Touaf Larbi, Mohamed I University, FLHS, Oujda
With the recent developments in our region (The Arab spring), the growing impact of globalized culture, and the flow of migration, the question of who we are as a nation surfaces again as an essential issue in the debate over the societal projects being discussed in the public place. In our country the state has addressed the issue with intelligence affirming in the newly revised constitution the multiple character of our national identity. The main questions I raise in this paper and in relation to the current situation have to do with the conceptualization of a plural identity that keeps that minimal sense of cohesion between the components of society without hegemonic tendencies from any particular group. The main questions I will address are: In what terms can we project a vision of “US” or “WE” away from the notion of a romanticized organic body politic? How can we reach a sense of community not as the hypertrophied figure of a unity of unities built on the model of an enlarged self, nor of an individual identity inflated into a collective identity, but as one allowing for a space to think and debate forms and models of common existence or co-existence?
Keywords: national narrative, identity, multiculturalism, morocco,
Bio-data:
Larbi Touaf (ed) earned his PhD from Sorbonne University in Paris, and currently teaches in his capacity as Professor of English at Mohammed I University, Oujda, Morocco. Dr. Touaf is a Fellow of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, NY, and a Fulbright visiting Scholar at SUNY. He is the founder and coordinator of The Identity and Difference Research Group and is the executive editor of the scholarly online journal Ikhtilaf The Journal of Critical Humanities and Social Studies. His latest publication is a co-edited volume titled In The Eye of The Storm: North African Women After The Arab Spring (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017). He previously published several books among which: Minority Matters: Literature, Theory, Society (Faculty of Letters Oujda, 2005), Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Ciriticism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2006), and The World as A Global Agora: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2008). Dr. Touaf is also a translator; his latest work in this field is Lucy Melbourne’s An American In Morocco/ Une Americaine au Maroc (2008).