Traveling Cultural Studies

The US -led military offensive against Iraq in 1991 was so shocking that it prompted a group of young scholars, including myself, at the Department of English in Fez to rethink the idea of teaching English in the Moroccan university. In response to the attack, they reconceptualized the politics of the taught and untaught, presence and absence in the curricula towards freeing them from the overwhelming specter of ‘white mythologies’ and of ‘grand narratives’ and towards ‘presencing’ local temporality, spatiality and identity. Using Edward Said’s concept of ‘traveling theory’, this article examines the department’s departure as ‘a starting point’, an original, and ‘an act of divergence, of moving away’ or an ‘afterlife’ of British Cultural Studies. It will explore the experience of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Center, the Moroccan Cultural Studies Journal and Moroccan Cultural Studies, nationhood and identity affiliated with the Department of English and the paradigmatic shifts they ushered in both research and the curricula. While the department does not espouse a radical ‘call on the abolishment of the English department’, it reproduces it to incorporate both ‘the origin’ and to emphasize the Moroccan, Arab, Amazigh, Jewish and African contexts in terms of culture, ethnicity, identity, language, politics and society.