Abstract
Given that Morocco's independence was recognized by the French and Spanish governments in 1956, and that after 1972 Morocco at once became more engaged with international relations across North Africa and the Middle East and began to produce a growing number of novels exhibiting a variety of themes and styles, the sixteen-year period that this book covers is the foundational period of Moroccan nation-building. [...]it would have been fruitful to dialogue with other critics, such as Bertrand Westphal and Robert Tally in the emerging field of geocriticism, Farid Zahi (al-(Ayn wa-l-Mira: al-Sura wa-l-Hadatha al-Basariyya [The Eye and the Mirror: The Image and Visual Modernity] [Rabat, Morocco: Manshurat Wizarat al-Thaqafa, 2005]), and Sara Upstone (Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel [Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009]), all of whose work is extremely relevant to the topic and theoretical approach of Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution. [...]the study does not address the ways in which Arab culture and the Arabic language are also colonial forces with regard to the autochthonous Amazigh (or Berber) population, nor the ways in which the Jewish Moroccan community had an in-between status during the colonial period.
