Impasse of the Angels ─ Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory

In Impasse of the Angels, Stefania Pandolfo takes the critical engagement of anthropology to its limit by presenting the relationship between observer and observed as one of interacting equals and mutually constituting subjects. Narrating, debating, and imagining, real characters take center stage and, through their act of speech, invent a people rather than stand for it. Exploring what it means to be a subject in the historical and poetic imagination of a Moroccan society, Impasse of the Angels listens to dissonant and often idiosyncratic voices elaborate the fractures, wounds, and contradictions of the Maghribi postcolonial present. Passionate and lyric, ironic and tragic, it is a transformative narrative experiment traveling the boundary of ethnography and fiction.

Stefania Pandolfo is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.