History of Art PhD candidate Ashley Miller gives a 20-minute presentation followed by discussion.

The management and symbolic “ownership” of Morocco’s cultural heritage was integral to the political ideology and social policies of French colonialism in Morocco. Within the first decade of the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912-1956), Resident-General Hubert Lyautey and his team of colonial administrators, ethnographers, and historians embarked upon an extensive campaign to “protect” Morocco’s material heritage and “revitalize” its traditional arts and craft industries. Hoping to garner moral and economic support for this cultural campaign from the French public, the French Protectorate’s Service of Native Arts organized a temporary exhibition of Moroccan art in the spring of 1917 at the Louvre’s Pavillon de Marsan in Paris. The exhibition, the first of its kind in France, had the unusual mission of at once promoting Morocco’s contemporary artistic products to a body of potential consumers and simultaneously convincing its audience that these objects should be considered works of “art” in the first place. The exhibition’s organizers strove to position “Moroccan art” within the historical narrative and material corpus of “Islamic art,” drawing upon the regimes of value to which an elite community of French scholars and collectors subscribed; nevertheless, their strategies for displaying objects within the space of the exhibition failed to support any clear historical narrative and instead created the impression that Morocco’s arts belonged to a “timeless” tradition. Ultimately, through its strategic mobilization of material culture, the Exposition des Arts Marocains and its organizers contributed to a colonial rhetoric of difference that relegated modern Moroccan art and society to a pre-modern, unchanging past.