Riad Kherdeen to present “The Ghosts of Morocco’s Agadir Earthquake” at Historical Materialism Conference in London November 8, 2025
Introduction
Assistant Professor Riad Kherdeen will be giving a paper titled "The Ghosts of Morocco's Agadir Earthquake," at the Historical Materialism Conference 2025 held at SOAS in London. He is on a panel called "Construction, Destruction and Ruin in the Urban Landscape" as part of the Marxism, Culture and the Arts stream.
Paper abstract:
In 1960, just four years after Morocco formally gained its national independence from the French and the Spanish who colonized Morocco from 1912-1956, an earthquake struck the southern Moroccan coastal city of Agadir and destroyed much of the city, killing more than 15,000 people (about a third of the then population) and injuring some 25,000 others. The nascent Moroccan state quickly intervened and decided to build a new Agadir in an avant-garde brutalist style, seizing this catastrophic event as an opportunity to begin building toward a decolonized future. But in so doing, the Moroccan authorities expunged all traces of the earthquake and evacuated all residents to create a tabula rasa upon which construction of the new Agadir would take place. Coverage of the earthquake in journals published by major Moroccan labor unions like UMT (Moroccan Union of Labor) and leftist political parties like UNFP (National Union of Popular Forces) and PCM (Moroccan Communist Party) were among the only sources to critique the government’s lack of support for poor and working-class survivors of the earthquake. They continued to report on the earthquake refugees years after 1960, even spotlighting families still living in tents outside of Agadir in the third year after the earthquake. This paper will track some of the class-based critiques of the Agadir earthquake response and reconstruction across various media, including an abstract painting by André Elbaz, a short essay film by Mohammed Afifi, a surrealist novel by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and prints and photographs published in the UMT’s journal L’avant-garde.