Books by Jonathan Wyrtzen
Columbia University Press, 2022
It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of Worl... more It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial powers unilaterally imposed artificial borders on the post-Ottoman world in postwar agreements. This book offers a new account of how the Great War unmade and then remade the political order of the region. Ranging from Morocco to Iran and spanning the eve of the Great War into the 1930s, it demonstrates that the modern Middle East was shaped through complex and violent power struggles among local and international actors.
Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914–1918 phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles, the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined processes through which states were made, identities transformed, and boundaries drawn. This book’s vast scope encompasses successful state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political units—including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states—that nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.
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How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As... more 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.
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Papers by Jonathan Wyrtzen
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2020
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Political Power and Social Theory, 2013
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Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
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Why and how was the territorialized state form disseminated through colonial expansion? To begin ... more Why and how was the territorialized state form disseminated through colonial expansion? To begin to answer this question, this study proposes a relational account of the production of territorialized state space, drawing on empirical evidence from two understudied cases of colonial expansion in the early 20th century: Spain in Morocco and Italy in Libya. Drawing on colonial and local archival sources, I demonstrate how colonial territoriality resulted from a violent clash between an aspiring colonial power and a reactive, rural counter-state building movement, led by the Amir Abd al-Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco and the Sanusi leader, Omar al-Mokhtar, in Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. Territorialization was not imposed from the outside by a European colonial power. Rather, it was produced relationally through violent interactions between the colonial state and a local autonomous political entity. This analysis contributes to the still-nascent study of colonial state space and to contemporary policy debates about political order in North Africa and the Middle East by emphasizing the importance of local political mobilization, the complexity of interactions catalyzed across local and translocal scales by colonial expansion, and the high levels of physical violence endemic to the production of territorialized state space.
Jonathan Wyrtzen , (2017), Colonial War and the Production of Territorialized State Space in North Africa, in Søren Rud , Søren Ivarsson (ed.) Rethinking the Colonial State (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 33) Emerald Publishing Limited, pp.151 - 173
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Scholarship on the modern state’s symbolic and social infrastructural power typically correlates ... more Scholarship on the modern state’s symbolic and social infrastructural power typically correlates high state capacity to practices of standardization, homogenization, and integration. Less attention has focused on how this power can be directed towards differentiation and heterogenization, as amply demonstrated in the case of empire. This article develops a framework for analyzing how infrastructural power is employed by modern colonial states and how it impacts society. It argues that formal legitimization structures defined for colonial subunits influence legibility practices enacted within them—what is named and counted and how it is named and counted—and that these legitimization-legibility linkages are significant because they politicize particular boundaries of collective identity in lasting ways within the subjugated society. This model is used to analyze variation within French North Africa between a colony-type linkage in Algeria and a protectorate-type linkage in Morocco, and account for the divergent identity politics and claims-making strategies that emerged within these units. The conclusion considers the broader comparative implications of legitimization-legibility combinations in formerly colonized political units.
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Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring, 2014
In view of this volume’s thematic focus on how multiculturalism and democracy can be negotiated i... more In view of this volume’s thematic focus on how multiculturalism and democracy can be negotiated in the contemporary Muslim world, this chapter focuses specifically on Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in examining the historical processes through which national identity has been defined in the Maghreb. In these cases (as in many other postcolonial Muslim societies), I argue colonial legacies play a highly significant role in shaping how contemporary North African states relate to culture. During the colonial period, French administrations in the region often implemented what could be described as multicultural policies to preserve ethnic, linguistic, and religious divisions in society, because these often facilitated the maintenance of a colonial socio-political order. In response, North African anti-colonial movements defined the nation in a mono-cultural manner – using “Arab” and “Muslim” identity as core markers of collective solidarity. It was thus in the colonial incubator that narratives linking Arabo-Islamic national cultural unity to political legitimacy were forged. In the half-century since independence, these initial conditions in which the a modern sense of national identity was defined have created lasting challenges for subsequent efforts to re-imagine more pluralistic understandings of the national community, most noticeably the recent attempts by Amazigh movements in Algeria and Morocco to have the state recognize Berber ethno-linguistic rights.
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Revisiting the colonial past in Morocco (pp. 184-99), 2013
Since the 1930s, the dominant discourse of Moroccan nationalism emphasized the nation’s Arab and ... more Since the 1930s, the dominant discourse of Moroccan nationalism emphasized the nation’s Arab and Islamic character, and it is therefore a remarkable development that Morocco’s amazighité, or Berber identity, is now also being celebrated at the highest level, fifty years after independence. In this process of re-imagining the nation, in which the Palace itself has taken a leading role, the pluralistic reality of Morocco’s cultural and ethnic heritage is celebrated, while, at the same time, national unity is affirmed around the pillars of Islam, a fiercely independent spirit that has resisted invasion and division, and allegiance to the Alawite (Filali) monarchy.
Moroccan “national” history is also being reworked into a more inclusive narrative, specifically colonial history of the resistance (al-muqawama) against the foreign invasion that took place during the Protectorate period. Nationalist historiography before and since independence reified Arabophone urban “resistance” against the French beginning in the protests against the 1930 “Berber Dahir,” continuing with the activities of the Istiqlal party created in 1944, and culminating in a unified official “resistance” period following the exile of the King Mohamed V in 1953 that resulted in his triumphant return in November 1955. Recent attention, however, is being focused on the earlier tribal “resistance” against colonial conquest between 1907 and 1934 (in the Rif, the Middle and High Atlas, and the Saharan south) and on the role of women in the independence struggle. As the Ajdir speech above indicates, the key criterion validating national unity (and, in fact, inclusion in the Moroccan nation) is participation in “resistance to every form of invasion and attempt at division.” In this “revisiting” of national history, the roles of previously marginalized, subaltern groups such as rural populations and women are highlighted, but a teleological historiography of the Protectorate—a grand narrative of national struggle leading to independence—continues to be perpetuated, albeit now with an expanded cast.
This chapter critically considers this category of “national resistance” during the Protectorate period, with specific attention to the struggle by many of Morocco’s Berber-speaking population in the Middle and High Atlas against the “pacification” (the French euphemism for colonial conquest) of these regions. The question of amazighité, or Berber identity, was at the nexus of conflicting colonialist and nationalist narratives of Moroccan history and has historically been fraught with political tension since the 1930s, when France’s ostensible “Berber Policy” became the bête noir for Arab nationalists protesting an attempt to divide the country along “Arab” and “Berber” ethnic lines. Our goal is to reconsider this critical aspect of Morocco’s colonial past by listening to Berber “voices” themselves—by drawing on an archive of Tamazight poetry collected between 1911-1939—to begin to move forward towards a more complex and nuanced understanding of “resistance,” beyond the colonial and nationalist paradigms which reduce it to either “siba” or “national.” This revisiting of amazighité and “national resistance” during Morocco’s colonial period also illustrates how a subaltern approach can provide a needed empirical contribution to the broader theoretical discussion about nationalism, including the perennial question, “What is a Nation?” and by extension, “What is Nationalism?”
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Nations and Nationalism, Oct 2013
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Political Power and Social Theory, 2013
As a fountainhead of postcolonial scholarship, Edward Said has profoundly impacted multiple disci... more As a fountainhead of postcolonial scholarship, Edward Said has profoundly impacted multiple disciplines. This chapter makes a case for why sociologists should (re)read Edward Said, paying specific attention to his warning about the inevitably violent interactions between knowledge and power in historic and current imperial contexts. Drawing on Said and other postcolonial theorists, we propose a threefold typology of potential violence associated with the production of knowledge: (1) the violence of essentialization, (2) epistemic violence, and (3) the violence of apprehension. While postcolonial theory and sociological and anthropological writing on reflexivity have highlighted the former two dangers, we urge social scientists to also remain wary of the last. We examine the formation of structures of authoritative knowledge during the French Empire in North Africa, the British Empire in India, and the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan during the “Global War on Terror,” paying close attention to how synchronic instances of apprehension (more or less accurate perception or recognition of the “other”) and essentialization interact in the production of diachronic essentialist and epistemic violence. We conclude by calling for a post-orientalist form of reflexivity, namely that sociologists, whether they engage as public intellectuals or not, remain sensitive to the fact that the production and consumption of sociological knowledge within a still palpable imperial framework makes all three violences possible, or even likely.
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International Journal of Middle East Studies, May 2011
Colonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territo... more 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.
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The Journal of Modern History, Jan 1, 2010
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Trajectories: Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section, 2011
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Teaching Documents by Jonathan Wyrtzen
This graduate seminar offers a general overview of the methodological issues and approaches that ... more This graduate seminar offers a general overview of the methodological issues and approaches that dominate and are emerging in the contemporary practice of comparative-historical social science. It is also practical and hands-on, designed to give you concrete experience working with historical data and skills for future research.
It is deliberately open-ended. The purpose of the class is to provide a shared language and overarching conceptual framework that will allow you to pursue your own research, with a clearer understanding of the consequences of making specific methodological choices.
Comparative historical sociology is both a subdiscipline and an ‘interdiscipline’ (connecting sociology, political science, history, IR, and others) in the midst of transformation. This course also provides a broader sense of both methodological problems and the continuing openness and creativity of the field.
The class is organized into several modules. We will cover opening grounds of debate (ontology, epistemology and comparative-historical sociology); general aspects of and problems in research design; and methods of empirical inquiry. Exemplars of approaches will also be featured, and we will incorporate students’ specific substantive interests as they evolve.
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This course provides a broad introduction to the history, politics, societies, and cultures of th... more This course provides a broad introduction to the history, politics, societies, and cultures of the Middle East. It first critically assesses what is meant by the container "Middle East," examining what holds it together, how it functions as a regional system of interconnected waterways and landmasses, and how it relates to multiple other regional designations (the Mediterranean, EurAsia, Africa, etc.). Next, the course briefly covers origins in Late Antiquity and the birth and spread of Islam up through the rise of the Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, and Saadian/Alawite empires in the 16th century. The bulk of our attention then focuses on developments from the 19-21st centuries across the region stretching from Morocco to Iran.
One goal of the course is for you to develop a literacy/fluency in key terms and geographical references and a basic chronological framework of the region's history. However, the primary goal--with that base knowledge--is for you to also be able to think analytically and critically about key debates, topics, and themes relevant to Middle East. Recurrent topics and themes that we will pursue include geopolitics, state formation, and the importance of the environment and resources. We will also consider the evolving roles of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and other religious traditions and identities in the region; the powerful impact and legacies of empire and colonialism; the importance and ambivalences of nationalism and other forms of collective identity; and the impact of regional and global wars on the region. Extended attention will be devoted to the Palestine-Israel conflict, the role of the US and other Great Power intervention, petro-politics, and the recurrent importance of society-based mobilizations.
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This graduate seminar offers a general overview of the methodological issues and approaches that ... more This graduate seminar offers a general overview of the methodological issues and approaches that dominate and are emerging in the contemporary practice of comparative-historical social science. It is also practical and hands-on, designed to give you concrete experience working with historical data and skills for future research.
It is deliberately open-ended. The purpose of the class is to provide a shared language and overarching conceptual framework that will allow you to pursue your own research, with a clearer understanding of the consequences of making specific methodological choices.
Comparative historical sociology is both a subdiscipline and an ‘interdiscipline’ (connecting sociology, political science, history, IR, and others) in the midst of transformation. This course also provides a broader sense of both methodological problems and the continuing openness and creativity of the field.
The class is organized into several modules. We will cover opening grounds of debate (ontology, epistemology, and comparative-historical sociology); general aspects of and problems in research design; and methods of empirical inquiry. Exemplars of approaches will also be featured, and we will incorporate students’ specific substantive interests as they evolve.
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This course is intended to introduce you to social theory, the process of theorizing, and the can... more This course is intended to introduce you to social theory, the process of theorizing, and the canonical works that arguably serve, and some that should serve, as the core of an inclusive professional identity for sociologists. As a one semester course, this can by no means be a comprehensive theory survey: the goal is help you develop a basic literacy of key sociological texts ranging from the 19th century to the present that can serve as a foundation and springboard for your own research and teaching interests.
The course asks what it means to think sociologically: What is social reality? Which components are important? How do we go about analyzing these? It traces out lineages of how social scientists have addressed these questions, the logics and styles that set different streams apart from each other, and the substantive areas they do and do not address.
During the course, we will be thinking through three overarching questions. First, many of the "canonical" social theory texts were written from the standpoint of a relatively small cultural group in the Global North but have been read over the years as presenting a universalistic vision of humanity that tends to ignore gender, race, sexual orientation, and empire/colonialism. We will ask how classical and contemporary theorists' treatment-explicit or implicit-of race, sex, and empire affected their work and its potential to provide satisfactory explanations of important social phenomena. Second, middle-range theory has dominated sociology for decades now. By considering these larger theoretical frameworks, this course implicitly rejects the view that middle-range theory alone can guide and organize research in the social sciences and encourages you to reflect on the relationship between the works under consideration and the project of middle-range theory building. Third, we should all reflect on how to use theory and theorize in our own research practice.
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Books by Jonathan Wyrtzen
Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914–1918 phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles, the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined processes through which states were made, identities transformed, and boundaries drawn. This book’s vast scope encompasses successful state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political units—including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states—that nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.
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.
Papers by Jonathan Wyrtzen
Jonathan Wyrtzen , (2017), Colonial War and the Production of Territorialized State Space in North Africa, in Søren Rud , Søren Ivarsson (ed.) Rethinking the Colonial State (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 33) Emerald Publishing Limited, pp.151 - 173
Moroccan “national” history is also being reworked into a more inclusive narrative, specifically colonial history of the resistance (al-muqawama) against the foreign invasion that took place during the Protectorate period. Nationalist historiography before and since independence reified Arabophone urban “resistance” against the French beginning in the protests against the 1930 “Berber Dahir,” continuing with the activities of the Istiqlal party created in 1944, and culminating in a unified official “resistance” period following the exile of the King Mohamed V in 1953 that resulted in his triumphant return in November 1955. Recent attention, however, is being focused on the earlier tribal “resistance” against colonial conquest between 1907 and 1934 (in the Rif, the Middle and High Atlas, and the Saharan south) and on the role of women in the independence struggle. As the Ajdir speech above indicates, the key criterion validating national unity (and, in fact, inclusion in the Moroccan nation) is participation in “resistance to every form of invasion and attempt at division.” In this “revisiting” of national history, the roles of previously marginalized, subaltern groups such as rural populations and women are highlighted, but a teleological historiography of the Protectorate—a grand narrative of national struggle leading to independence—continues to be perpetuated, albeit now with an expanded cast.
This chapter critically considers this category of “national resistance” during the Protectorate period, with specific attention to the struggle by many of Morocco’s Berber-speaking population in the Middle and High Atlas against the “pacification” (the French euphemism for colonial conquest) of these regions. The question of amazighité, or Berber identity, was at the nexus of conflicting colonialist and nationalist narratives of Moroccan history and has historically been fraught with political tension since the 1930s, when France’s ostensible “Berber Policy” became the bête noir for Arab nationalists protesting an attempt to divide the country along “Arab” and “Berber” ethnic lines. Our goal is to reconsider this critical aspect of Morocco’s colonial past by listening to Berber “voices” themselves—by drawing on an archive of Tamazight poetry collected between 1911-1939—to begin to move forward towards a more complex and nuanced understanding of “resistance,” beyond the colonial and nationalist paradigms which reduce it to either “siba” or “national.” This revisiting of amazighité and “national resistance” during Morocco’s colonial period also illustrates how a subaltern approach can provide a needed empirical contribution to the broader theoretical discussion about nationalism, including the perennial question, “What is a Nation?” and by extension, “What is Nationalism?”
Teaching Documents by Jonathan Wyrtzen
It is deliberately open-ended. The purpose of the class is to provide a shared language and overarching conceptual framework that will allow you to pursue your own research, with a clearer understanding of the consequences of making specific methodological choices.
Comparative historical sociology is both a subdiscipline and an ‘interdiscipline’ (connecting sociology, political science, history, IR, and others) in the midst of transformation. This course also provides a broader sense of both methodological problems and the continuing openness and creativity of the field.
The class is organized into several modules. We will cover opening grounds of debate (ontology, epistemology and comparative-historical sociology); general aspects of and problems in research design; and methods of empirical inquiry. Exemplars of approaches will also be featured, and we will incorporate students’ specific substantive interests as they evolve.
One goal of the course is for you to develop a literacy/fluency in key terms and geographical references and a basic chronological framework of the region's history. However, the primary goal--with that base knowledge--is for you to also be able to think analytically and critically about key debates, topics, and themes relevant to Middle East. Recurrent topics and themes that we will pursue include geopolitics, state formation, and the importance of the environment and resources. We will also consider the evolving roles of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and other religious traditions and identities in the region; the powerful impact and legacies of empire and colonialism; the importance and ambivalences of nationalism and other forms of collective identity; and the impact of regional and global wars on the region. Extended attention will be devoted to the Palestine-Israel conflict, the role of the US and other Great Power intervention, petro-politics, and the recurrent importance of society-based mobilizations.
It is deliberately open-ended. The purpose of the class is to provide a shared language and overarching conceptual framework that will allow you to pursue your own research, with a clearer understanding of the consequences of making specific methodological choices.
Comparative historical sociology is both a subdiscipline and an ‘interdiscipline’ (connecting sociology, political science, history, IR, and others) in the midst of transformation. This course also provides a broader sense of both methodological problems and the continuing openness and creativity of the field.
The class is organized into several modules. We will cover opening grounds of debate (ontology, epistemology, and comparative-historical sociology); general aspects of and problems in research design; and methods of empirical inquiry. Exemplars of approaches will also be featured, and we will incorporate students’ specific substantive interests as they evolve.
The course asks what it means to think sociologically: What is social reality? Which components are important? How do we go about analyzing these? It traces out lineages of how social scientists have addressed these questions, the logics and styles that set different streams apart from each other, and the substantive areas they do and do not address.
During the course, we will be thinking through three overarching questions. First, many of the "canonical" social theory texts were written from the standpoint of a relatively small cultural group in the Global North but have been read over the years as presenting a universalistic vision of humanity that tends to ignore gender, race, sexual orientation, and empire/colonialism. We will ask how classical and contemporary theorists' treatment-explicit or implicit-of race, sex, and empire affected their work and its potential to provide satisfactory explanations of important social phenomena. Second, middle-range theory has dominated sociology for decades now. By considering these larger theoretical frameworks, this course implicitly rejects the view that middle-range theory alone can guide and organize research in the social sciences and encourages you to reflect on the relationship between the works under consideration and the project of middle-range theory building. Third, we should all reflect on how to use theory and theorize in our own research practice.
Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914–1918 phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles, the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined processes through which states were made, identities transformed, and boundaries drawn. This book’s vast scope encompasses successful state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political units—including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states—that nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.
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.
Jonathan Wyrtzen , (2017), Colonial War and the Production of Territorialized State Space in North Africa, in Søren Rud , Søren Ivarsson (ed.) Rethinking the Colonial State (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 33) Emerald Publishing Limited, pp.151 - 173
Moroccan “national” history is also being reworked into a more inclusive narrative, specifically colonial history of the resistance (al-muqawama) against the foreign invasion that took place during the Protectorate period. Nationalist historiography before and since independence reified Arabophone urban “resistance” against the French beginning in the protests against the 1930 “Berber Dahir,” continuing with the activities of the Istiqlal party created in 1944, and culminating in a unified official “resistance” period following the exile of the King Mohamed V in 1953 that resulted in his triumphant return in November 1955. Recent attention, however, is being focused on the earlier tribal “resistance” against colonial conquest between 1907 and 1934 (in the Rif, the Middle and High Atlas, and the Saharan south) and on the role of women in the independence struggle. As the Ajdir speech above indicates, the key criterion validating national unity (and, in fact, inclusion in the Moroccan nation) is participation in “resistance to every form of invasion and attempt at division.” In this “revisiting” of national history, the roles of previously marginalized, subaltern groups such as rural populations and women are highlighted, but a teleological historiography of the Protectorate—a grand narrative of national struggle leading to independence—continues to be perpetuated, albeit now with an expanded cast.
This chapter critically considers this category of “national resistance” during the Protectorate period, with specific attention to the struggle by many of Morocco’s Berber-speaking population in the Middle and High Atlas against the “pacification” (the French euphemism for colonial conquest) of these regions. The question of amazighité, or Berber identity, was at the nexus of conflicting colonialist and nationalist narratives of Moroccan history and has historically been fraught with political tension since the 1930s, when France’s ostensible “Berber Policy” became the bête noir for Arab nationalists protesting an attempt to divide the country along “Arab” and “Berber” ethnic lines. Our goal is to reconsider this critical aspect of Morocco’s colonial past by listening to Berber “voices” themselves—by drawing on an archive of Tamazight poetry collected between 1911-1939—to begin to move forward towards a more complex and nuanced understanding of “resistance,” beyond the colonial and nationalist paradigms which reduce it to either “siba” or “national.” This revisiting of amazighité and “national resistance” during Morocco’s colonial period also illustrates how a subaltern approach can provide a needed empirical contribution to the broader theoretical discussion about nationalism, including the perennial question, “What is a Nation?” and by extension, “What is Nationalism?”
It is deliberately open-ended. The purpose of the class is to provide a shared language and overarching conceptual framework that will allow you to pursue your own research, with a clearer understanding of the consequences of making specific methodological choices.
Comparative historical sociology is both a subdiscipline and an ‘interdiscipline’ (connecting sociology, political science, history, IR, and others) in the midst of transformation. This course also provides a broader sense of both methodological problems and the continuing openness and creativity of the field.
The class is organized into several modules. We will cover opening grounds of debate (ontology, epistemology and comparative-historical sociology); general aspects of and problems in research design; and methods of empirical inquiry. Exemplars of approaches will also be featured, and we will incorporate students’ specific substantive interests as they evolve.
One goal of the course is for you to develop a literacy/fluency in key terms and geographical references and a basic chronological framework of the region's history. However, the primary goal--with that base knowledge--is for you to also be able to think analytically and critically about key debates, topics, and themes relevant to Middle East. Recurrent topics and themes that we will pursue include geopolitics, state formation, and the importance of the environment and resources. We will also consider the evolving roles of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and other religious traditions and identities in the region; the powerful impact and legacies of empire and colonialism; the importance and ambivalences of nationalism and other forms of collective identity; and the impact of regional and global wars on the region. Extended attention will be devoted to the Palestine-Israel conflict, the role of the US and other Great Power intervention, petro-politics, and the recurrent importance of society-based mobilizations.
It is deliberately open-ended. The purpose of the class is to provide a shared language and overarching conceptual framework that will allow you to pursue your own research, with a clearer understanding of the consequences of making specific methodological choices.
Comparative historical sociology is both a subdiscipline and an ‘interdiscipline’ (connecting sociology, political science, history, IR, and others) in the midst of transformation. This course also provides a broader sense of both methodological problems and the continuing openness and creativity of the field.
The class is organized into several modules. We will cover opening grounds of debate (ontology, epistemology, and comparative-historical sociology); general aspects of and problems in research design; and methods of empirical inquiry. Exemplars of approaches will also be featured, and we will incorporate students’ specific substantive interests as they evolve.
The course asks what it means to think sociologically: What is social reality? Which components are important? How do we go about analyzing these? It traces out lineages of how social scientists have addressed these questions, the logics and styles that set different streams apart from each other, and the substantive areas they do and do not address.
During the course, we will be thinking through three overarching questions. First, many of the "canonical" social theory texts were written from the standpoint of a relatively small cultural group in the Global North but have been read over the years as presenting a universalistic vision of humanity that tends to ignore gender, race, sexual orientation, and empire/colonialism. We will ask how classical and contemporary theorists' treatment-explicit or implicit-of race, sex, and empire affected their work and its potential to provide satisfactory explanations of important social phenomena. Second, middle-range theory has dominated sociology for decades now. By considering these larger theoretical frameworks, this course implicitly rejects the view that middle-range theory alone can guide and organize research in the social sciences and encourages you to reflect on the relationship between the works under consideration and the project of middle-range theory building. Third, we should all reflect on how to use theory and theorize in our own research practice.
The course will meet ca. five days a week (in classroom or on field trips), with each week exploring a prominent theme related to North African society and politics, including an overview of Maghrib history, the legacies of colonialism and nationalism, political systems and opposition, Islam in North Africa, and the Maghrib in the 21st century. To maximize the opportunity of being taught on site in the region, the course’s subject matter will be interwoven with multiple field trips, including visits to the four historic imperial cities of Morocco (Fes, Meknes, Rabat, and Marrakech). It will also immerse students through meetings with local experts, interaction with Moroccan university students, and optional home stays with Moroccan families.
This seminar will examine the rise of nationalism in the “Mashriq” (Arab East) and “Maghrib” (Arab West) in conversation with current theories about nationalism. In the first half of the course, the major typologies and debates in general discussions about nationalism (ethnic vs. civic, elite-popular, modernist-constructivist vs. primordialist-perennialist, process approaches) will be introduced, as well as specific themes regarding the development of nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa including the influence of empire and state formation, transnational (pan-Islamic and pan-Arab) ideologies, ethnicity, gender, and religion. We will then comparatively analyze case studies of state-sponsored and state-seeking nationalisms including Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Monarchies, Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria, and Berber and Kurdish movements.
The modern Islamic world encompasses multiple geographical regions from Morocco to Indonesia and from London to Kano. This course provides an introduction to the historical development of this global Muslim community from its origins in 7th century Arabia through its spread over subsequent centuries into the Middle East, Africa, Central and South/Southeast Asia, and the West.
A central theme of the course will be to analyze the unity and diversity expressed across the Muslim world, investigating both the universal, cosmopolitan and the local, particularist distinctive expressions of Islam. Through a comparative approach, we will explore how tremendous variation and complexity are expressed across Islamic societies and evaluate to what extent Islam functions as a unifying factor on critical issues including religious practice, political structure and activism, gender, and cultural expression.
Episode No. 269
Release Date: 15 September 2016
Recording Location: Yale University
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
2016 Winner: Jonathan Wyrtzen
Book: Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015)
Prize Committee Assessment:
Jonathan Wyrtzen's Making Morocco is an extraordinary work of social science history. Making Morocco's historical coverage is remarkably thorough and sweeping; the author exhibits incredible scope in his research, and mastery of an immensely rich set of materials (from poetry to diplomatic messages in a variety of languages across a century of history). The monograph engages with the most important theorists of nationalism, colonialism, and state formation, and uses Pierre Bourdieu's field theory as a framework to orient and organize the socio-historical problems of the case and to make sense of the different types of problems various actors faced as they moved forward. His analysis makes constant reference to core categories of political sociology (state, nation, political field, religious and political authority, identity and social boundaries, classification struggles, etc.), and he does so in exceptionally clear and engaging prose. Rather than sidelining what might appear to be more tangential themes in the politics of identity formation in Morocco, Wyrtzen examines deeply not only French colonialism but also the Spanish zone, and he makes central to his analysis the Jewish question and the role of gender. These areas of analysis allow Wyrtzen to examine his outcome of interest – which is really a historical process of interest – from every conceivable analytical and empirical angle. The end-product is an absolutely exemplary study of colonialism, identity formation, and the classification struggles that accompany them. This is not a work of high-brow social theory, but a classic work of history, deeply influenced but not excessively burdened by social-theoretical baggage.