TALIM Director's Blog

Morocco - US Strategic Dialogue at TALIM April Seminar

April Seminar, 2013

The Morocco - United States Strategic Dialogue

Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies 

This year, our annual April Seminar had a decidedly political flavor, so it was appropriate that it be launched at a sufficiently high level.  US Ambassador to Morocco Samuel Kaplan opened the seminar at a time of unusual - and uncharacteristic - tension between the two old allies.  The chairs that remained empty at the seminar about the bilateral Strategic Dialogue had all been slated for Moroccan speakers.

Quel dommage. The entire point of a strategic dialogue is that countries espouse their own national interests, and see where those interests converge.  We missed an opportunity to hear a definitive Moroccan explication of their country's firm position on a matter of vital national interest.

Moroccan dissatisfaction with a perceived change in American policy over human rights reporting in the Sahara marked the proceedings, mostly by a no-show of a number of officials and other invited speakers.  Quite a change in atmosphere compared to Washington in September 2012, when then Secretary of State Clinton hosted the first edition of the Morocco-United States Strategic Dialogue.

In a week where the news from the Maghreb had been catastrophic - Ambassador Chris Stevens had just been killed in Libya - Secretary Clinton recalled why the Strategic Dialogue was important:

No country has been a friend of the United States longer than Morocco. You were the first nation to recognize us back in 1777. But we’re not satisfied with simply having a friendship that is longstanding. We want one that is dynamic, growing, looking toward the future.

Which is what brought TALIM to devote this year's April Seminar to a sort of status report on the Dialogue.  Our proceedings covered the same four areas that involved Working Groups composed of diplomats and experts from both countries: Political, Economic, Education & Culture, and Security.  Our format was to mirror the "WGs" with speakers, Moroccan and American, on each of these four pillars.

In light of the - we hope temporary - boycott by Moroccan officials of certain American events, all of our panels but one had an empty chair at the table. 

Security

Mr. Larry Velte of the National Defense University's Near East South Asia Center (NESA) provided an excellent inventory of the rich variety of security sector cooperation between Morocco and the United States.  Classic service programs (Navy to Navy, etc.) exist, but so too do connections where no institutional counterpart exists - the Moroccan gendarmerie, for instance.  In an area like disaster relief, it was the state of Utah National Guard that was the quickest to react, while the DOD was still trying to sort out fiscal data.  Utah didn't ask, "who will pay for it?"

AFRICOM social scientist Dr. Liza Briggs, freed up from the "deferred" African Lion '13 joint exercise, attended the Seminar, a reminder that the flap over the Sahara UN issue carried a price in terms of a long-running symbol of security cooperation.  Dr. Briggs, in her conversations with soldiers from the US and Morocco, indicated that "mil to mil" relations were going along smoothly, and of course go beyond the matter of a postponed exercise, costly as that might be in terms of logistical expenses and opportunities lost.

Update, Wednesday 25 April: the US Embassy in Rabat has announced that - following another US policy readjustment - the African Lion excercise would resume on a limited scale.

Finally, Olmstead Scholars from the US Army, US Air Force, and the Marine Corps attended our Seminar, fresh from their classes at Moroccan universities and before rejoining their respective services.

Education & Culture

Dr. James Miller, Executive Secretary of the Fulbright Commission in Morocco (MACECE) provided an overview of the history of American-Moroccan cooperation in education, the bases of which started as early as the World War II Anfa (Casablanca) Conference and early postwar aid programs.  Even before Morocco regained its independence in 1956, Fulbright scholars were active in the country.

The state of higher education in Morocco is a concern to MACECE, and to TALIM (full disclosure: TALIM director Loftus is on the MACECE board, and TALIM is the AIMS research center in Morocco, home to Moroccan, American, and other scholars).  Fulbright scholars from the US come to Morocco, and Moroccans study in the United States.  One of the main problem areas is simply the resources devoted to education: the University of Fez, for example, has upwards of 96,000 students!

Dr. Miller's presentation was replete with such stupendous numbers (in another faculty, 23 professors deal with some 5,000 students).  A special type of French jargon has been developed to describe the "massification" of Moroccan universities, where students are piled on without classrooms, and classrooms without teachers; a "voluntary departure" program led to massive reductions in experienced teachers, and those that are left sometimes teach courses in things like COBOL, a computer programming language developed in the Fifties, simply because that's the last thing they themselves learned.

Much of the structural - literally - problems in universities have their roots in attitudes left over from the bad old days of distrust of intellectuals under King Hassan II, when they were automatically suspected of disloyalty.  Arts faculties (traditionally left wing) were physically separated from those of science, seen as more compliant.  Even now, while "autonomy" is seen as an end worthy of every institution and university faculty, the financial means to that end are nonexistent.

Economics

Dr. Kamal Tazi of Mohamed V University in Rabat, a regular visitor to Tangier as guest lecturer at business school HEM, gave a very fluid overview of the Moroccan economy, in light of the reforms recently undertaken by King Mohamed VI's government, and the still-necessary reforms to come.  Tazi was unique among Moroccan speakers scheduled for this Seminar: he showed up.  And we were lucky to have such a frank analyst of his country's economy, whose heartfelt plea for an open, humane society tempered the facts and figures usually a feature of "the dismal science."

On the American side, US Consul General Brian Shukan (Casablanca) spoke to the vibrant commercial relations between the two countries, something he sees on a daily basis as the chief US diplomat in Morocco's economic capital.  Brian also looked at economic integration in the region - or, in the case of inter-Maghreb flows, lack of integration - seeing potential advantages in a number of areas, including political stabilty.  The US-Morocco Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is a cornerstone of bilateral economic ties, and today some 120 American firms operate facilities in Morocco.

Political

In some way, the very fact of the Strategic Dialogue - and the apparent snub by Moroccan officials and some individual speakers of our proceedings - shows the essentially political nature of relations.

Dr. Jack Kalpakian of AUI, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, described his introduction to Morocco, which, as a state, is defined by the Makhzen, the ubiquitous term that includes the royal family and the state institutions.  It's often summed up on the whitewashed walls of beachside guard posts and in white-painted rocks on hillsides: Allah, al-Malik, al-Watan: God, King, and Country.

There's a related triumverate of Moroccan red lines: Islam, the monarchy, and the Sahara.  The latter, of course, was the issue which led to the current state of tetchiness so apparent in our empty seats at the table.  Why, asks Kalpakian, the extreme sensitivity in Morocco to the matter of the Sahara?  Simply legitimacy: any questioning of Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara is seen as a threat to national integrity.

Looking at the conundrum for Moroccans that the US represents, Kalpakian imagines how the decentralized, disparate nature of American government must present a quandary for Morocco, where you can just deal with the appropriate ministries.  The US isn't, like some of his students might think, a "Super France," and Morocco isn't like governed like Maryland.

So, down at the level of the citizenry, we had a Dialogue that, while perhaps not Strategic, was meaningful and certainly multidimensional.  Moroccans and Americans - and a good number of Europeans - from academia, government, private sector.  From lycée through troisième age.  A rich dialogue representing the potential for exchange going beyond what we like to harp on, our historic Moroccan-American ties.  As Hillary Clinton said, we want a relationship "that is dynamic, growing, looking toward the future."

Where Are the Maghrebi Artists?

"Converging Territories," Lalla Essaydi

Dr. Carol Solomon of Haverford College, Pennsylvania, in Morocco on a Fulbright grant, was intrigued by that very question: in many of the textbooks and survey courses of African art, the art of North Africa was always given the shortest chapter.  Odd, as the region's recorded history goes further back than much that is available on sub-Saharan Africa.  She set out to find out "where were the Maghrebi artists?" 

In Algiers a few years ago for the opening of MAMA, the national museum of contemporary art, Carol Solomon heard the lament of a number of artists about the general lack of galleries and facilities for artists.  In Morocco, only Tetouan (Beaux Arts) and Casablanca (Design) offer art schools.  "How do I survive as an artist in my country?"  Many choose to emigrate, and it was this vein which Dr. Solomon has mined.

For her presentation at TALIM yesterday, Dr. Solomon chose to focus on "Women Artists of the North African Diaspora," a subject rich in diversity.  Indeed, such descriptions as "third space," "limnal," "edge," and "hybridity" pepper Carol's vision of the art of the daughters of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia who not only fly back and forth between the Maghreb and Europe or North America, but whose art inhabits that in-between territory.  She shares Edward Said's view of the "plurality of vision" of these multi-state citizens.

Said, whose book "Orientalism" informed and shaped much study of West - MidEast cultural relations, might be surprised at the lingering popularity of much Orientalist art, and not just among European art collectors nostalgic for sepia-toned views of harems and fantasias.

No, as Solomon says, Orientalist works are the rage too in places like the Gulf, where wealthy sheikhs buy up art to populate new museums and galleries, and 19th century Orientalist paintings offer a measure of "topographic, ethnographic, and historic" accuracy, along with nostalgic appeal to buyers whose grandfathers were Bedouins with little contact with the Seraglio.

Carol Solomon presented the audience with the works of a hometown star, Yto Barrada, who might be better known in Tangier for her pioneering work in restoring the historic Cinema Rif and turning it into a respected and much-appreciated institution, the Cinémathèque Tanger.  But Yto Barrada is also a prize-winning photographer, and her "projects" like the "Strait Project" involve photography but also sculpture, often providing a biting commentary on the rampant over-development that not only wipes out historic vestiges of Tangier's rich architectural past, but endangers the unique flora and fauna of this zone that is Africa's closest point to Europe.

Les Femmes du Maroc, No. 14, Lalla Essaydi

Another Moroccan, who has settled in the United States, Lalla Essaydi, has been recognized as worthy of a Smithsonian exhibition, "Revisions."  Carol, who curated an exhibit in 2008 at Amherst College, introduced a work by Essaydi that received a review in her native Morocco.  Essaydi later told Carol Solomon that the picture of her work was the first time that any of her images was seen in Morocco.

TALIM - thanks to a grant from the Moroccan American Cultural Center (MACC) in Washington - will soon be mounting a new permanent exhibit at the Legation Pavilion, entitled "Moroccans in America," featuring talent from across the spectrum of the arts, literature, academia, and public service.  We will be featuring, thanks to Lalla Essaydi, one of her works from "Les Femmes du Maroc," currently exhibited at the Banque al-Maghrib.

Back to the Orientalists.  Today's women artists from the Maghreb will often do what Lalla Essaydi terms "neo-Orientalist" takes on works like that of Delacroix's "The Women of Algiers," even naming their works with more than a nod to the 19th century exoticists.  Franco-Algerian Zoulikha Bouabdellah, whose performance art "Dansons," or the Marseillaise, belly-dance version, turns Orientalism on its head, and would make both Front National and Front Islamique partisans equally livid with its cross-cultural identity-blurring juxtapostion of bleu-blanc-rouge "nationalism" and sequinned hip-swiveling.

But that's what the women artists of the Maghreb diaspora do best: challenge stereotypes, mix media, and generally get their native Maghreb on the stage of the world.  Carol Solomon gave us a taste of what is out there, and we appreciate the wisdom she imparted.

Club Elixir, Then & Now

A couple of months back, we carried a post on our glass negative collection, and unveiled an undated - but probably early Twentieth century - photo of a long-gone medina institution, Club Elixir.

One of our neighbors in the medina thought he recognized the location, and took a little cell phone picture of it to show us.  It certainly bore all the hallmarks of the same location, Place Sakaaya.

So we sent Mohammed Jadidi of TALIM, fresh from his digital photography course, to take a "then and now" shot of the same square.  There might be a few more stories on some of the buildings, and a lot more in the way of street vendors, but here it is in April 2013:

It turns out that another TALIM staffer, Fatima Benguerch, who teaches Arabic literacy to the women of the medina, was born in the same building, during another one of its iterations after the demise of "Club Elixir."  There are almost no more elixirs of any sort in the medina, another vestige of International Naughty Zone Tangier that has gone by the wayside.

But we're glad to see that the square is as lively as ever.  We hope to provide more "then & now" photo pairs as we discover the treasures in our glass negative collection.

TALIMonth: CNN, Cartoons, Carnivals - a Cornucopia

February & March are supposed to be dead months, right?  It's still winter - inside and out - and marmots and groundhogs who know best stay tucked up in their dens.  Well, it looks like no one told us here in Tangier.  Here's a taste of what we've been up to over the past couple of months.

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Anthony Bourdain (left) at the Grand Socco, Tangier

5 February: The team from CNN's new international travel show, Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" (photo from their Tangier sojourn above) shoots lots of film at the Legation, and - in a first for this epicurean - films yours truly having dinner with Anthony at a nice new local restaurant, El Morocco Club, a sort of "Rick's Cafe" without Nazis.  Anthony and his crew, in Tangier for several days, focused on food, but also a bit of culture (they might use some of our glass negatives to illustrate the show), and we are told the Tangier piece will air Sunday May 12.  Stay tuned.

9 February: TALIM stalwart (she designs our Movie Night posters) Serena Epstein - chief librarian at AST, the American School of Tangier - has many talents, one of which, we discover, is cartoonist.  Check out her great 'toon "My Invisibility Glasses: How to escape unwanted attention in Morocco," excerpt above.  We can't wait 'til Serena does the cartoon version of some of the Legation's wilder tales of the weird from two-plus centuries of diplomats, some of whom, shall we say, went off the deep end.

18 February: NATO & the Arab World: Dr. Florence Gaub of the NATO Defense College in Rome spoke to the students and faculty of the Euro-Mediterranean program of Abdelmalek Essaadi University, tracing the evolution of the North Atlantic Alliance, which has always had a Mediterranean dimension, not just since the Mediterranean Dialogue beginning in 1994.  Algerians recalling their struggle for independence sometimes say that "we fought NATO, with shotguns."  Italy's inclusion in NATO was thanks to French insistence on a Med dimension, which later saw Turkey, Greece, and then Spain, join the alliance.  Post Cold War, maritime security has risen in importance, and in recent years, concerns about the Sahel might stretch common definitions of "Mediterranean."

21 February: First visit to the Tangier Free Zone, home to some 40,000 workers.  See the American auto parts manufacturer Lear, where men and women work side-by-side on the assembly line, and where an impressive sense of organization means a factory that literally hums.  Tangier is home to other American car industry firms: another Lear factory, plus PolyDesign and Delphi. 

7 March: The Infinite Peace Process: Bichara Khader, professor at Belgium's UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain), originally from the West Bank, lauds the "resiliency" of his people, who persist in their efforts to create a Palestinian state despite decades of processing peace.  Khader, whose own family has suffered mightily from terrorism, remains committed to non-violence.  While he has no great enthusiasm for the two-state solution in an increasingly piecemeal Palestinian territory, he sees it as the logical outcome of the peace process.  TALIM director moderated this program, sponsored by the Rotary Club Tanger Détroit.

11 - 13 March: Fulbright Seminar, Rabat. Gathering American scholars from across the region, this is an opportunity to compare notes on research projects.  Dr. William Lawrence of ICG - International Crisis Group - made the keynote speech.  Lawrence, a polymath who is proud of producing the first Arabic rap song (!), is a former Peace Corps Volunteer, former State Department officer, and now produces analyses on the region for ICG.  Likening some aspects of the Arab Spring to 1848 Europe, Lawrence admits that with some 90,000 dead so far, "violence has played an important role."  Lawrence provided the Fulbrighters with useful research tips, including the value of open-ended questions.  MACECE, the Moroccan-US commission which administers Fulbright, put on a great show, and the student presentations were uniformly serious and original.

12 March: TALIM Director gives presentation on the Legation to people gathered at the American Club in Rabat, the watering hole for people from the US Embassy.  It's a good audience, and one of the fellow amateur historians sees that I'm a sucker for sepia photos.  He sends me a bunch, plus a great comic book (from the 70s?), "Il était une fois Hassan II," an homage to - and commissioned by - Morocco's late ruler.  Again, we'd like to see a budding cartoonist do something similar for the Legation - maybe just one page with 6 or so windows showing, say, the first American diplomat in Morocco, Thomas Barclay, meeting with Sultan Sidi Muhammad.  "Once upon a time..."

14 March: Sustainable Development: Held in the Tangier-Tetouan Regional Council (former US Consulate General Tangier building), and sponsored by AMED, a university-based sustainable development association.  Dr. Khalid Riffi Temsamani of the government-sponsored Observatory for Sustainable Development paints a picture of a region under multiple environmental stresses.  Illegal cutting damaging protective forests, and - in the most densely populated region in the country - open-air incineration of solid wastes...  "it can't go on."  The region, however, is the first in Morocco to perform an integrated development plan.  None too soon: wildcat development is eating up more and more greenfield sites, as the city sprawls across every potential building site.

16 March: Moroccan-American Friendship Foundation (MAFF) puts on a show at Borj El-Hajoui, the restored fortress which houses a number of Tangier community groups, including acrobats, gnawa singers, Andalusian musicians, and artists.  The Legation opened its doors for the day, and artists who have spent time in the US told of their experiences.  A chance to showcase a historic preservation project with a community development goal.  Moroccan TV news 2M carries an interview with TALIM director on Moroccan - American ties.

30 March: Lusko Gallery, a Tangier art auction house, puts together a collection of 19th century Orientalist works along with modern Moroccan paintings.  It draws a serious crowd, one with money to spend on art.  Our very unscientific talley indicates that hundreds of thousands of dollars were bid today, some for works by artists that we too have at the Legation museum.  Food for thought: if a for-profit gallery can bring in this kind of money, what might we do with a fund-raiser, à la "Paint the Legation" from 2011?  Makes you want to see if we have any duplicates that might get auctioned off - not oil paintings obviously, but maybe engravings, lithographs... books.

31 March: we eat a delicious omelette from farm-fresh eggs, a present from a friend with chickens.  Perfect Easter gift!

Merja Zerga: Pilgrims of the Blue Lagoon

This guest post by house guest Christiane Delongueville is in the realm of "singing for your supper," or, to put it more genteely, making the most of our limited resources here at TALIM.  We could have asked our talented Brussels friend Christiane to share with specialists her extensive knowledge of molluscs in the Strait of Gibraltar and Mediterranean, or suggested an illustrated talk on her wonderful collection of nature photography in the Arctic.  But the easiest (for us!) was simply to ask her to share with our readers her great photos from a day on the Merja Zerga lagoon at Moulay Bousselham, a couple of hours' drive south of Tangier.  For Moroccan birdwatchers keen for such detail, the photos were taken in late February.  Click on photos to see full-size.

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Recently I had the privilege of being a guest at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM).  A lot of my time was devoted to admiring all the magnificent paintings and documents exposed in the museum rooms open to the public.

When the question arose - “What can we do this weekend in the vicinity of Tangier?” - inspiration came when looking at the painting: “L’espoir” (1994 by Mouh El Hachimi) showing a dove perched in an open window. The choice was made; we would travel south to look at Moroccan birds.

Examination of the old maps at the Legation was of limited help; only the river Loukkos was mentioned. We headed for Moulay Bousselham, a quiet fishing village (when not filled with 200,000 pilgrims during the annual moussem of Sidi Moulay Bousselham) 30 km south of Larache, where the lagoon is renowned for its migratory birds. Some birds spend the winter; others use this body of water as a stop during their migrations. This is also a great spot for fishing.  Eels are caught in special nets and clams are taken by hand from the bottom of the lagoon at low tide.

The Merja Zerga (blue lagoon) is composed of brackish waters and contains anywhere from 50% to 90 % salt water depending on the season.

With the help of a guide and his boat we explored different areas of the lagoon, including a stop on a sand bank. We were lucky with the weather, and the sunshine and our binoculars helped us spot a lot of birds. Of course the easiest to see are the bigger ones like flamingoes, grey herons, egrets and even a spoonbill.

This place is a paradise for sea birds like different types of gulls, terns, oystercatchers and cormorants.

We could see different species and looked at beak, leg, and tail colors for hints: were we looking at adults or juveniles? The rare Andouins gull and the Sandwich tern were very close to us.

Further we came across the waders, birds eating small invertebrates in the mud in a coastal environment.

Here we looked at differences between males and female, behavior… We saw plovers, turnstones, curlew with their nicely curved beaks.

The climax was an osprey back from fishing, peacefully eating its big fish on a half-submerged boat, with a slender billed gull waiting for some remains.

On our way back we saw a big group of cormorants drying their wings and a mix of different types of sea birds (photo at top of page). The tide from the nearby Atlantic was coming in and the birds were on the point of leaving the deepening lagoon for more comfortable places to await the next tide.

We finished this idyllic morning with a fish lunch in a peaceful restaurant of Moulay Bousselham.  I hope to have given you a taste of how wonderful this place is and which is worth a visit… at low tide.

Photos and text by Christiane Delongueville.

Lasting Blessings of the Barakat Trust

Madrassah Luqash Museum, Tetouan, Ministry of Habous & Islamic Affairs

"For fourteen centuries, the art and architecture of the Islamic world has represented a pinnacle of achievement for some of the world's greatest civilisations.  Today, the art of the Muslim world extends a bridge of understanding to all cultures, [but] this cultural heritage remains largely unappreciated and understudied.  The Barakat Trust is responding to this urgent need by supporting and facilitating opportunities to study, conserve and preserve an extraordinary artistic heritage."

 The Barakat Trust (note: "barakat" means "blessings" in Arabic)

Few cultural tourism groups can say that they have an investment in the sites visited as much as the - mostly women, largely Saudi, extended family-related - group from the UK-based charity The Barakat Trust which is currently touring Morocco.

Barakat Trust members at the Erzini home, Tetouan

We were delighted that they chose to start their Tangier/Tetouan program with a vist to TALIM.  And the link between Barakat, TALIM, Tangier, and Tetouan was in the person of Dr. Nadia Erzini, eminent historian and restorer of Morocco's religious architectural heritage.  We are proud that Nadia performed her research at the Legation's library, and even prouder that the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art chose her as historical adviser for the creation of its Moroccan Courtyard.

Perhaps it comes from growing up in a palace - sadly now in need of a major restoration - and imbibing centuries' worth of anecdotes about diplomatic ancestors and advisers to sultans, but Nadia Erzini's knowledge of her subject is encyclopedic.  She shared some of this during the Barakat Trust tour of Tetouan's historic medina, which since 1997 has been classed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Barakat Trust visitors were treated to a number of Tetouan must-sees, including the EAO or Escuela de artes y oficios, the artisanat school founded during the Spanish Protectorate in the 1920s (photo above).  Barakat's approach is scholar-based, but in the case of Dr. Erzini's work to restore the Luqash madrassah, resulted in her being able to fill the museum with authentic artifacts from centuries of Moroccan mosques, madrassahs, and marabouts or zaouiyas (centers for religious orders).

The visit of the Barakat Trustees and their members provided a rare insight into a small but dedicated group of people who put their resources - and give of their time - to safeguard threatened treasures of Islamic art throughout the world.  Aided by an Academic Advisory Committee (Oxford Professor James W. Allan was along for the trip), the Barakat Trust provides assistance to scholars to help counter "the neglect of a great artistic tradition."

We see this visit as an introduction to the Barakat Trust and its important work, and look forward to return visits by this fascinating group of people.

Photos, text by Gerald Loftus.

Advocate for the Legation Day

Actually, yesterday February 25 was Museum Advocacy Day, something organized by the AAM, the American Alliance of Museums.  So we missed it by a day.  If you are, however, inspired to do a bit of advocacy from either your armchair or while visiting Washington D.C., you might want to bone up by reading the AAM's book "Speak Up for Museums: The AAM Guide to Advocacy."

For us, every day is Legation Advocacy Day.  We provided a handy list of actions - letters to the editor, donations-in-kind, full-blown lobbying - for readers as a kind of New Year's resolution to advocate for the Legation.  Though some stalwarts and a few newcomers have chimed in through comments or emails, we have yet to see many people actually carrying out an effective action (i.e., we haven't gotten any surplus Macs in the mail).

If the check is in the mail, well, the postman may not yet have found America Street.  We'll stay tuned, and in the meantime, your suggestions and comments are welcome, as always.  But as much as I like to read comments from readers, fellows, and board members, I would like even better being cc'd on letters to their Senators or Members of Congress.

Logistics' Human Side: "Deep Hanging Out"

Janell Rothenberg may wince when she hears me refer to her as our "trucker anthropologist," but her first slide in yesterday's presentation confirms this rather unique nomenclature:

Longtime Tangier-based researcher Janell Rothenberg of UCLA, with Fulbright Morocco (MACECE) Executive Director Dr. James Miller as discussant, presented her work to an audience of fellow academics, Legation regulars, and interested citizens on January 23 at TALIM.

Janell Rothenberg completed 18 months of dissertation research during the summers of 2008 and 2009 and March 2011-June 2012. Her doctoral research is supported by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS, for which TALIM is the research center in Morocco), the Fulbright-Hays Program, the National Science Foundation and the UCLA Department of Anthropology (Janell's advisor is longtime Maghrib specialist Dr. Susan Slyomovics). Ms. Rothenberg is certified as a Global Logistics Specialist from the Center for International Trade and Transportation in Long Beach, California.

This is how we pitched the event:

Please join us for a presentation by PhD student Janell Rothenberg from University of California, Los Angeles about her past two years of dissertation research on the logistics and transportation industry in the Tangier region. Using qualitative methods from cultural anthropology, Janell examines the perspectives and experiences of the men and women participating in the rapid expansion of this industry and traces the local dimensions of these very global developments in Northern Morocco. Join us as Janell explains her particular methodology to the study of globalization and offers a social and cultural lens on our rapidly changing regional landscape.

Janell Rothenberg has already presented results of her Tangier research, including at the MESA conference of 2009, and at TALIM's own April Seminar of 2011, which was focused on the impact of Tangier's ambitious port development projects on the surrounding populations.

Through discussion of her dissertation - "Moving Things: The Material Mobilities of Transportation Logistics in the Tangier Region" - the audience, which contained a fair number of people at various stages of higher education, was able to gain an insight into research methodologies that normally are the subject of specialized dissertation workshops.  Not only did they get a free look into Janell's modus operandi, and the added benefit of Dr. Miller's long experience, but joined both for a fireside reception afterwards.  The civilized way to deconstruct dissertation research.

Dr. James Miller and Janell Rothenberg at TALIM 23 January 2013

"Mobilities" - also the title of a scholary journal - provided Rothenberg the cultural anthropologist and Miller the cultural geographer a common interdisciplinary ground.  Humanities and social science, hard and soft, thin and thick research... a number of us could better visualize this qualitative approach in Janell's vivid description of her "deep hanging out" with the human subjects of her study.  The truckers, the dispatchers, the port chandlers, the shipping executives, all the human parts of the system which puts mega-ports like Tangier Med at the crux of globalization.

And Janell's choice of Tangier as the focus of her research puts her in a small group of scholars knowledgeable about one of the world's most promising transportation hubs - Tangier's two modern ports, high-speed train line under construction, and world-class free trade industrial zones.

Ever the avuncular advisor, Jim Miller challenged Janell Rothenberg, with her baseline work in Tangier in 2013, to imagine herself as a senior scholar in, say, 2050.  Would this North African logistics study be an episode in her career, or, he asked, "are you a scholar of Morocco?"  We have heard Jim before expound with great erudition on his concern about ensuring that Janell's generation provide the relief force for the baby boomer generation of American Maghrib specialists.

With her mastery of Moroccan and modern standard Arabic, French, and logistics-speak, and with years of field work in northern Morocco at this critical stage of her career, we think that in Janell Rothenberg, we have a Maghrib scholar of some duration.

Performing the Political in Tangier...

... is not a party political manifesto; rather it is the subtitle of the annual "Performing Tangier" academic conference this year: "Enacting a New Urban: Performing the Political in Tangier."

We are partners with conference organizers ICPS, the International Center for Performance Studies, and disseminate their Call for Papers (CFP) below.  For generalist readers put off by the vocabulary of the performance studies discipline, suffice it to say that the gathering is composed of scholars and practicioners from a wide swath of performance world, stress on world.  It is truly international, and ICPS President Dr. Khalid Amine of Tangier deserves recognition for his ability to carry this off for the better part of a decade.

And it's not all just dry academia: check out that fire-eater in the poster!  TALIM and ICPS collaborated last year in a knockout performance by American actress Dorothy Weems, illustrating what the academics call "site-specific performance."  We again hope to use our historic building - and the two centuries worth of human stories contained in it - to showcase how performance can illustrate history.

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Call for Papers:

“Enacting a new urban: performing the political in Tangier”
1-3 June 2013, Tangier, Morocco

This session aims to explore some of the new urban spatialities created by Tangier’s emergent performative politics. Inspired by Judith Butler’s (1993: 2) understanding of performativity, we would especially like to draw attention here to ‘‘the re-iterative and citational practices by which [political] discourse produces the effects that it names’’ and in particular, the variety of performative practices and (re)enactments that are today challenging pre-existing socio-spatial categories and boundaries in and around the city. Many of these (re)enactments draw upon (and at once make possible) a far-reaching re-scaling of politics, economics and governance taking place in and around Tangier today – but also novel ways of subverting these same through recitation, reiteration and resignification.

We invite papers that focus on such new political and geopolitical ‘stories’ and their accordant (re)enactments of urban spaces and identities, and seek contributions that engage with topics including, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Performing/promoting Tangier as an urban commodity

• The performance of new property regimes and the creation of new spaces of ‘economic exception’

• The border and/in the city

• Fractioned spaces/fractioned mobilities

• New urban identities

• Performing the ‘espace du détroit': new cross-border imaginations

Please forward expressions of interest and paper proposals/abstracts to:

Dr. Luiza Bialasiewicz
L.A.Bialasiewicz@uva.nl
Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam (brief bio below)


Please note that we will require the following from all presenters: title, abstract (250 word  max)and a brief bio (one paragraph max). BY JANUARY 31, 2013

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This panel is part of the 9th annual Tangier International Conference,
“Performance in/and the Public Sphere”,  June 1 - 3, 2013, Tangier, Morocco

Full conference info and full CFP (with additional panels) at:
http://collaborativemedia.blogspot.com/2012/09/cfp-performing-tangier-2013.html

Hosted by the International Centre for Performance Studies (ICPS) Tangier
http://icpsmorocco.org/new/

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Luiza Bialasiewicz is Associate Professor in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Before moving to the Netherlands in 2011, she was Senior Lecturer in Political Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and, prior, Lecturer in Geography at Durham University.

Her work focuses on the political geographies of European integration and on European borders, with a particular focus on the ‘geographical imaginations’ of European belonging, within and beyond the territorial confines of Europe. Her current research focuses on EU border management and EU geopolitics, looking specifically at the role of third states in the 'out-sourcing' of EU border controls in the Mediterranean, and her most recent book is the edited collection Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the Making of European Space,
published by Ashgate in its Critical Geopolitics series.

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Partners for International Collaboration and Education (PICE)

George F Roberson, PhD, Chair
Dept of Geosciences, Geography Human Dimensions Research, Univ of
Massachusetts-Amherst

Amherst, Denver, Tangier:
http://interactive-worlds.blogspot.com/2007/12/welcome.html

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Etched in Memory: Historic Glass Negatives

Scanned glass negative from the Tangier American Legation Donald Angus collection

Resolve to keep those shoeboxes full of negatives from your grandmother's attic.  Even if they're not worth a few hundred million dollars, they just might contain some historic treasures, like the glass negative collection at the Tangier American Legation.  The gift of philanthropist Donald Angus, who lived in Tangier for many years, and whose generosity provided our museum of many of its historic maps and prints.

Who today can tell us about the "Club Elixir" of Tangier's old days, pictured above?  "Elixir" - الإكسير - or Al-kisir, the alchemist's stone, perhaps an appropriate name for a late 19th century emporium where you could mix your absinthe with whatever you fancied.  If only they had identified those negatives...

The 2,000 glass negatives tell many stories, and we hope to tell some of them through scans done by Dr. Beatrice St. Laurent of Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.  Dr. St. Laurent, in 2004, continued under an AIMS grant

a project of the conservation and identification and analysis of the collection of glass negatives dating from the late 19^th century to the 1930’s housed in the Tangier American Legation Museum. This collection documents an important period in the region’s history from pre-colonization through to the 1930’s domination by the French and Spanish.

Dr. St. Laurent reported on her work at the 2005 World History Association conference at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and presented a display of prints from the Legation glass negatives in 2006 in Massachusetts.

Glass negatives document some of photography's earliest work; the Library of Congress collection, available online, has more than 100,000 images, many of which are painstakingly identified.  George Eastman House - the International Museum of Photography and Film - also has collections that can be accessed online.

Someday, we too would like to make the TALIM glass negative collection available online in a similarly systematic fashion.  In the meantime, we'll post some of these photos randomly, in this blog, and perhaps set up a page on the Legation website.  Some 200 negatives were scanned, meaning more funding will be needed to clean, preserve, catalog and scan the remaining 1,800.  Maybe we can interest Lebanon's Arab Image Foundation, dedicated to preserving the photographic heritage of the entire region.

Finally, thanks to Beatrice St. Laurent, Simona Schneider, and Michael Toler for helping to "repatriate" these valuable scans back home to Tangier.