@article{Révolution:2220,
      recid = {2220},
      author = {Hickman, Kristin Gee},
      title = {Révolution Dārija? Imagining Vernacular Futures in  Morocco},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-06},
      pages = {151},
      abstract = {This dissertation investigates standard language ideology  as a key site of modern power in the postcolonial world  through an archival and ethnographic examination of  vernacular language politics in urban Morocco.  Specifically, it examines how a very particular and  historically contingent set of ideas about language—namely,  that every nation-state should have its own language in  which citizens carry out all aspects of their daily  lives—has come to set the terms for debates over the Arabic  language in contemporary Morocco. While explicit debates  over language often seem to lay bare opposing linguistic  ideologies, I argue that such debates in fact serve to both  reinscribe and invisibilize standard language ideology as  the common ground of discussion—in this case, further  entangling Moroccan Arabic (dārija) speakers within the  logics and sensibilities of postcolonial modernity even as  they struggle to imagine alternative linguistic and  national futures.

The dissertation draws on historical  research conducted in the archives of the French  Protectorate in Morocco, as well as on ethnographic  research carried out over a period of 21-months across  three major Moroccan cities: Tétouan, Rabat, and  Casablanca. By looking at a wide variety of sites—from  colonial-era schools to contemporary dubbing studios—I  locate fraught debates over the Arabic language within  changing conceptualizations of what language is (or is not)  and how it should (or should not) function. In particular,  I focus not only on sites of text production, but also on  sites of sound production. Similarly, I attend not only to  Moroccan actors, but also to non-Moroccan  others—particularly West African immigrants—who have become  unexpectedly entangled in “the dārija question.”

I show  that over the course of the past century, such debates have  facilitated the transformation of “dārija” from a mere  adjectival modifier describing a type of language (al-lugha  al-dārija, vernacular language) into a proper noun (Darija)  understood to describe a particular national language.  Further, I show that this reification of dārija into a  national language of sorts has led to new and unexpected  tensions about dārija as a local form of speech tethered to  ethnic Moroccan bodies, versus the potential for dārija to  be an anonymous public language that can be spoken by  anyone by virtue of belonging to no one in particular. I  argue that the Moroccan case exposes this as a core tension  that has long existed at the heart of standard language  ideology. Yet I conclude that the stakes in a postcolonial  context like Morocco are higher than in the global north,  as such a tension serves to further solidify a country’s  location as marginal and never fully-modern—even while it  remains stuck within the logics and sensibilities of  modernity, and struggles to imagine futures beyond these  confines.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2220},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2220},
}