This special issue, in the form of a roundtable, is something of a border-crossing event, as it brings together Maghrebi scholars in the United States who took the initiative of relaunching the journal Souffles, with members of a working group on decoloniality in North Africa[1], including researchers, artists, and others living and working at home or abroad.
The need to open a serious, interdisciplinary, academic—but also literary and artistic—discussion about the decolonization of knowledge and imaginaries in the region arises first from an assessment broadly shared among the authors. Despite the existence of a number of past works which, through their choice of research subjects and fields, attest to the realization of a need for cultural, epistemic, historical, conceptual or methodological decolonization, even sixty years after independence, little progress has been made in rethinking the contribution and meaning of this decolonization effort. Work in anthropology and the broader social sciences, but also in theater, cinema, and literature, that takes into account marginal knowledge production and indigenous modernities, and which permits us to glimpse paths which until now have largely remained invisible, have been quite recent and hesitant at best.
Keeping in mind these concerns, the recognition of the legacies which have contributed to the erection of a "postcolonial library"[2] remains to be elaborated. Yet, the writings of Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and Ahmed Bounani at the heart of the original Souffles journal constitute clear examples. The journal Lamalif which persisted longer and was more open to sociologists and economists, published landmark essays. Abdelkebir Khatibi's double critique, Abdelmalek Sayad's analysis of the problem of migration, or even Assia Djebar and Fatema Mernissi's work on the subalternity of rural, illiterate, or weaver women, constitute an important heritage. Finally, the parallel reflections in Arabic on questions of civilization and patrimony by Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, Hicham Djaït, and Mahdi Elmandjra, for example, deserve to be revisited.
One must recall that the critical perspective Edward Said developed on Orientalism, as the invention of the Orient, was contemporaneous with the engagement of Abdelkébir Khatibi who, with his double critique, sought to carve out a distinct space as much from the Arabo-Muslim intellectual tradition as from Western conceptual frameworks. But the fate of these two scholars was largely determined by the power of the university and publishing regimes which controlled their transmission. Ultimately, only Frantz Fanon, who came from Martinique, witnessed the settler colonialism of wartime Algeria, and saw cultural exoticism as a form of racism, remained an exception in global publishing categories. Probably this arose from the fact that within North Africa, decolonization was long understood as a situated historical event, and not sufficiently as an ongoing intellectual process of permanent renewal. This is equally connected to the double marginalization of North African thought in comparison with that being produced in the various epicenters of Paris, Beirut, and New York.
Building on this observation, it is first necessary to take up, without romanticizing it, the subject of remembrance and memory work, which allows us to put these postcolonial intellectual efforts arising from North Africa into conversation with what preceded them, surrounded them, and encompassed them. Whether that means returning to the Marxist intellectual tradition of Gramsci or Adorno who attempted to develop a new critical approach, revisiting works of postcolonial theory which extended the subaltern studies of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ranajit Guha, or building on the South American decolonial theory of Enrique Dussell and Gloria Anzaldua, the authors in this issue seek to build new genealogies (Levine & Sobrera) while distinguishing the particular context of their writing and the approach they adopt (Luste Boulbina, El Aoufi). In so doing, a distinction arises between discursive production emerging from older empires and former colonies, as well as between the decolonial as a concept and decolonization as a permanent and endless process.
Clearly the present need to reintroduce the works of contemporary African intellectuals like Achille Mbembe or Souleymane Bachir Diagne shows the extent to which such scholarship emerging from the Francophone world only really took off through American university and publishing channels. Likewise, it is necessary to note that the debate over the divergent intellectual genealogy of decolonization within the social sciences—which opposes the historicism of Abdellah Laroui to the empiricism of the anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi—has thrived more in the Arabophone world and through sites of Arabic knowledge production, especially, and in spite of recent challenges, in Beirut (Sammouni).
From this arises a key question regarding the hierarchy of languages so crucial to the production and diffusion of knowledge and social imaginaries, but also processes of identification and differentiation. There is a pressing need to reread closely, but also go beyond, the initial writings of Khatibi on the effects of language policy, the continued centrality of French as inherited from the Protectorate and as an ongoing marker of social distinction, and what has followed under Arabization and the official rehabilitation of the Amazigh language. What this means for the collective work of decolonization, emancipation, and the construction of a plural society demands further reflection in a Morocco whose politics are simultaneously tightly controlled and neoliberal (Kabel).
Behind the question of language is the problem of translation, in-betweenness [l'entre-deux], intersubjectivity [l'inter-sujet], and the relations between thinking subjects trying to make sense of an increasingly violent and socially divided world. The epistemological traditions inherited from the West, and the cognitive frameworks which arise from them, have cramped this sense-making. We must recognize the role of personal memory, affect, and everyday lived experience in the rehabilitation of forgotten, buried, or minoritized ways of knowing, not only in their gendered but also in their raced and subaltern forms—all of which necessitates crafting a decolonial epistemology (Guessous).
The acute need to take into account these sidelined ways of knowing requires a significant methodological, aesthetic, and political unlearning and rebuilding. In the social sciences, this can take the form of de-framing [décadrage], a redefinition of the field and methods of research as no longer "on" but collaboratively "with" excluded or marginalized indigenous groups (El Kahlaoui). This may also entail a critical revision of the reliance on colonial archives, including revealing their blind spots and subjecting them to expertise, in medicine, for example (Sadiki). It can also involve the use of collage to recombine historical, memorial, metaphorical, and imaginary elements in order to grasp not only what occurred in colonial history, but also the affective afterlives which still perdure, as in the case of the Rif War (Rihani & Nahhass).
To this point, the decolonization of knowledge has required the de-siloing of disciplines in order to better account for the complexity of the phenomena uncovered, studied, described, and analyzed. But it is at least as important to include artistic and literary creations as bases of knowledge that often go unrecognized and marginalized given their intuitive and subjective nature. Thinking back to a resolutely decolonial film, Ahmed Bounani's multiply censored Mémoire 14 [Memory 14 (1971)], what is at stake is the deconstruction of the relationship of political and institutional power with marginal knowledge and the creation of images purposively kept off-screen (El Arjaoui).[3]
Finally, the interview with the writer Mustapha Kébir Ammi helps us understand how a fictional detour can shed light on those areas forgotten in intellectual and institutional knowledge production; fiction can not only help build new understanding as an archive but also gesture to an alternative path to take with eyes wide open. In this sense, the imaginary proves to be, beyond its spectral sense, a resource that helps us perceive the branching connections [embranchements] which underwrite an indubitably plural society.