Letter zero to the director of the Moroccan cultural studies centre: toward a decolonial turn in English studies in Morocco – part I

This intervention, designated as Letter Zero in a forthcoming series of epistolary reflections, is addressed to the Director of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre. It revisits the intellectual, institutional, and affective significance of the Centre’s pioneering role in rethinking English Studies in Morocco. Drawing on a mode of academic writing grounded in relationality, correspondence, subjectivity, and lived experience, the letter reflects on my own scholarly trajectory – from the early stirrings of postcolonial critique in Tetouan in the 1990s to my current engagement with expanding the Moroccan Cultural Studies turn across disciplines, languages, and arts. The letter foregrounds the foundational interventions of the Centre, including the creation of the MA programme Cultural Studies: Cultures, Identities, and Nationhood in Morocco, the launch of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Journal, and the re-editing of Anglo-American writings on Morocco. As Letter Zero, this intervention sets the stage for a broader, open-ended series of reflections, titled Letters from the South: Toward a Decolonial Moroccan Cultural Studies, which invites a new generation of scholars shaped by the Centre to collectively explore the unfinished project of decolonizing knowledge. The series, expected to consist of twelve letters, aims to extend this critical momentum across departments of French, Spanish, Arabic, History, Philosophy, Sociology, and Psychology, while embracing epistolary and relational forms of academic engagement as tools for reimagining the university from the South. This epistolary gesture is anchored in the conviction that the substantial foundation of knowledge serves as an epistemic correlative for emancipation, in alignment with the enduring decolonial ethos of the emancipation turn: to know is to emancipate.