Things do move either because of globalization or colonialism. And as they move, they tend to acquire news identities. I would like to maintain that the movement of things, images, objects and collections accelerates the process of interweaving cultures that has started to impose itself as a principal determining factor of our cultures and identities today. In my presentation,1 I will examine the movement of French things and institutions to Morocco during colonial times as well as the impact of this movement on the Moroccan theatrical institution.

For colonizers, things and institutions and objects are needful for colonization. They are also needful for implementing their civilizing missions.2I invite you to ponder with me on the following questions: why would a thing like a play be so important for colonizers? Why would colonizers need a thing like a theatrical building or a school in their colonial agenda? I argue that the movement of people alone from one place to another in order to conquer another people is always useless unless the colonizers move their things with them. It is thanks to these things that colonialism can vanquish and subjugate and achieve coloniality. Yet strikingly the colonizers’ things soon lose their colonial significance when they fall in the hands of the colonized. I am interested in the movement of things from the colonizers’ hand into those of the colonized. To put it into questions, how did Marshal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey (1854-1934) use the French play, the French school and the French theatrical building as tools for colonizing the imagination of the Moroccans? And how did the Moroccans deal with these things after they had become theirs?

VOlUME 01 ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2018