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ABSTRACT
There are quite a few studies that adopted a critical perspective to the analysis of the narrative of standardized school textbooks and their impact in the process of ‘the interpellation of individuals as subjects’. While these studies examined narratives on racial/ethnic identity in different national contexts, both the Global North and the Global South, they all address the way mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion play out to define ‘sense of belonging’ ersus ‘otherness’. In the Maghreb region, studies that depict the representation of Amazighs in school textbooks remain scarce. Therefore, guided by Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis conceptual framework, this study focuses on the textual and visual representation of Algerian Tuareg Amazighs in the textbooks that are currently used in Algerian Middle schools. The findings suggest that the portrayal of the Tuareg Amazigh Sahrawi ethnic group is characterized by the ‘markedness’ of their blackness. This visibility affirms their ‘local Otherness’ in three different ways: deagentialization, folklorization, and disempowerment. Some pedagogical recommendations are suggested to foster inclusive and equitable language learning materials and spaces.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I define global citizenship in this context as a sense of belonging to a common humanity. It implies human dignity regardless of differences: race/ethnicity, gender, religion, social class etc.
2. Sahrawi (adjective in Arabic which means people that come from Sahara, i.e. the desert).
3. Berber ‘also Barbari in Arabic’ denotes barbaric. It is coined by Arab conquerors and European colonizers. Due to its negative connotation, I will use the term Amazigh throughout the paper.
4. ‘Tuareg’ (also Arabic Tawareq) is the plural of the Arabic name ‘Tarqi’. Historians diverge in terms of its etymology. Therefore, different explanations were attributed to the term Tuareg: their settlement and incursion of the Sahara Desert, their association with Tareq Ibn Ziad (the leader of the Islamic conquest) and his army, or their association with the Maghrebi region of Ouargha, a Tamazighet name for fertile land (Timbukti, Citation2006).
5. ‘There is no difference between an Arab and a non-Arab, a white person or a black person, except for their piety. People are from Adam, and Adam is from Earth’.
6. To refer to former black slaves that later Islamized and Arabized (Stephen, Citation2021).
7. Collective memories are manifested in the use of history that supports a specific group limited within a specific space and time.
8. Khadija Ben Hamou, the second black woman and a Sahrawi from the Southern state of Adrar faced racial prejudice after she was crowned as Miss Algeria in 2019 due to her black skin.
9. Here, we can mention the racist comments of the Tunisian president against the sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia to express the fear of altering the Arab-Islamic identity.
10. My Book of English, MS Year Four (p.82).
11. My Book of English, MS Year Three (p.35).
12. The Imzad is a musical instrument and essential element of ‘Tuareg folklore’. It is made of wood, covered with animal skin, and has strings made from the horsehair.
13. ‘tarbiyyah’, ‘ta’lim’ and ‘ta’dib’ are Arabic nouns. ‘Tarbiyyah’ means instilling good values and ethics; ‘ta’lim’ means instruction; and ‘ta’dib’ means disciplining the self to maintain good manners.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fadhila Hadjeris
Fadhila Hadjeris is a Ph.D. Candidate at the School of Education at the University of California Los Angeles with a major in Social Sciences and Comparative International Education. Her research interests center on the conceptualization and implementation of Global Citizenship Education in the Maghrebi context with a focus on the school curriculum and teachers’ pedagogy. Fadhila has a background in Foreign Language Education and Applied Linguistics which was the focus of her first Ph.D. that she obtained from the University of Constantine 1, Algeria. She has also completed her Fulbright scholarship as a Language Teaching Assistant of Arabic Language at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Wellesley College. Currently, she is serving as a teaching fellow at UCLA’s Department of French and Francophone Studies. With a career spanning sixteen years of international language teaching experience in both U.S. and Algeria in English, Arabic, and French, she was awarded the prestigious Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms fellowship at UCLA. Besides teaching and research, Fadhila has also served in different leadership positions in Higher Education in Algeria.