Making Moroccan 'Heritage': Art, Identity, and Historical Memory in the Early French Protectorate of Morocco (ca. 1912 - 1931)

Abstract

This dissertation argues that transnational negotiations over the meaning and content of Morocco’s cultural heritage and identity during World War I and the interwar period (ca. 1912 - 1931) were critical to the French Protectorate’s cultural campaign in Morocco. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the early French Protectorate regime, led by Resident-General Hubert Lyautey from 1912 until 1925, established one of the earliest and most comprehensive programs for arts and heritage management in Africa and, arguably, the world; the legacy of this colonial project is still reflected in notions and practices of “heritage” in Morocco and France today. Existing literature depicts the Protectorate’s exceptional attention to preserving Morocco’s “traditional” architecture, arts, neighborhoods, and cultural practices as a colonial campaign pursued in the service of social control, economic exploitation, and political dominance. I diverge from this current scholarship by examining the dynamic relationship between the colonial politics of cultural representation within Morocco and the intellectual, commercial, and political stakes of representing a cultural image of Morocco on the international stage. In this way, I broaden our understanding of the early-twentieth-century cultural relationship between France and Morocco beyond the realm of colonial politics to consider its formative role in articulating twentieth-century notions of “art,” “heritage,” and “identity” on both sides of the Mediterranean.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Morocco had taken on a central position in imperial politics as the object of economic and political competition among the major European powers. With the formal establishment of French and Spanish protectorates in the region in 1912, the image of Morocco as a long independent Muslim kingdom in North Africa continued to have symbolic currency for its European protectors and allies who held a particular stake in disassociating Moroccan society and politics from the German-allied Ottoman world. Following years of political and economic instability in their country during the second half of the nineteenth century, the first decades of the twentieth century also presented an opportunity for diverse actors in Morocco to reimagine themselves and their society in relation to evolving cultural, national, and transregional identities and relationships.

Drawing upon recent museum and heritage theories, I consider how different communities and actors in France and Morocco exploited the representational tools afforded by concurrent developments in museum display, cultural exhibition, and the emerging scholarly disciplines of Islamic and African art to articulate competing claims over Morocco’s cultural image and national identity. The significance of this project varied for its stakeholders: some strove to make sense of Morocco’s diverse arts, cultures, and histories in relation to globalizing narratives of “tradition,” “modernity,” and national identity, while others endeavored to profit from the commercial and professional opportunities afforded by growing international interest in Morocco’s cultural products. My analysis brings together a range of exhibitionary contexts in France and Morocco typically discussed separately in historical studies — the Exposition Franco-Marocaine in Casablanca (1915), the museums of art and ethnography established by the French Protectorate in Morocco (1915-1929), the first exhibition of Moroccan art in France (1917), the Grande Mosquée de Paris (1922-26), and the international and colonial expositions of the early twentieth century in Marseilles (1922) and Paris (1925 and 1931) — to demonstrate the varied political, commercial, and intellectual objectives that shaped local and global notions of Moroccan “heritage” in the twentieth century.