Intimate Demolitions: Violence, Repair, and Colonial Technologies in Urban Morocco

• In Event: Technology, Violence, and Resistance: Feminist, Decolonial, and Intersectional Perspectives

Abstract

Situated in Casablanca during the early 1950s, this paper considers the relationship between demolition, technology, and colonial violence in urban Morocco. During the final years of the French Protectorate, modernist planners and engineers developed prefabrication and demolition technologies for clearing Casablanca’s largest slum—a center of nationalist and communist political organizing—the Carrières Centrales. Modernist fantasies of seamless slum removal, however, clashed with local residents’ practices of repair and slow dismantling—forms of technological engagement that ran counter to the logics of forced displacement. As anticolonial violence erupted across Morocco, residents of Casablanca’s largest slum neighborhood enrolled technologies associated with slum removal into an insurrectionary project during the urban uprising of December 1952.

This paper takes up insights from recent STS scholarship on maintenance and repair by centering forms of technological labor often rendered invisible. At the same time, placing discussions of repair and demolition alongside the racialized violence of Morocco’s colonial encounter raises questions about the political viability of certain reparative practices—the difficulty of enacting new forms of value through colonial technologies designed to distribute violence. This paper then will reflect on the relationship between decolonization—as an ongoing process and possible future—and demolition—as a form of labor, creativity, and skill. I argue that residents of Morocco’s lowest-income neighborhoods have transformed and continue to transform the material remnants of the French Protectorate through fraught forms of repair and intimate acts of taking apart.

Author

• Daniel Williford, University of Michigan