Browsing by Subject "North Africa"
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Item À qui le soleil : how Morocco’s developing solar capacities have altered urban infrastructural provisions(2015-12) Rowlinson, Thomas Edmond; Liedl, Petra, 1976-; Wilson, Patricia AnnThe creation of a sustainable, solar-based energy sector in Morocco involves changes to both its domestic energy infrastructure as well as the surrounding political and financial arrangements. This research shows that such changes affect Morocco’s most vulnerable urban citizens, specifically those without current grid service, or hacked grid service: those who live in bidonvilles, or shantytowns and slums. I trace such changes in Morocco’s solar energy to the perpetuation of neocolonial narratives of European energy and historical uses of infrastructure in urban manifestations of colonialism. With a focus on domestic large-scale solar energy generation systems like the publicly-operated MASEN, as well as international, public-private enterprises such as Desertec (a German-Moroccan partnership that is mega-regional in scope), this thesis assesses the level of access afforded to bidonville citizens in Morocco’s biggest city, Casablanca. I offer some ideas on how the flexibility and accessibility in the scale and operation of solar can provide generation capacities to urban citizens living in informal communities.Item Definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic : contact, divergence, and semantic change(2013-08) Turner, Michael Lee; Brustad, KristenThe aim of the present study is to cast new light on the nature of definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic (MA). Previous work on the dialect group has described its definiteness system as similar to that of other Arabic varieties, where indefinite entities are unmarked and a "definite article" /l-/ modifies nouns to convey a definite meaning. Such descriptions, however, do not fully account for the behavior of MA nouns in spontaneous natural speech, as found in the small self-collected corpus that informs the study: on one hand, /l-/ can and regularly does co-occur with indefinite meanings; on the other, a number of nouns can exhibit definiteness even in the absence of /l-/. In response to these challenges, the study puts forth an alternate synchronic description the system, arguing that the historical definite article */l-/ has in fact lost its association with definiteness and has instead become lexicalized into an unmarked form of the noun that can appear in any number of semantic contexts. Relatedly, the study argues that the historically indefinite form *Ø has come under heavy syntactic constraints and can best be described as derived from the new unmarked form via a process of phonologically conditioned disfixation, represented {- /l/}. At the same time, MA has also apparently retained an older particle ši and developed an article waħəd, both of which can be used to express different types of indefinite meanings. To support the plausibility of this new description, the study turns to the linguistic history of definiteness in MA, describing how a combination of internal and external impetuses for change likely pushed the dialect toward article loss, a development upon which semantic reanalysis and syntactic restructuring of other forms then followed. If the claim that MA no longer overtly marks definiteness is indeed correct, the study could have a significant impact on work that used previous MA descriptions to make grammaticality judgments, as well as be of value to future work on processes of grammaticalization and language contact.Item L'influence de la culture Nord-Africaine en France(Texas Tech University, 2001-05) Huet, LénaïcNot availableItem The language attitudes of second-generation North Africans in France : the effects of religiosity and national identity(2015-08) Oprea, Megan Grace; Bullock, Barbara E.; Blyth, Carl; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline; Brower, BenjaminThis dissertation explores the language attitudes (LAs) of second-generation North African immigrants in France toward Arabic and French, focusing primarily on women. I explore how these attitudes are correlated with religiosity, national identity and proficiency. Although numerous LA studies have been done in the Maghreb, none have examined the attitudes of the highly marginalized North African community in France. Previous research in LAs and in sociolinguistics has also neglected religion as a variable, a gap in the literature that this dissertation addresses. French and Arabic have powerful language ideologies making them an ideal language pairing to study. Muslims believe Arabic is the only language through which the true message of the Qur’an can be transmitted (Suleiman, 2003). Previous LA studies in the Maghreb indicate that people there strongly associate Islam with Arabic (Benrabah 2007; Chakrani, 2010). It is also the national language of most Muslim majority countries and is linked with both national and pan-Arab identity (Dawisha, 2003). The French language is seen as the vehicle of French culture and is an important symbol of national identity that is used as a tool for the assimilation of immigrants (Weil, 2010). There is evidence to suggest that LAs are stronger in a diaspora context (Garrett, Bishop & Coupland, 2009). Language attitudes may be especially potent for the North African diaspora because of the colonial history between France and the Maghreb, and the strained relationship between France and its immigrant population. Given that language can act as a symbol of culture (Choi, 2003), participants who more closely identify with their North African cultural and religious heritage will express more positive attitudes toward Arabic. In order to explore these topics, I constructed an anonymous language attitudes survey that was distributed online to second-generation North Africans in France, ages 18 to 30. The survey included questions concerning attitudes toward religious and national identity. The results indicate positive attitudes toward Arabic, Islam and North Africa, while expressing relatively neutral attitudes toward French, and negative attitudes toward France. Correlations did emerge that suggest a relationship between religiosity, national identity, and language attitudes for this population.Item Morisco survival : gender, conversion, and migration in the early modern Mediterranean, 1492-1659(2014-08) Nutting, Elizabeth Woodhead; Spellberg, Denise A.; Hardwick, Julie; Canizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Brower, Benjamin; Bodian, Miriam; Heng, GeraldineIn the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Mediterranean, Moriscos were Christians whose ancestors had been Muslims. The term came into use in Spanish following the first forced baptisms in the Iberian Peninsula after the 1492 Spanish conquest of Granada, the last Muslim-ruled kingdom in Spain. Old Christians used “Morisco,” often pejoratively, to refer to a group of people whose religious, political, and cultural allegiances were suspect. The Spanish crown finally solved the “Morisco problem” by expelling every Morisco from Spain with a series of edicts between 1609 and 1614. The expelled Moriscos scattered around the Mediterranean and beyond, eventually losing the designation “Morisco” as they assimilated into their new homes as either Christians or Muslims. Previous scholars have approached the Moriscos from a Spanish national historiographical context and have focused on the question of the Moriscos’ “true” religious identity. This dissertation puts new archival evidence in conversation with better-known printed material in both Arabic and Spanish to examine the socio-economic history of Morisco men and women in a transnational context that expands our understanding of who the Moriscos were and the varied strategies they used to survive in a changing Mediterranean world. This dissertation makes three central arguments about Morisco survival from a range of contexts that highlight the variety of Morisco responses to persecution and violence and to emphasize how Moriscos adapted to changing circumstances over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, Moriscos in Granada relied on the centrality of Morisco (and especially Morisca) labor to survive in a changing political world, but their economic leverage only lasted a few generations until they were expelled from the Kingdom in 1570. Second, Moriscos in Valencia increasingly relied on resistance as tension increased during the last decades of the sixteenth century and coexistence became increasingly dangerous and impossible. Third, Moriscos in the Mediterranean diaspora and beyond found survival even more difficult than their predecessors in Spain. Separation from communities and families made Moriscos particularly vulnerable and they relied on increasingly desperate strategies to survive. Throughout, gender and class determined the range of both challenges and opportunities.Item The self as subject and the subjected self: networks of being and becoming in the captivity of Miguel de Cervantes and Antonio de Sosa(2015-05) McCoy, Christina Inés; Reed, Cory A.; Harney, Michael; Robbins, Jill; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Heng, GeraldineIn this dissertation, I draw on theories of affect, performance and social networks to examine cross-cultural contact in three captivity plays by Miguel de Cervantes that take place outside of Spain, La gran sultana, El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel, as well as the only extant work by the Portuguese cleric Antonio de Sosa, Topografía e historia general de Argel, an understudied and historically significant account of life in Algiers during the late sixteenth century. Both of these authors, held against their will in Algiers’ slave quarters, emphasize humanity and corporeality despite their dehumanizing experience of captivity. I regard the act of writing as an attempt by these two authors to create new nodes in a human Mediterranean network, one expanded by corsairing and spanning from Algeria to the Spanish playhouses and beyond. In doing so, my dissertation shows how works of this epoch often dismantle binary systems of Christian and Muslim, self and other, dyads upon which modern postcolonial studies rely so heavily. I argue that these authors, and their fictional characters, are intermediaries across categories of identity, in spite of difference. Through my close readings I further refashion early modern Spanish identity within the framework of cosmopolitanism, wherein sites of bondage become not only spaces of conflict but also of confluence.Item Urban Mediterranean dialects of Arabic : Tangier and Tunis(2015-05) Montes, Valerie Susana; Brustad, Kristen; Magidow, AlexanderThis thesis compares two urban Mediterranean dialects of Arabic in North Africa: the Arabic dialect of Tangier, Morocco and the Arabic dialect of Tunis, Tunisia. Both of these dialects have traditionally been classified as "pre-Hilalian" varieties, which originated with the first wave of Arab Muslim invasions of North Africa in the late 7th century CE. Tangier and Tunis not only underwent similar historical developments; the Arabic dialects of these two cities also underwent similar developments, in addition to sharing the features used as criteria for the pre-Hilalian dialect grouping. This thesis shows the similarities between the language contact situations in Tangier and Tunis historically in order to explain the parallel development of the morphosyntactic features--specifically the paradigms for the 2nd person category in pronominals as well as perfective, imperfective, and imperative verb inflections--shared by the Arabic dialects of these two cities today.