Brahim El Guabli

Areas of Expertise

Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature, Professor El Guabli is a Black, Amazigh Indigenous scholar from Morocco. In addition to teaching different levels of Arabic language courses, Professor El Guabli teaches or is interested in teaching a variety of topics in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern literature, including trauma and memory, Saharan imaginations, Jews in Arabic literature and film, transitional justice processes, translation, current events, Marxist Leninist Movements, Afro-Arab solidarities, and decolonization movements.

His research encompasses areas of language politics, indigeneity,  human rights, transitional justice, political violence, archive creation, memory studies, Amazigh/Berber literatures, and environmental humanities. Professor El Guabli’s scholarship has appeared in PMLA, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Arab Studies Journal, and the Journal of North African Studies, among others. He also authored a number of book chapters on memory, joint authorship practices in Morocco, and the return of Jews in literature and film.

Professor El Guabli’s first book, Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence, draws on new materials in Arabic, Tamazight, French, and Moroccan colloquial Arabic (Darija) to make a novel argument about the connections between cultural production, history writing and citizenship in post-1999 Morocco. Moroccan Other-Archives is the winner of the Carl J. Brown AIMS Best Book Award in 2024. It was also a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Best Book Award and receipted Honorable Mention by the Middle East Librarians’ Association. El Guabli’s second book Desert Imaginations: A History of History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences will be released by the University of California Press in November 2025. Desert Imaginations uses an interdisciplinary approach to present a history of ideas that explain how and why deserts are mistreated globally. El Guabli has also completed a book entitled Amazighitude: Essays on Living Amazigh Indigeneity in the World. Amazighitude charts the path for a critical reflection on Amazigh indigeneity in conversation with other indigeneities.

He is the co-editor of a two-volume special issue of The Journal of North African Studies Journal entitled “Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb without Borders” as well as  co-editor of Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the “Years of Lead” (Liverpool University Press, 2022) and Refiguring Loss: Jews Remembered in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Cultural Production (Pennsylvania State University, 2024. He most recently edited a special issue of Arab Studies Journal entitled “Where is the Maghreb?”

Professor El Guabli is co-founder and co-editor of Tamazgha Studies Journal, which is a peer-reviewed, open access  journal dedicated to the study of Tamazgha (the broader North Africa) from the lens of indigeneity and multilingualism. El Guabli is also co-founder and co-editor of Georgetown University Press’s Amazigh Studies Series.