ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the diasporic Amazigh movement, networked in France’s Amazigh cultural associations, village committees and political movements, constructs an imaginative geography of North Africa, which activists call Tamazgha, partly through articulations of Indigenous identity. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation, the chapter works within the tension within approaches to indigeneity between the essentialist tendency to reify cultural difference and therefore seeks to establish things like ‘authenticity’ or to see indigeneity as purely ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’. These articulations are identified through the discursive and embodied practices of Amazigh activists relating to village territoriality, performing alterity in Amazigh costume and spoken Tamazight, discourses of colonisation and exile, and networks of solidarity within the Indigenous Movement globally. All point towards the existence of an emergent Indigenous diaspora, whose discourse and politics have wide-ranging and sometimes unexpected effects ‘on the ground’ in North Africa.
