Genealogies of (anti-)Blackness in the Maghreb: Africanity, Arabness, and the French colonial legacy

Abstract

This essay starts with the unstable valence of the term “African” in governmental discourses and their media treatment in Morocco and Tunisia, which vacillate between a political and cultural solidarity on the one hand, and an oppositional stance on the other hand, whereby the “Arabness” of the Maghreb is posited as oppositional to the Blackness of Africa. The essay grapples with the competing historical and epistemic frames that attempt to explain this conflicting relation. The “colonialist thesis,” whereby the origin of the “tale of two Africas” is traced back to colonial racial schemes, posits pan-Africanism as an anti-imperialist political alliance, one that sought to transcend colonial categories of belonging between so-called “Arab” and Black Africa. However, if taken in isolation, a pan-African approach can also selectively sanitize the historical relation that the Maghreb entertains with the rest of the continent. The essay discusses the urgency of re-centering the precolonial Maghrebi history of the trans-Saharan slave trade, in order to fully comprehend the history of Black and North Africa, while being cautious with importing western concepts, and reinforcing orientalist notions of Islamic “tyranny.” Ultimately, taking Eugène Delacroix’s Femme d’Alger dans leur Appartement as a case study, it argues for an entangled legacy of prejudice , whereby trans-Saharan practices of slavery become palimpsestically reconfigured through the racial schemes of French coloniality. It invites a third mode of relationality, a critically reparative stance, one that posits the necessity of more fully implicating a global audience – a Maghrebi as well as a Western one – as having historically co-constituted the sociocultural and political frameworks through which racial prejudice is reproduced.