When Amílcar Cabral called Algeria “the Mecca of Revolutionaries,” he could hardly have predicted that he was spawning an academic cottage industry. Yet over the past decade, scholars, journalists, and historical actors have written about Algeria's welcome of revolutionaries from around the world in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of these accounts focus on the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF), when the South African artist Miriam Makeba sang (in Arabic) “Ana Hurra fi-l-Jaza'ir,” the American Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver strutted through the Casbah, and the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène screened Le Mandat. Yet those who have closely followed Algeria's subsequent political life are cognizant of the shadows lurking behind these celebratory accounts. While the regime of Houari Boumediène (1965–78) staged unprecedented spectacles of Third Worldist solidarity, his single-party state also imprisoned political opponents as an increasingly bureaucratic state structure captured the revolutionary spontaneity of the Algerian Revolution (1954–62). A central question thus animates Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik's account: How do we tell a story of the multiple connections, emancipatory hopes, and conceptual grammars that underpinned this period in Algeria (and across North Africa) in a way that does not perpetuate masculinist top-down accounts provided by the state?
Maghreb Noir decenters the official visions of the PANAF by centering the “Maghreb Generation,” a group of artist-militants who were “state skeptical” and looked South to draw on Africa's revolutionary experience to revitalize their project. This meticulously researched work interrogates the functioning of race and gender while also inviting us to expand our geographical vision to Tunisia and Morocco. The archival sources—which span four countries, four languages (including Portuguese), and over thirty interviews—deserve special mention. As historians of the region know, telling the story of postcolonial North Africa is an especially difficult task. In this regards, Tolan-Szkilnik's encouragement to find that the “archives exist in people's attics, basements, and in their minds” (p. 155) is particularly welcome.
Each chapter focuses on a specific instance of a “transnational encounter between the militant-artists of the Maghreb Generation” (p. 10). The first chapter looks at the trajectory of Luso-African poets as they followed the changing political winds from Lisbon to Paris to Rabat. This section is particularly fascinating both in centering exiled militants from Portuguese Africa (who have had recent scant attention in the literature) and reminding us that despite Hasan II's later authoritarian policies, Rabat under Mohammed V attracted numerous revolutionaries. In their travels from Lisbon and Paris to Rabat, “Europe was a middle passage for Africa” (p. 24). After January 1960, and the Second All-African People's Conference in Tunis, Rabat became the hub of their activities. This chapter also places poetry and artistic production at the forefront of revolutionary concerns, something that has also been elided by a historiography that tends to focus on diplomatic history or geopolitical concerns.
The second chapter looks at Souffles, a radical Moroccan literary journal that has been the object of several scholars’ attention over the past few years. Here, too, Tolan-Szkilnik focuses on the role of African and Pan-African thought. In their dismissal of négritude (which the Haitian poet René Depestre denounced as a form of “black Zionism,” p. 56), and their adoption of Marxist-Leninism, these intellectuals were inspired by—and learned from—their readings of African politics and art. In a particularly fascinating section, the chapter details the 1971 transition from publishing in French to Arabic, which represented a new orientation toward the Arab revolution and question of Palestine. Their critique of Moroccan policy in the Western Sahara, coupled with their broader revolutionary activities, led to the arrest and torture of founding members of Souffles such as Abraham Serfaty and Abdellatif Laabi.
The third chapter takes us to Algeria, though the center of the action is not the brightly lit stages of the PANAF, but rather the decrepit apartment of the revolutionary poet Jean Sénac. Despite his one-time proximity to the Algerian regime, he was increasingly marginalized after the 1965 coup and his well-respected radio show, which featured poetry from multiple revolutionary traditions, was canceled in 1972. Yet in the (seemingly raucous) nocturnal events he hosted, the Maghreb Generation was brought together. A similar interest for the social (if not to say libidinal) dynamics of revolution is highlighted in the fourth chapter, which looks at the ways in which male participants in the PANAF recollected their sexual exploits at the time. Tolan-Szkilnik writes that these individuals “created a community premised on revolutionary masculinity, casting women as ahistorical and apolitical symbols of Africa to conquer and collect through sex” (p. 102). Not only does the book capture the alienation and exclusion of women such as Kathleen Cleaver, the Black Panther Party activist, but it provides a nuanced account of the differences between individuals such as the Ivorian playwright Bitty Moro, who was struck by the anti-Black racism he experienced, and the American poet Ted Joans, whose economic status also “protected” him from the racism often directed at Black participants who hailed from the continent.
The fifth and final chapter looks at the JCC (Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage), a film festival held at Carthage, and Tunisia's role as a hub as the “final home” of the Maghreb Generation in the mid-1970s. This section positions North Africa in the context of Third Cinema, focusing on the “ciné clubs” and the central role of Sembène and the Mauritanian director and producer Med Hondo in fostering a Pan-African radicalism. Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba hope for a “soft” Pan-Africanism was ultimately trumped by the efforts of the Maghreb Generation (including female directors such as Sarah Maldoror). For many Maghrebi directors, Tolan-Szkilnik notes, “pursuing Pan-African networks became a relatively safe way to expressing resistance and evading the nation state” (p. 124). While the period after 1968 saw a decisive shift away from Europe, and the introduction of a rule that limited the official competition to African and Arab films, the political mood decisively shifted over the next decade. By the early 1980s, these initiatives had been co-opted by African states who tended to use cinema to glorify nationalist narratives.
This book offers a fascinating glimpse into the political and social dynamics that shaped the artistic production and Pan-African thought in the Maghreb. While Tolan-Szkilnik's desire to move away from official state narratives is crucially important, one wonders if the desire to do away with the state is at times too quick. The PANAF was of course a form of “Algerian propaganda,” and “glorified” (p. 2) the leaders of the ruling party, the FLN, but it also provided the infrastructure for the kinds of meetings that occurred in Jean Sénac's apartment. Moreover, many of the “state-skeptical” (p. 3) militants we meet in the book relied on state support to live in North Africa in the first place. Some of the actors indeed moved in and out of favor with state officials, leading us to wonder if the line between state and society was more porous than the monograph implies. Lastly, while the focus on social histories and “good old-fashioned story telling” makes this a truly delightful read, a few more theoretical questions remain unanswered: How did the particular racial myths propagated by Lusophone thinkers—notably Lusotropicalism—influence how militants from Portuguese Africa understood Blackness and négritude? How did Moroccan “Marxist-Leninists” embrace the works of Frantz Fanon while simultaneously centering a “class-based” liberation and relegating questions of race to a “superstructure” (pp. 44–45)?
It is a testament to the richness of the material that Maghreb Noir cannot answer the myriad theoretical questions that emerge from these stories of decolonization. The monograph is fascinating reading that opens a number of fresh perspectives regarding the intellectual and political journeys of revolutionaries who came to North Africa. It is a must-read for those interested in decolonization, Pan-Africanism, and histories of the left. It can be debated whether the major events detailed in the book were, indeed, “all for show” (to quote Tahar Ben Jelloun, p. 91), but there is no doubt that this work is an important corrective to state-focused accounts that tend to obfuscate the social, political, and artistic developments that happened offstage.
