This paper analyzes the geographical imaginations of Amazigh activists, the indigenous people of North Africa. Situated at the crossroads of post-colonial theory, indigenous language rights and national narratives of inclusion and exclusion, the paper discusses the Amazigh movement in Morocco. The issue of language rights is particularly important to the movement and this is reflected in the paper through an emphasis on Tamazight script choice and perceptions of the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe (IRCAM). IRCAM is the government entity charged with the standardization of the Tamazight languages and the implementation of Tamazight instruction in Moroccan schools. Debates over the role of IRCAM and the choice of an official script for Tamazight language instruction form an important area of contestation within the activist movement. Despite activists' differences in opinion on these key issues, the imaginative geographies they articulate through these debates share similar visions of national Amazigh identity. These imaginative geographies re-imagined the Moroccan nation by asserting that all Moroccans are Amazigh while continuing to produce a transnational imaginative geography of 'Tamazgha,' a greater Amazigh land across all of North Africa.

In interwar Morocco, French colonial policies aimed to transform the country into an export-oriented agricultural economy in which one-time small farmers became wage labourers on large-scale monoculture enterprises. But as a rapidly urbanising population lost its own means of food production, Protectorate efforts to alleviate 'colonial malnutrition' and low standards of living focused on the accessibility and affordability of sugar for the indigenous population. Sugar provided not just an economically and physiologically efficient calorie source, it also meshed with the French ethnographic constructions of the Moroccan diet. This article shows how French officials struggled to reconcile scientific ideas about Moroccans' biological needs with their foundational belief in Moroccan cultural difference.

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