Tamazgha: Foundations and Horizons for New Directions in Scholarship 

Aomar Boum, UCLA
Brahim EL Guabli, Johns Hopkins University
Takarzyna Pieprzak, Williams College

Tamazgha Studies Journal has made it its mission to produce and regularly publish high-quality research and content that blazes the path for a fresh understanding of Tamazgha as a horizon for scholarship. Our fifth issue is designed to do just that. The peer-reviewed articles, interviews, book reviews, and the pedagogical roundtable that this issue offers continue to examine and center Tamazgha as an object as well as a field of knowledge that exceeds state institutions, written documents, and disciplinary boundaries. Tamazgha is, first, an aspirational geographical location that serious scholarly engagement can make into an object of history, sociology, linguistics, migration, and colonialism.

Taken together, the various contributions in this issue attend to questions related to pedagogy, writing systems, material culture, women, and cinema. Through linguistic signs, poetic songs, films, classrooms, oral traditions, and intellectual genealogies, the issue introduces readers to Amazigh worlds shaped by transmission, reinterpretation, and political claim-making. Across these contributions, the authors ask how Indigenous Amazigh knowledge has moved through colonial ethnology, postcolonial Arabization, statist incorporation, gendered labor, and the enduring treatment of Amazigh life as ethnographic or folkloric experiences. We present this issue as an invitation to reorient research on Tamazgha around its languages, landscapes, practices, memories, and theoretical inheritances.

Widely recognized as the Amazigh alphabet, Tifinagh has been the object of both memory and amnesia as well as history and lack thereof. Two articles in this issue dive deeply into Tifinagh and explore cosmology, myths of origins, orality, and materiality as they relate to the emergence and evolution of the Amazigh alphabet. Helene Claudot-Hawad’s article “Tifinagh as a Reading of the World: Tuareg Perspectives” does the fundamental work of explaining the significance of Tifinagh as a practice within the Tuareg social and cultural order. Providing both historical and social context, Claudot-Hawad demonstrates how neo-Tifinagh has phagocyted, if not cannibalized, its Tuareg ancestor. Consequently, even projects that seek to redress historical wrongs can also generate their own lots of loss. Within the same vein, Fatima Sadiqi’s article “Could Weaving Be the Ancestor of Writing in the Amazigh Language?” is an important attempt to historicize the origins of pro-Tifinagh through designs in Amazigh carpets. Drawing on a variety of material sources and maintaining a profound conversation with a wide array of disciplines, Sadiqi provides a serious attempt to widen the horizon of interpretation of the origins and evolution of Amazigh writing systems.

Continuing the focus on language,, Yassine Boussagui’s article “Amazigh Language Teaching in Morocco” delves into the politics underlying the implementation of the inclusion of Tamazight in the Moroccan education system. Mobilizing education theory, the article sheds light on the lack of political will that has used time as a strategy to slow down, if not foil, the societal project of Tamazight’s rehabilitation. Tamazight has been introduced in Moroccan schools since 2003. Teachers were trained and resources were allocated, but the political will has not met the societal interest in the indigenous language of Moroccans. The indifference of political stakeholders translates into pedagogical choices that have left their impact on the teaching of Tamazight.

Turning towards Tamazgha and its gendered spatial representations, Yahya Laayouni’s article “The Amazigh as the Internal Other in Myopia: Challenging State Management of Space, Exclusion and Dominance” is a foray into Moroccan cinema’s treatment of womanhood. Focusing on Sanaa Akroud’s film Myopia, which represents the effort of a pregnant Amazigh woman to have the glasses of her village imam  be fixed in the city, Laayouni uses space as a cinematic motif to examine Imazighen’s marginalization and its spatial manifestations. Laayouni situates Amazigh cinema within Indigenous visual practices that contest homogenizing national narratives. Through Fatem’s movement from a mountainous village to the urban center, Laayouni argues that state power produces Amazigh communities as internal Others through linguistic hierarchy, bureaucratic recognition, and infrastructural neglect. Fatem’s journey to repair the imam’s glasses becomes a critique of a national order that demands documents, signatures, certificates, and official recognizability from communities that the state has excluded from full civic recognition.

This issue also offers a unique section on Amazigh pedagogies. This roundtable, curated and introduced by Brahim El Guabli, emerged from an event that Paul Silverstein, Brahim El Guabli, and Rachid Adnani organized in 2023 at Williams College. Funded through a grant from the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC), this workshop brought together a dozen colleagues who are interested in including Tamazight-related content to their courses. Two days of conversation in the presence of Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi yielded a program of pedagogical action that the circumstances of the different participants have not allowed us to implement yet. Mounia Mnouer’s article “Indigenous Amazigh Curriculum: The Importance of Positionality and Relationality” revisits her experience teaching her course “Indigenous North Africa: Amazigh Communities” at Princeton University. Mnouer invites us to decolonize not only pedagogical practices but also the premises upon which our concepts are established. Paul Silverstein’s article “Translating and Teaching Tamazgha” addresses how teaching and translation go hand in hand when one’s pedagogical task is to present Tamazgha to wider audiences. Finally, Brahim El Guabli discusses how he placed Tamazgha and Imazighen within the larger indigenous context in his course “Indigenous Ecologies.” Taken together, these three articles and the accompanying introduction provide the beginning of a path toward an Amazigh-inclusive pedagogy. Pedagogical thinking has been eerily absent from field-shaping conversations, which exacerbates the exclusion of Tamazight and Imazighen from academic curricula. Even as Tamazgha has changed, pedagogy has remained siloed, traditional, and detached from the reality of Tamazghan societies and their awareness of their Amazighity.

Azzeddine Tajjiou’s complete English translation of the Tarifit epic of “Dhar Ubarran” attends to widening scholarly and pedagogical accessibility  to oral tradition, where memory takes rhythmic, performative, and communal form. With an extensive introduction and notes, we are delighted to make this major Rifian anti-colonial text available in English. The epic records the 1921 confrontation at Dhar Abarran, the broader Rif War, the labor of resistance, and the violence of Spanish colonial warfare, including the use of chemical weapons to bombard the area. A legacy that continues to haunt the inhabitants of the Rif, who, over a century later, have the largest number of cancer cases throughout the country. Dhar Ubarran’s archival significance exceeds the force of military reportage and its chronology. This poem, composed and transmitted by women, centers Riffian women as makers of history and transmitters of memory in addition to their essential role as active participants in the material resistance. Tajjiou’s meticulous translation and articulate critical introduction form a historical reclamation of this past. Thanks to this effort, an oral Amazigh archive is now available to a wider readership who can put into an even larger conversation with anti-colonial literature, environmental violence, gendered memory, and Indigenous historiography.

Reframing the field has always been one of our goals in TSJ. Several generations of scholars have worked within “Berber studies” constrained by two contradictory inheritances. First, colonial administrators and ethnologists self-interestedly documented “Berber” life in ways that preserved invaluable linguistic, social, and material evidence. Without any altruism or romanticism, these would-be specialists organized their findings in a manner that supported their military knowledge, imperial governance, and unequivocal belief in their civilizational superiority. Second, post-independence nationalisms often reduced Amazigh identity to culture festivals, local color, or divisive particularism, especially as they established Arabic as the idiom of nation and Arabization as the ideology undergirding national unity. This polarization between colonial and nationalist legacies requires Amazigh studies practitioners to conduct work that involves different levels of retrieval, translation, and even (re)institutionalization of materials and ideas. Therefore, scholars in this field will always have to be careful when retrieving materials not to reproduce hierarchies, translating content without losing sight of context, and working without disciplines without succumbing to their control. The field requires scholarly practices adequate to a plural Tamazgha, internally differentiated by region, language variety, gender, class, race, migration, and political history.

Our interview section features three important interviews with several scholars. Nabil Boudraa, a pioneer of Amazigh studies in the United States of America, talks to us about his experience growing up in Kabylia in Algeria and his scholarly and pedagogical efforts to establish Amazigh studies in the US. Given his long involvement in the field, Dr. Boudraa records both the constants and the changes that have happened over the years, noting most particularly the energy that is dynamizing it in the last decade. The interview with Boudraa highlights the labor required to build Amazigh studies in the United States through conferences, edited volumes, language institutes, cinema forums, journals, and scholarly networks. His account demonstrates how institutional labor can transform isolated scholarship into a sustainable intellectual ecosystem. Similarly, our interview with the co-organizers of the New York Amazigh Film Forum (NYFAF): Habiba Boumlik, Lucy McNair, Yahya Laayoui, and Wafa Bahri, provides a rich inroad into the history of the festival since its humble beginnings to the celebration of the eleventh edition in April 2026. Covering a lot of ground that extends from the initial idea for the NYFAF to the organizers’ positionality vis-à-vis Native American indigeneity, this interview sheds a new light on Amazigh indigeneity as it is relayed and experienced through cinema. Finally, this section culminates with an equally important interview with South African historian Shamil Jeppie about his newly published book Writing Timbuku. Jeppie’s book not only focuses on the making and circulation of books in the Sahara, but does something even bigger by thinking about space and connecting the dots of a larger bookish universe that cemented relationships between all the participants across the regions of the Sahara. In addition to highlighting the milestone nature of Jeppie’s book, we seek to open space for Tamazgha and Imazighen in these very important conversations. Jeppie’s responses to our question highlight the importance of undertaking more work to connect the different parts of Tamazgha.

As customary, review editors, Mariam Taher and Lahoucine Laamari, have commissioned and curated four excellent reviews of recently published books. Matthew Brauer has reviewed Katarzyna Pieprzak, Poetics of Repair: Contemporary Arts and Afterlives of Colonial-Era Mass Housing in the Maghreb. Mohamed Chtatou crafted a review of Alfonso Casani’s Contemporary Islamist Opposition in Morocco: Resisting Inclusion and Moderation. Liz Matsushita’s review focuses on Brahim El Guabli’s Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences, while Bruce Maddy-Weitzman’s is dedicated to Fatima Sadiqi’s Women and the Codification of the Amazigh Language. These books and the rich reviews they elicited from these experts represent only the tip of an iceberg of connections that Tamazgha elicits. 

As we prepare for our next issue, we are thrilled that the contributions in the current issue continue to challenge the peripheralization of Amazigh studies by expanding the contours of Tamazgha as a material and immaterial archive, a pedagogical practice, a critical field, and a source undergirding both theory and methodology. Our hope is that this issue contributes to the study of the Amazigh language and culture while supporting the ongoing construction of Amazigh studies as a collaborative, critical, and indigenous field that is based on our shared collegiality, commitment to scholarly innovation, and ethical responsibility toward Tamazgha’s Indigenous people.