the consolidation of nation-sized political units and multivocal efforts to reframe the religious and ethnic parameters of communal solidarity during the colonial period.