Growing up in southeast Morocco in the 1980s, I remember how adding a rod and three strings to the empty oil jars USAID donated to the Moroccan government transformed them into a resounding luṭar, which is a three-stringed musical instrument widely used in Morocco. H..
Brahim el Guabli and Brian T. Edwards
Brahim El Guabli is an academic whose work and research interests encompass the Maghreb, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. He probes questions of trauma and memory, and the way aesthetics enable various forms of coming to terms with violent pasts. Brahim’s articles have appeared, among others, in Arab Studies Journal, The Journal of North African Studies, Francosphères and Jadaliyya. He is also the co-editor of the two-volume special issue of The Journal of North African Studies entitled “Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb Without Borders” (2017). Brahim is the co-editor of Jadaliyya Maghreb page.
Brian T. Edwards teaches and writes about U.S. literature and culture in its international context, globalization and culture, and contemporary literary and cultural production of North Africa and the Middle East. His fields of interest include American studies, Middle East and North African studies, comparative literature, postcolonial and diaspora studies, film, and cultural anthropology. He is the author of After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016; paperback April 2017) and Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Duke University Press, 2005), as well as essays and Op-Eds in publications as diverse Public Culture, Salon, American Literary History, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Chicago Tribune, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Journal of North African Studies, Foreign Policy, and many others.