Abstract

This article examines how the postcolonial francophone writer Abdellatif Laâbi locates the Moroccan monarchy within a history of colonial manipulations of indigenous political institutions. In Laâbi’s literary works, in particular his novel Le fond de la jarre and his early poetic works from the 1960s, L’œil et la nuit and Le Règne de barbarie, the body of the sovereign takes on a palpable materiality that Laâbi uses to expose a foreclosed link between colonial and postcolonial definitions of national culture. I argue that Laâbi’s spectral poetic landscapes mine this negated register of memory in order to figure new modes of aesthetic and political agency.

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