Moroccan Noir

Although extremely popular in diverse national literatures, the police procedural--a novel in which a sympathetic cop-hero uses real-world forensic techniques to investigate a believable crime--has appeared in Arabic only in Morocco. In this dissertation, the first in any language to treat the Arabic police procedural, I argue that the genre, with its hard-hitting social critique, demonstrates the flexibility and adaptability of the Arabic novel as a literary form. I show how the cultural and political environment of Morocco during the past forty-five years created a specific environment that led to the birth and development of the genre. Although countries such as Egypt and Lebanon have typically pioneered modern literary innovation, the Arabic police procedural stands as an important example of how Moroccan authors are now at the cutting edge of genre experimentation in the Middle East and North Africa. In this work, I first explore why the police procedural has not emerged in Arabic outside of Morocco and how canonical Middle Eastern authors such as Nagib Mah[dotbelow]fuz[dotbelow] and Ghassan Kanafani incorporated elements of the genre into their novels without ever placing a s