Maghrib in Past & Present | Podcasts
Education
Paraska Tolan Szkilnik is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She obtained her BA from Brandeis University in 2011 and an MA from the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in 2014, working on the relationship between Senegal and Tunisia in the 1960s and 70s. Her doctoral work is concerned with the history of cultural Pan-Africanism in the Maghreb in the decades following independence. Moving away from the strictly political approach of much of the literature on Pan-Africanism, her dissertation reconsiders the history of Pan-Africanism in the postcolonial period by centering on three Maghrebi cultural spaces of encounter between Black and non-Black African and Diaspora artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC), the Moroccan literary journal Souffles, and the Pan-African Festival of Algiers of 1969 (PANAF).
Beginning in Morocco, this podcast follows the adventures of a group of Luso-African poets and militants (chief amongst them Mario de Andrade, Marcelino dos Santos and Aquino Bragança) from Paris to Rabat. Starting in the late 1950s, these young militants used Rabat as a home-base for anti-colonial activism in the Portuguese colonies. The Moroccan government provided them with passports, headquarters, press coverage, and weapons. Morocco also served as a liberated space, on the African continent, to imagine what one could be in the wake of empire. In Rabat, these militant-poets met young Moroccan writers who were haunted by similar concerns over their role in the postcolonial world, amongst them poet Abdellatif Laabi founder of the Moroccan literary journal Souffles. Over the course of its seven years of publication, 1966-1973, Souffles took off from a marginal Moroccan literary journal to a paper caucus through which writers from across the African diaspora called for an African cultural revolution. On the pages of this shabby 30-something page journal, Laabi welcomed contributions from Haitian poet René Depestre, Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, Angolan insurgent Mario de Andrade, and Cape Verdean militant Amilcar Cabral. Working in tandem with these writers, the journal provided a platform to discuss the great issues of the decade: decolonization, Marxism-Leninism, civil rights in the United States, and of course Portuguese colonialism.
This episode is part of the Arts and Letters in the Maghrib series and was recorded on November 8th, 2018 at the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT), in Tunis, Tunisia.
The music in the introduction and conclusion of this podcast was performed by street artists on Avenue Bouguiba, Tunis, Tunisia.
Posted by Hayet Lansari, Librarian, Outreach Coordinator, Content Curator (CEMA).
A History of Franco-Muslim Education in Morocco and in Northwest Africa
The Worlds of Safia Farhat
Landscape and Identity in Medieval Morocco
Contemporary Art in Tunisia
The ”Lush Garden” of Andalusian Music
Entretien avec Farah Khelil au sujet de son projet Effet de Serre.
Thoughts on State-Building, Decolonization, Gender, and Tunisia: Insights from the Global 1960s
Modern Art and Architecture in Morocco in the Aftershock of the 1960 Agadir Earthquake
From Palestine to North Africa and Back: Transnational Solidarity in the Arts in the 1970s
رمي النفيات بالوسط الحضري: اغتراب في المجال ام عوز في التحضر؟
La pollution atmosphérique, un risque majeur en Algérie
Hygiène publique et citoyenneté : un lien indissociable
Durabilité et résilience urbaines face aux risques majeurs: outils et méthodes
En hommage à feu Omar Carlier (Décédé le 22 octobre 2021): Fabriquer une élite intellectuelle en situation coloniale. Le cas de l’hypokhâgne d’Alger 1929-1961
Museums, Cultural Infrastructures, and Multiple Publics in Morocco
Queens Of Words: Moroccan Women Zajal Poets
Roots And Traces Of Contemporary Cultural Life In Tangier
Writing on Kingdom Walls: Practices, Narratives and Visual Politics of Graffiti and Street Art in Jordan and Morocco
L’école de médecine de Kairouan dans l’histoire de la médecine arabe médiévale : repères historiographiques
Protecting Morocco´s Rarest Forests
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Positive Thinking Mind
In the Great Khan’s Tent
Visualize Meditations
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast