Maghreb Noir

The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future

Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781503635913, 9781503634824
• eBook ISBN: 9781503635920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for militant-artists, and the region reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse through the 1960s and 1970s.

Maghreb Noir dives into the personal and political lives of these militant-artists, who collectively challenged the neo-colonialist structures and the authoritarianism of African states. Drawing on Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English sources, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik expands our understanding of Pan-Africanism geographically, linguistically, and temporally. This network of militant-artists departed from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, instead following in the footsteps of their intellectual mentor, Frantz Fanon. They argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, trans-racial, and in defiance of the emerging nation-states. Maghreb Noir establishes the importance of North Africa in nurturing these global connections—and uncovers a lost history of grassroots collaboration among militant-artists from across the globe.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Cast of Characters
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1. Revolt Respects No Borders: Luso-African Revolutionaries in Rabat
• 2. A Continent in Its Totality: Moroccan Literary Journal Souffles Turns to Angola
• 3. Poetry on All Fronts: Jean Sénac’s Fight for Algeria’s Airwaves
• 4. Nothing to Fear from the Poet: Hooking Up at the Pan-African Festival of Algiers
• 5. The Red in Red-Carpet: The Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List