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Feminist & Gender Studies is proud to announce Dr. Nadia Guessous recently published "Postcolonial Attunements: Decolonizing the Anthropology of Morocco" in a special issue of Hespéris-Tamuda entitled "Anthropological Debates on the Maghrib."
In this essay, Dr. Guessous describes the contingent conjunctures of events that have contributed to her becoming an anthropologist who never quite feels at home within the discipline, except in its margins. She articulates some of the ways in which she has tried to decolonize her feminist anthropological practice by using ethnography to write against teleological conceptions of modernity and to think about the tragedy of postcolonial subjectivity rather than to contribute to a better Western self-understanding through an encounter with the Other. In doing so, her aim is to complicate the story that gets told about the anthropology of the Maghrib by rendering its normative Western subject visible and suggesting ways of re-orienting the anthropological project away from the task of rendering the strange familiar for the West. It is also to urge fellow Maghribi and postcolonial anthropologists like her to start telling their own stories in ways that take seriously the specificity of their positionality and the epistemological implications of their (oftentimes ambivalent) relationship to anthropology as a field.
Hespéris-Tamuda is a multilingual interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated to the study of Morocco. It is published by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, and will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2021.
Congratulations, Dr. Guessous! We are so proud to know you!