On this episode of our In the Archive series, MERIP’s Executive Director, James Ryan, speaks with Brahim El Guabli about his essay, “The Sub-Saharan Turn in Moroccan Literature,” which appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Middle East Report, “Maghreb from the Margins.” El Guabli speaks about how migration from sub-Saharan Africa reshaped Moroccan politics and identity over the course of the last 30 years and how he read those changes through recent Moroccan novels. We discussed how the piece has been received and how its ideas contributed to El Guabli’s development of the concept “saharanism”—the subject of his newly published book, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences.
You can check out our earlier In the Archive segment, with Beshara Doumani here: https://www.merip.org/2025/11/the-merip-podcast-episode-11-in-the-archive-with-beshara-doumani/
MERIP is accepting pitches for our summer issue on visual art and cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa until February 23rd for more information click here: https://www.merip.org/2026/02/call-for-pitches-visual-art-cultural-production-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/
Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University.
Further Reading:
Abdel Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt ( New York: Vintage, 1989) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/118591/cities-of-salt-by-abdelrahman-munif/
Brahim El Guabli, “The Sub-Saharan Turn in Moroccan Literature” Middle East Report Issue 298 Spring 2021 https://www.merip.org/2021/04/the-sub-saharan-african-turn-in-moroccan-literature-2/
Brahim El Guabli, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2025) https://www.ucpress.edu/books/desert-imaginations/paper
Brahim El Guabli, “Forgettable Black and Amazigh Bodies: Boujemâa Hebaz and the Moroccan Racial Politics of Amnesia” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 44(2) 2024: 303-316 https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-11233072
Brahim El Guabli, “The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential” Tamazgha Studies Journal Vol 1. Issue 1. Fall 2023, 7-22 https://www.tamazghastudiesjournal.org/articles-fall2023-issue-01-article02
Ghislaine Lydon On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth Century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/on-transsaharan-trails/B6AB08C0940DBAF3370045EA702E84D1
Shamil Jeppie, Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691273853/writing-timbuktu?srsltid=AfmBOorqYdHD-ksEASj0rR-5TBFwqVQPM-Rj-sV-o5pO2dHeMGaTdRaD
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