Tamazghan Futures: Forging a Humanistic Approach

Katarzyna Pieprzak, Brahim El Guabli, and Aomar Boum

In previous issues of TSJ, we have promoted academic writing on Tamazgha as a geocultural space founded on a reimagined territory that seeks, first and foremost, to highlight the indigenous dimensions of the places mostly known as North and sub-Saharan Africa. We have published articles that, from essays on textiles to articles on music and literature, as their focus, and we have also made available numerous English translations of Amazigh poetry. These publications have demonstrated our commitment to an interdisciplinary approach that is deeply rooted in the value of humanistic inquiry and its transformative outcomes. This issue offers yet another epistemological entry into Tamazghan cultural production by foregrounding art practice, writ large, as a form of research and space for creating Tamazgha’s futures.

When we first proposed Tamazghan futures as a topic for the issue, we hoped to receive submissions that foregrounded how Tamazghan thought, technologies, practices and philosophies engaged in future-oriented projects whether that be responses to climate change, architectural innovation, or ideas of governance and community building. Our expectations for academic articles were not met by the submissions we received. Instead, most of the material we have gathered for this issue has come from the world of the arts.  And thus, it became clear to us that centering the arts as research in this issue would mark another milestone in our commitment to make Tamazgha Studies Journal a locus for experimentation to broaden the horizons of scholarship to look beyond the traditionally sourced ways of approaching the place commonly known as the Maghreb or North Africa. The scarcity of submissions about Tamazghan futures as a topic as well as a possibility to envision a different futurity is also an indication that what we may consider a priority in our American context may not have the same resonance in a different location, which is all the more important to underline and highlight here. This said, we hope to have opened a new space for reflection on what it means to think about the future of Tamazgha both as an aspirational location and a locus for critical and imaginative thinking.

In this issue, we foreground essays by and interviews with artists. Artists Nadir Bouhmouch and Soumeya Ait Ahmed’s contribution, “Cultural Expressions of Class Conflict in the Apple Orchard” is an essay and photographs from their series Remedies for Monotony: “a long-term multi-disciplinary art and research project which lies at the intersection between popular North African oral poetry, folktales and legends, food sovereignty and history, environmentalism, the transition from peasantry to proletariat, and agricultural wage labour in the Moroccan Atlas mountains.” Architect Carlos Perez Marin’s “Inhabiting the Desert” is a photographic essay of over 150 photographs of traditional architectures, urban planning and territory planning that “could (should) be a model of contemporaneity for our cities and regions when we think about creating habitats that might confront new challenges: economic and social development, energy consumption, water resources optimisation, climate evolution adaptation.” Our interviews with Raïssa Lei, Ahmed Haddachi, and Alia Bensliman, explore how performance, literary and visual arts intersect with Amazigh activism and work to broaden the historical record as well as imagine futures. We bookend the issue with an original English language poem by Layla Hannah Rafaoui. Rafoui, an Amazigh poet of Moroccan and Danish descent, uses the poetic medium to reflect on Amazigh histories and experiences. We hope that these texts and the visual archive that they produce or evoke will provide readers with not only a glimpse of important Amazigh interventions in the arts, but also show how art itself engages with and remaps knowledge that enables us to think or rethink possible Tamazghan futures.

In her book Mapping the Middle East, historian Zayde Antrim articulates a crucial, albeit self-evident, fact that “the people of the region have been making maps of their worlds for centuries.” However, Zayde, cautions that “most histories of cartography are strikingly Eurocentric, and those that do deal with other parts of the world tend to emphasize their encounters with Europe and European maps from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries on.” One would think that it should be simply obvious that mapping and remapping are an ordinary humanity activity in space and place, but self-evidence is not always sufficient when scholarship does not open up its horizons to embrace new trends or to adapt its practices to what emerges from social and cultural realities of the societies studies. In this regard, Tamazgha, as a transformative act of indigenous remapping, could potentially move our thinking about history, culture, society, and politics in an entirely fresh manner. Wedding this remapping with humanistic inquiry has tremendous potential for our disciplines, programs, and curricula.

To this end, in this issue we are including several essays and one peer-reviewed article in this issue. Mohamed Chtatou’s essay on Finnish anthropologist “Westermarck Investigates the Intricacies of the Culture of the Imazighen of Morocco.” Our New Directions in Research section features a timely article on the politics of the production of green hydrogen in Morocco and its relationship with the EU’s energy needs. Samir Oujhain and Abdellah El Haloui’s article, also featured in the New Directions section, is titled “The Tribar Signs in RIL Inscriptions.”  Abderazaq Ichou’s article “Standardization of Tifinagh Writing and its Adequacy” surveys the process that led to the adoption of neo-Tifinagh as the official writing script for Tamazight in Morocco and highlights how it is a fitting choice compared to the Arabic and Latin alphabets, which were proposed during the deliberations.

Beyond the simply topographical and geographical imaginings that are evoked by the notion of remapping, we reorient the concept to also apply to the locations from which we think about, articulate, and engage with knowledge production. Hence, fields of study can be remapped, words used to approach topics or describe phenomena can also be remapped by being borrowed from other places or geographies, and conceptual frameworks live in a state of constant remapping in their movement from their points of origination to new locations. Remapping, for us, involves the possibility to think and conceptualize issues and places differently in order to tease out knowledges that were left outside major scholarly concerns or simply take routes that were left untaken. Taking an existing route, like Tamazgha, and attempting to tap into its potential is not only important but also critical for the renewal of our humanistic and social scientific disciplines.

The Critical Amazigh Studies Summer Institute (CASSI), which took place at Rabat International University in the summer of 2025,  is an example of the remapping that feeds into TSJ’s mission. Designed to transcend the current state of scholarship and pedagogy focused on the area called the Maghreb/North Africa, the CASSI offered the first cohort of undergraduate and graduate participants lectures, seminars, and languages classes to prepare them for their own already existing endeavor  to  redraw borders and reconfigure the disciplinary fault lines they are called to navigate in their careers in generative ways. Organized between June 30 and July 11, 2025, the CASSI is an act of redrawing that, if fully optimized in scholarly and pedagogical practice, will not only change the methodologies but also the very bodies of knowledge, languages, and sources used to study Tamazgha. It is an important exercise in thinking about Tamazghan futurity.

In this issue, we also include a set of book reviews by several colleagues. We are proud that our review section editors have deliberately invited colleagues from Tamazgha to prepare these reviews because we believe that their interventions are sine qua non for the construction of an inclusive Tamazghan scholarly future. As the journal continues its work, we plan to include not only academic book reviews, but also reviews written about cultural production and events across Tamazgha. It is important to us, as editors, to acknowledge that academic forms of writing are not the only forms of legitimate knowledge production. While we will return to publishing more peer-reviewed articles in the next issue, we will continue to expand our methodologies in the hopes of curating a journal that dismantles not only outdated geographical boundaries but also traditional epistemologies and manners of knowing that continue to leave countless creative ways of doing research outside the scope of the legible and the publishable.