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

Drawing on interviews, personal papers, and the archives of many of the surviving protagonists, this lively book revisits the heady age of anticolonial revolution and political ferment in North Africa in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when liberation was in the air and solidarity was glamorous. Poets, playwrights, and filmmakers rubbed shoulders with—and sometimes took turns as—revolutionaries and freedom fighters in the era’s global struggles. The book moves from Paris to Rabat, Algiers, and Tunis, following an ever-evolving cast of luminaries in anticolonial campaigns, including Angola’s Mario de Andrade and Agostinho Neto, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, Morocco’s Mehdi Ben Barka and Taher Ben Jelloun, Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the American Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. As they agitated against imperial powers and autocratic regimes, these men supported one another with financing, military training, venues to publish and perform, and, perhaps most important, opportunities to serve as ideological sparring partners. Tolan-Szkilnik is perceptive and candid about the limits of liberation: women were hardly present except as the typists and messengers for a predictably patriarchal generation of revolutionaries. The ghost of one of the movement’s most acute analysts, the Marxist revolutionary and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, who died of leukemia at 36, in 1961, hovers over the entire assembly.