2025 Distinguished Scholar Lecture
"Tamazgha Remaps Africa: Reflections on the Scholarly Potential of Amazigh Indigeneity"
by Brahim El Guabli of Williams College & Johns Hopkins University
Thursday, April 3, 2025, at 4:30pm
Rittenberg Lounge, Mather Hall
This year's lecture is sponsored by Professor Walid Bouchakour and the Francophone Studies Section of Language and Culture Studies
This year, we are honored to host Dr. Brahim El Guabli, Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College and currently Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. El Guabli’s lecture, titled “Tamazgha Remaps Africa: Reflections on the Scholarly Potential of Amazigh Indigeneity,” will explore the Amazigh Cultural Movement (ACM), which has produced a rich body of literature and thought that has played a crucial role in changing states and societies in North Africa. In tandem with advocacy for linguistic and cultural rights, the ACM activists remapped African geography by inventing and deploying the neologism of Tamazgha. Extending from the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean to the oasis of Siwa in West Egypt and encompassing vast areas of the Sahel, Tamazgha, or the Amazigh homeland, has challenged all the traditional ways in which the Sahara has been conceptualized and discussed in scholarship, opening space for a different understanding of Islamization and cultural and demographic continuities between North and sub-Saharan Africa. This talk will address ACM activists’ construction of the Amazigh homeland and reveal Tamazgha’s transformative potential for scholarship.
Dr. El Guabli is associate professor of Arabic studies and comparative literature at Williams College and currently associate professor of comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in Amazigh, Arabic, and Francophone literatures, but his interdisciplinary scholarship encompasses a variety of fields including memory, indigeneity, and environmental studies. Dr. El Guabli is the author of the award-winning monograph Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023). He has two forthcoming books: Desert Imaginations (University of California Press) and Literature and Indigeneity (University of Michigan Press). He is also co-founder and co-editor of the Amazigh Studies series (Georgetown University Press) and of the independent peer-reviewed Tamazgha Studies Journal.
