Taskla means literature in Tamazight. A neologism, taskla has been used since the 1980s by a group of Kabyle cultural activists, who had joined together in the academic association Imdyazen, to refer to modern literary genres that have been emerging in the field of Amazigh creation since at least the 1960s. Members of the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange (AMREC) also adopted the term to encapsulate the work they were doing to construct the new Amazigh literature. This article reconstructs the choices that Moroccan Amazigh activists undertook to establish a full-fledged literary field between 1967 and the early 2000s. Contextualizing this new literature in a longer history of lmāzghī (Amazigh writing in Arabic script), the article reveals how a process of intentionality and active construction of the field has led to the development and current flourishing albeit changing, landscape of Amazigh literature.

This article examines the literary and spiritual initiatives undertaken by Henri Bosco and his collaborators, notably Captain Léopold Justinard, in interwar colonial Morocco. Focusing on the Revue Aguedal, inaugurated by Bosco in Rabat in 1935, I highlight the revue's primary role as a cultural conduit between French and indigenous Amazigh and Arab intellectuals. Bosco's concept of a “poetic church,” championed by contributors such as René Guénon and Ahmed Sefriou, sought to document, safeguard, and translate Amazigh and North African literature. Although the Aguedal literary project experienced interruptions during World War II, it accentuated indigenous perspectives through sections like “Propos du Chleuh,” overseen by Justinard. I also underscore Bosco's simultaneous advocacy for French culture, challenging stereotypical colonial narratives while amplifying Amazigh voices within them. Despite financial challenges leading to the revue's demise after the war, the literary circle fostered enduring literary relationships and left an indelible mark on the nexus of colonial scholarship, literature, and spirituality.

Racism is a scourge that has not spared any society or community. Moroccan society is not different in its grappling with the legacy of the complex history of slavery and racialization in North Africa. Although social scientists have dedicated much scholarly attention to the study of race in Morocco, they have not accounted for Amazigh language's rich documentation of and grappling with race and racism. Ethnographic work has emerged to explain racial dynamics between Imazighen and isuqiyn (Blacks) or Haratines, but these crucial interventions fall short of examining primary sources in Tamazight to explain how Amazigh communities negotiated racism openly in the public sphere. This article draws on the experience of the Black Amazigh poet Mbark u-Ms‘ud Ben Zayda to demonstrate that racism was not, and is not, entirely silenced in Amazigh-speaking Morocco. In fact, Amazigh sources and terminology reveal that poetic performances in this social environment have not only unsilenced racism but actively grappled with its multilayered dimensions. Adopting a close reading methodology, the article interprets portions of Ben Zayda's poetry and its response to the explicitly racializing compositions of his contemporaries.

Amazigh literature has undergone a veritable historic shift from oral to written form, following the constitutional and institutional recognition of this indigenous language in Morocco and Algeria. We intend to seize this historic moment by focusing on a titrological analysis which, in our view, would be able to highlight the pragmatic side of a stammering literature that would like to proclaim its rebirth and speak to the world. The titular discourse of these novels, still in an experimental phase, informs us about the semiospheres that nourish and irrigate this writing that defossilizes a buried memory, repressed and threatened by the inexorable desymbolization process that traditional cultures are undergoing. This body of work could never be reduced to a simple scription of a narrative folklore that provides it with its cultural semantics; it is driven by the desire to integrate the international literary heritage by dialoguing with it and drawing inspiration from it.

Mohammed Rouicha is an Amazigh musical legend. Rouicha came to prominence in his teenage years in the mid-sixties in Morocco and continued to evolve and rise internationally until his death in 2012. An artist and a musician, he was ahead of his time in that he believed that people and communities should connect with one another through music, regardless of ethnicity or language. Rouicha appreciated art in all its shapes and forms and was fascinated by Amazigh, Arab, and Hindi Music. He sang in both Tamazight (the language of the Indigenous Amazigh) and Arabic, winning him accolades among listeners in both languages. In this article, I draw on Rouicha's biography and artistic repertoire in Tamazight to analyze his lyrical and musical style. Rouicha's songs revolved around three primary themes: love, struggle, and resistance, and he painted his lyrics with the beauty and imagery of Tamazgha (Amazigh lands), giving a voice to Moroccans’ embodied experiences. His songs represent an imagined Morocco: a place where Amazigh identity is an integral part of the national identity. I argue that Rouicha represented the hope that an imagined linguistic and cross-cultural interconnectedness would unite all of Morocco within their differences.

This essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.