Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco

Notes

Introduction 1. Kilito, “The Flower-Bed,” 37. 2. Pandolfo, “The Thin Line of Modernity,” 124. 3. Moroccan National Tourist Board, Morocco: Museums, 3. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Ibid., 6, 12, 18. 6. Ibid., 1. 7. Ali Amahan, interview by the author, Ministry of Culture, Rabat, May 19, 2000. 8. Rharib, “Le mot musée,” 51. 9. Touzani, “Les musées marocains,” 48. 10. Szwaja and Ybarra-Frausto, “Foreword,” xiv. 11. Among these studies I have found Wendy Shaw, Irene Maffi, and Heghnar Wautenpaugh ’s recent works on the Middle Eastern museum the most interesting and inspiring. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed; Maffi, Pratiques du patrimoine et politiques; Wautenpaugh, “Museums and the Construction of National History.” For studies of African museums, see Gaugue, Les états africains et leurs musées. 12. Fehr, “A Museum and Its Memory,” 59, emphasis mine. 13. Kratz and Karp, “Introduction,” 4. 14. Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” 17. 15. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body, 3, 40. 16. Bennett, “Difference and the Logic of Culture,” 56. 17. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 115. 18. Rabinow, French Modern, 9. 19. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 32–33. 20. Majid, “A Moroccan Star Is Born.” 179 Notes 21. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 189. 22. Laroui, cited by Pandolfo in “The Thin Line of Modernity,” 124. 23. For excellent projects of this type, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, and many of the essays in Mitchell, Questions of Modernity. 24. De Boeck and Plissart, Kinshasa, 57. 25. Ibid., 34. 26. “La rançon d’une societé à deux vitesses: violence et répression.” Diouri, A qui appartient le Maroc? 37. 27. This evocative phrase is taken from Pierre Bourdieu: “Like the so-called naïve painter who, operating outside the field and its specific traditions, remains external to the history of art, the ‘naïve’ spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to a specific history of artistic tradition.” Bourdieu, Distinction, 4. 28. These concepts are developed further in the body of the book, but their phrasing comes from Clifford, Routes, 8, and Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction,” 370–371. 29. Muhairi, cited by Hassan Fattah in “Celebrity Architects Reveal a Daring Cultural Xanadu for the Arab World,” New York Times, February 1, 2007. 30. http://www.lord.ca. 31. Mikdadi, “Arab Art Institutions and Their Audiences,” 56. 32. adonis, “Le manifeste du 5 juin 1967,” 3. 33. See the work of Hamid Irbouh, Stacy Holden, and Muriel Girard for scholarship that retrieves voices about art and restoration from the colonial archives. Amina Touzani’s thorough and insightful analysis of the Moroccan Ministry of Culture from Independence to the beginning of the twenty-first century is based on her work in various ministerial archives in Morocco in French and Arabic. On the conditions of these archives, Touzani writes, “The Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Morocco is a department without memory because up to this day, it has not been able to organize its archives. In effect, there doesn’t exist the smallest administrative cell to proceed to the collection, analysis and diffusion of the archives or at least their preservation. The question that haunts us is the following: Is there really something to preserve?” (“Les musées marocains,” 16–17). 34. Becker, Amazigh Arts in Morocco; El Maleh, “Ahmed Cherkaoui ou la passion de la signe”; Khatibi, L’art contemporain arab; Ossman, Susan, Picturing Casablanca. 1. Degeneration and Decay in the National Museum 1. Touzani, La culture et la politique culturelle au Maroc, 227. 2. It is not my aim here to examine Benjamin’s theory of redemptive recuperation through decay and to analyze its full relevance for a theory on the decay of museums. Rather I am borrowing fundamental concepts such as decay as critical practice from his work in the Arcades Project and Trauerspiel as starting points for thinking about museum decay in a Moroccan context. 3. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 163. 4. Tranchant de Lunel, Au pays du paradoxe, 188. The Protectorate Fine Arts Administration was called by different names throughout the Protectorate period, including alternately Service des Beaux-Arts and Service des Arts Indigènes.This vacillation in names points 180 Notes to Chapter 1 to a vacillation in attitude toward the Moroccan arts. Were they fine arts or indigenous arts, a distinction that...