Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of North African Studies finds its principal source in a summer institute held at Oregon State University in 2014, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. That institute brought together, for three weeks, university scholars and teachers in different fields attached to the humanities and social sciences. The issue is also tributary of an earlier NEH institute held on the significance of Berber culture which took place at OSU in 2007, and of other meetings and publications devoted to North African minorities.¹ As editors of this issue, we had the privilege of co-directing both NEH institutes that brought together two highly stimulating intellectual communities focused intensely on the multifarious characteristics of North African culture.

The ambition of the two NEH institutes was to inspire among visiting scholars and teachers a need for a more comprehensive assessment of post-colonial Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia from the perspective of the region's cultural artistic vitality. And, in a more specific manner, to shed light on the significance of North African art today, in its continuity marked by Berber, Arabic and European idioms, and in its modernity as it wrestles with the realities of globalism and advances of social media. The field of North African studies is shifting as a result of growing urbanisation, the emergence of an educated middle class and political changes in favour of western-style democracies. If the Berber NEH institute gave considerable attention to the history and ethnology of North Africa, the second one principally focused on three guiding themes that chronologically unite politics and the arts since the 1960s: Nationalism, Exile and Revival. These three themes correspond in overlapping ways to three specific periods. First, the post-independence and cold war years (1960–1990); second, the period wrought by the political and economic instability of globalisation (1990–2010); and lastly, the recent and unfurling expressions that have blossomed from the Arab Spring.

If somewhat structurally manufactured for the purpose of directing discussion during the 2014 NEH institute, the three themes do form a watermark for this issue of JNAS. This is principally so because all of the contributors to this volume were selected to participate in the institute, giving them the opportunity through different exchanges to foment and develop their own current research. Although difficult to measure, the fruit of those weeks of conversation and study are tangibly found in these pages. The essays on contemporary North African artistic production assembled here are grouped into three broad themes. The first, Words and Images of Immigration and Diaspora, wishes to give several approaches to the difficulties of narrating not only the other but an invisible or absent one. The second entitled The Art of Shadows and Reappearance offers ways of interpreting that very absence through innovative ways of seeing. Finally, the section entitled Literatures and New Contexts seeks to anchor change in the permanence of North African poetry, legend and song.

The originality of this volume, we believe, resides in the multiple interpretations of modern North Africa it offers using artistic discourse – rather than social or economic documentation – as its starting point. The essays certainly do not eschew the deeply felt wounds of modern North African political history in their various considerations of creative genres or works. Indeed, one of the additional features of this volume is that it has sought to avoid purely critical artistic analyses – that would better be destined for literary, cinematographic or beaux-arts publications – in favour of larger cross-disciplinary perspectives that seek different yardsticks for measuring or, at least, uncovering social changes.

This issue has also guarded itself from artificial amalgamations: although it is certainly possible to understand North African artistic expressions through the prism of a common Berber heritage, through a similar overlaying of cultures or through a recently shared resistance to French colonialism, the political reality and social evolution of the Maghreb since the 1960s bar such clean encapsulations. The Berber world in itself is intricate, linguistically and geographically dispersed from the Mediterranean to the Sub-Sahara. Most importantly, post-colonial nationalism has led Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia on distinguishably different paths. If Morocco has found since independence a modus vivendi under the sovereignty of its monarch, Tunisia remains the rare success of the Arab spring, an increasingly stable model for institutional democracy in the region. Algeria however, according to Benjamin Stora (2001), is stuck in different zones of unfinished or unachieved liberation, still embattled culturally in the legacies of colonialism.

Some brief explanation should be offered for the title of this volume, Maghrebi Artistic and Literary Expressions in the 21st Century. Above all, this volume intends to suggest continuity rather than some radical shift in the idiom or polemical cultural character of North African art in all of its manifestations. Its autochthonous roots are in the stitching of Kabylian textiles, in the pages of Abdellatif Laâbi's revolutionary journal, Souffles (Sefrioui 2012), in the voice of the singer Idir, the cinema of Moufida Tlatli, the tags sprayed over the images of Ben Ali. In other words, this collection seeks to decanter change from within a larger permanent framework. The larger congruence between time and the elements of light, sea and sand that reside in the works of Albert Camus, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Assia Djebar.

And, the designation of twenty-first century in our title only serves to situate the temporal reality of this writing. But it is far from suggesting a temporary or presentist understanding of North African artistic expression. Art does not correct political dissonance, nor does it explain the structures of social injustice. This is particularly true in North Africa, a region rooted in its Berber substrate but dynamically modified over time by waves of incursions. Yet art often can, through a long hibernation or a sudden irruption, expose the different faces of dissonance and injustice. And this has certainly been the case in the Maghreb since decolonisation, where artists have often endured a long and clandestine silence at home, or a culturally bifurcated voice if resettled in France. More specifically, in Tunisia where the Jasmine Revolution in the early months of 2011 yielded a burgeoning of (often) repressed creativity. This flourish inspired the early optimism of the Arab spring through the rap anthem by El Général (Hamada Ben Amor), Raïs le bled, the blog of Tunisia Girl (Lina Ben Mhenni), the songs of Emel Mathlouthi, street graffiti, poems and images finally liberated by a free press and the internet.

Yet, as the Maghreb finds its path in this new millennium, old handicaps and new hurdles indicate that Tunisia remains heretofore an exception. Let us hope that the Tunisian Revolution can find firm anchoring and will survive the strong pull of regressive forces. High unemployment, arthritic bureaucratic structures, political dissonance – especially in Algeria – chronic problems of immigration, gender divides, a larger sense of social malaise, ethical disjunction and cultural apathy are just a few of the several major problems that characterise the three countries of the Maghreb today. If we believe Boualem Sansal's (2015) most recent opus, 2084, the Maghreb's future is mostly promised a bleak destiny, given the rise of Islamist militancy, and the underlying religious tides that now reconfigure the geopolitics of North Africa and the Middle East. And, it was not long ago that French intellectual and political advisor, Jacques Attali (2009), predicted a somber future for the Maghreb in his A Brief History of the Future.

However, artistic expression remains the underskin of hope, particularly under the heavy stress of political anachronisms. It endures in its vital and subterranean voices, always ready to come forth at the necessary hour. In its 10 essays, this volume has a simple ambition: to show how artistic discourse is a vital part of North Africa's destiny.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The National Endowment for the Humanities in large part contributed to the possibility of this publication. The editors of the present issue wish to thank the NEH for its support of both summer Institutes in 2007 and 2014 at Oregon State University devoted to Berber and North African cultures. Particular gratitude is extended to Barbara Ashbrook, Assistant Director, and Victoria Sams, Program Officer, in the Division of Education Programs at NEH.

Notes

1.. Previous scholarship principally includes, Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause, Editors. North African Mosaic: A Cultural Re-Appraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2007; and Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause, Co-Organizers, ‘The Berbers and Other Minorities in North Africa. A Cultural Reappraisal.' International Conference, Portland, Oregon. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Oregon State University and the Middle-East Studies Center State University, Portland State University (May 2005).