Tamazgha as an Object of Pedagogy

Brahim El Guabli
Johns Hopkins University

The classroom for many of our students is their entryway into realms they oftentimes have no idea even existed. As anthropologist Paul Silverstein explains, pedagogy is an act of translation that helps students interpret and unlock both worlds and worldviews through the syllabus and curricula we curate. Building off Silverstein’s idea of pedagogy-as-translation, I cannot but remind us that much of the stalemate that we have witnessed in Amazigh studies and its exclusion from Anglophone curricula as a full-fledge field of research and pedagogy has to do with the failure of translators to capture the significance of Imazighen, Tamazgha, and Tamazight. For translation to function productively, the translator has to master both the source and target languages equally. However, embodying these two languages, if not more, in a manner that is able to feel, experience, and respond to their meaning and significance requires deeper investment than perfunctorily carrying out one’s teaching duties. Institutional conditions have not favored Tamazight since independence, and the professors who work on Tamazgha have the additional duty to offset the  toll that decades of marginalization took on pedagogy’s and scholarship’s potential in Tamazgha and beyond. It’s true that there has been a major effort to teach and learn Arabic in Anglophone universities, but Tamazight has been excluded from their curricula for the last forty years for no reason other than political shifts and the canonization of Arabic as the language of study of Tamazgha. Translation did not only fail here, but it became complicit in de-indigenization and linguicide that played out in Imazighen’s homeland.

This section contains three contributions that examine pedagogical practices around Tamazgha. These essays honor a long overdue project that Paul Silverstein, Rachid Aadnani, and I started in 2022 by applying to and receiving a grant from the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC) for the workshop entitled "For an Amazigh-Inclusive Curriculum on North Africa." The grant allowed us to bring together a dozen colleagues from several liberal arts colleges across the United States to think collectively about ways to integrate Amazigh studies materials into their interdisciplinary courses. Although not entirely focused on Tamazgha, the different colleagues who attended the workshop demonstrated a strong interest in experimenting with inclusive curricula in the absence of discrete Amazigh studies programs on their campuses.

The workshop, which spanned two days, aimed to achieve two important goals. The first goal was identifying the state of inclusion of Amazigh questions in the participants’ curricula. On the first day, all the participants were invited to reflect on the manner in which Tamazight, Imazighen, and Tamazgha figure in their teaching. It was clear from this assessment that, while our colleagues are aware of the importance of this issue, there is no clear strategy to create space for Imazighen. This first day allowed us to identify a decolonial pedagogy that could serve as a springboard for the next stage of coming up collectively with syllabi that could be inclusive and more attuned to the existence of an Indigenous people in Tamazgha whose language and culture are not necessarily reflected in the way their homeland is taught, discussed, and debated in the classroom. The different groups attempted to come up with language-centered as well as content courses that would serve as a home for this inclusive pedagogy.

The organization of this workshop, which took place in the spring of 2023, was supposed to lead to other collaborations and initiatives. However, the global context changed due to the war on Gaza over the next two and a half years and prevented the continuation of this conversation. Therefore, these three articles were authored and edited in that spirit of picking up the conversation and documenting the outcomes of this important gathering. Combining both depth and breadth, these articles address questions of positionality, disciplinary boundaries, and the teaching of Tamazgha within larger and more cutting-edge contexts that require the mobilization of theory, pedagogy, and activism in the meantime. These three contributions demonstrate Tamazgha's potential  to make inroads into new areas of teaching beyond conceptions of territory, nation, and what constitutes knowledge and epistemology. These routinized ideas have seldom acknowledged Imazighen and their homeland.

In her trenchant article, Dr. Mnouer highlights the importance of positionality in her teaching of a course on Imazighen. As an Amazigh Indigenous woman, Dr. Mnouer emphasizes the decolonial nature of both defining and asserting one’s positionality when engaging with indigenous issues and course materials. Drawing on theories far afield, encompassing Paulo Freire and Linda to Tuhiwai Smith, and mobilizing many works by and interviews with Amazigh scholars, Dr. Mnour concludes that her course “brought a holistic approach to the curriculum and helped raise awareness about Tamazgha as a region,” singling out how it “also engaged in concepts of positionality where everyone situated themselves in the curriculum and explored the idea of knowledge and how it was not viewed as universal or objective, but rather politically and historically situated. The course also opened doors to new ways of theorizing while breaking free from viewing knowledge from a prescribed standpoint.” Accordingly, the relationality and positionality that Dr. Mnouer invites us to exercise would result in the recognition of  “Indigenous agency,” which could, in turn, “lead to the emergence of Tamazgha Studies beyond traditionally defined regional and/or departmental structures.”

Likewise, Dr. Paul Silverstein, one of the very few scholars who have practiced Amazigh studies since the 1990s,  invites us to think about the future of Amazigh studies in a manner that takes into account its contradictions. The challenge, as Silverstein fittingly states it, is how to keep an open, inclusive, and critically aware curriculum. In his own phrasing:

How might we best promote and sustain the project of Tamazgha without bracketing its internal divides, exclusions, and biases along terrains of gender, ethnicity, and race? How might we avoid a destructive deconstruction of Amazigh politics and instead contribute to a productive dialogue among Tamazgha’s differing—and sometimes conflicting—stakeholders? By what criteria do we choose our collaborative partners and decide on which translations to translate? The questions we face in elevating Amazigh Studies are as ethical as academic.

These words draw attention to the internal richness of Amazigh studies as a field that has survived on margins of Maghreb/North African studies, privileging a dialogical approach that builds off the field’s internal variety, including the conflicts within, in order to build robust, field-building practices. As such, the excitement about the ongoing efforts to rehabilitate the field should not lead to new exclusions. This warning from Dr. Silverstein, who has spent over two decades examining Amazigh issues, aims to keep Amazigh studies ecumenical, open, and all-inclusive.

My own article focuses on the decolonial nature of the course I taught on “Indigenous Ecologies” during the academic years 2024/2025 and 2025/2026. For me, this course was the culmination of my own self-decolonization. Working through the notion of Amazighitude, which I have reconceptualized and rerouted to mean Amazigh decoloniality, I understood the importance of developing a pedagogical practice that accounts for Imazighen and their indigeneity in their global context. Teaching “Indigenous Ecologies” was a transformative milestone for me to have a strong grasp of the way Imazighen within both the grammar of indigeneity and the indigenous condition that ensues from it. Once one understands how the grammar of indigeneity is undergirded by dispossession, linguicide, and genocide, the Amazigh condition becomes legible on levels that its confinement to culturalist struggle has not been able to capture. By placing Amazigh indigeneity within  wider indigeneities worldwide, my teaching aimed to open a crack in the wall of separation that has prevented Imazighen from fully achieving their decolonial potential.

All in all, these articles are not meant to provide complete answers but rather to open up space for more reflections on pedagogy and Tamazgha. The road is still long, but it has to start from somewhere. These three articles will hopefully inspire, if not provoke, more colleagues to center Tamazgha in their teaching.