Cynthia Becker's Blackness in Morocco deftly weaves together history, art history, and ethnography to produce a timely work on Gnawa identity in Morocco, in the process considering broader questions of race, enslavement, and Blackness in North Africa. These latter questions have animated recent debates within North African studies, and yet scholarship that primarily focuses on these themes remains limited, and particularly those that consider race through the lens of culture, music, and art. Since this history is often difficult to access, the book also makes an important contribution to how we think about and deploy a range of historical evidence. Becker demonstrates how music, performance, and visual and material culture can be utilized to reconstruct narratives that remain obscure or nonexistent in traditional written archives. As she states in her introduction, “Gnawa performances have become a means through which a largely suppressed history of enslavement has been conserved and remembered” (4). This inquiry is enhanced by her long experience in Morocco and her ability to draw on a vast personal archive of interviews and interlocutors in the country's southern regions, as well as additional fieldwork in Niger and Mali. The book makes a vital contribution to Moroccan and North African studies, and also undoubtedly will appeal to scholars of race and ethnicity in both North African and African studies, as well as to scholars in any field who utilize art, music, and visual culture as archives.
Probing the fluid definitions around the category of “Gnawa,” Becker shows that this identity coalesced in the early 20th century around groups of phenotypically Black men and women in Morocco with shared experiences of enslavement via the trans-Saharan slave trade. This identity paralleled the formulation of a distinctive spirit-possession practice that drew on West African traditions and North African Islamic idioms. The first two chapters take a more straightforward historical approach to recovering the agency of these early Gnawa practitioners: in the first, Becker argues that Gnawa men in the early 20th century consciously chose to present themselves in a particular way in street performances and on tourist postcards, which were crucial sources of income for those who recently had been manumitted and moved from southern regions into northern urban centers looking for work. To an extent, this early, exoticized view of Gnawa musicians as male street performers has endured into the present moment, and the category of “Gnawa” has largely been reduced to a popular genre of world music. But, as Becker demonstrates, this view misses much of what was and is essential about Gnawa identity. In a particularly fascinating second chapter, she reinscribes Gnawa women into this history and reads through their presence and absence in early 20th-century photographs, as well as her conversations with present-day female Gnawa practitioners, the central role that Black women have played in both Gnawa and Moroccan history, a role often missed by their lack of visibility.
One of the most important interventions of Blackness in Morocco is its contribution to critical race scholarship in Morocco and its reconsideration of how racial categories of “Black” and “white” are understood and produced in the North African context. Rather than an identity that is simply imposed upon Moroccans of darker complexion or sub-Saharan origin, we see how many consciously strive to inhabit a Gnawa identity, and recognize in Blackness and Africanness markers of spiritual power. For them, the ability to claim enslaved ancestry and Gnawa lineage confers real authenticity and, within the Gnawa community, legitimate authority. This is especially true in the present moment, as the Gnawa community has expanded to include evermore diverse sectors of Moroccan society. Ultimately, Becker argues that Gnawa identity has developed as a symbol of alterity, one that has historically been racialized as Black but that in the present day has come to be utilized by those without Gnawa lineage or who are non-Black. Gnawa as both practice and identity has appealed to groups like the Tamazight-speaking Ismkhan, the urban poor, disenfranchised youth, and other broad cross-sections of society, often those with countercultural beliefs or disillusionment with the state-sponsored Arab-Islamic identity. In the face of this expansion, the concept of tagnawit, which roughly translates to essential Gnawa-ness, is invoked as a way to claim a more authentic connection to African or enslaved origins.
This framing is a vital addition to the growing body of scholarship on the Gnawa, and more capaciously accounts for the active staking of claims in the making of Blackness in North Africa, rather than simply passive racialization. In doing so, the book accommodates positive and powerful associations with Black identity, particularly in places like Essaouira, upending the notion that it has consistently been understood as a negative marker. The multiple meanings of race in the Gnawa imagination come through most clearly in Becker's fourth chapter, which embeds the reader in the overwhelming sensory experience of a lila, or spirit possession ceremony, and describes in detail the succession of spirits who appear during a ceremony and, notably, the profound powers and connotations accompanying those said to originate from West Africa. Her research comprises attendance at more than fifty lila in Essaouira over the course of eight years, and the chapter is supplemented by a highly informative index that charts the different spirits and spirit groups.
Although race and Blackness are central themes, the book also is consistent in its attentiveness to the gendered and classed dimensions of Gnawa history. Becker's primary interlocutors in Essaouira are women, many of them respected Gnawa diviners and healers who perform the most critical functions of a lila ritual. These roles, traditionally dominated by women, have been gradually marginalized due to the fact that Gnawa divining has been largely decoupled from Gnawa musical performance as it has moved from private lila ceremonies to concert settings. Despite this, Becker shows the continued status and power of women like Zaida Gania in the Essaouira Gnawa community, and demonstrates how Zaida and others actively claim and embody a profound connection to Blackness via their enslaved ancestry and West African origins.
Blackness in Morocco crucially focuses on the country's southern regions and specifically on the city of Essaouira, where Becker conducted the majority of her fieldwork. Although this in no way detracts from the book's arguments and indeed presents a textured and in-depth picture of the coastal town's Gnawa culture, it would be interesting for a future work to expand the field of focus to include the northern cities and how Gnawa identity has been and is being made there. This question arises in particular moments, such as when we see the non-Black Gnawi Abdeslam Alikane, an Essaouira native, move to Casablanca to study Gnawa music before returning to serve as director of Essaouira's Gnawa Festival, suggesting a different dynamic in the Gnawa communities of northern urban centers. The spatial and racial politics of Morocco are a field ripe for further inquiry.
Yet in Essaouira alone, the dominance of the Gania family, the contentious renovation of the famed local Zawiya of Sidna Bilal, and the recent and skyrocketing popularity of the Gnawa Festival serve as deeply compelling sites of investigation that speak to wider themes of race and identity in Morocco. And ultimately the contributions Becker makes to conversations in North African studies—from race and racialization to music and art as archives to interrogating the border between “North Africa” and “Africa”—are invaluable and much needed. Additionally, the book is beautifully arranged: the chapters stand on their own and will work exceptionally well as teaching material, and there is a wealth of compelling photographs and visuals, many from the author's private collections. Indeed, beyond being supplemental, the photographs prove vital in illustrating and enacting the book's arguments; as Becker shows in her early chapters, photography served as a medium through which Gnawa were objectified but also through which they claimed their own subjectivity. This echoes the book's larger goal of showing how racial identity is formed in a dialectic between external oppression and subjects’ self-fashionings. Similarly, the camera's flexible role as a tool of either control or empowerment holds continuity with the roles of the world music stage and festival circuit of the present day. By focusing on the Gnawa visual and performing arts and on female practitioners, the book allows us to consider the multivalent and sometimes contradictory ways that Blackness and Gnawa identity have been and are continuing to be made in the Moroccan context.
