‘Writing is an Act, the Poem a Weapon and Discussion an Assembly’: The Political Turn in Souffles during Morocco’s 1968

Abstract

Abstract Using the recent publication in English translation of an anthology of texts from the Moroccan journal Souffles (Stanford University Press, 2016), this article is part of a wider project that links the journal’s moves to question Négritude with its postcolonial critique of folklorism. It considers the Moroccan journal as an archetypal May 1968 publication; first, by tracing the dramatic shift that Souffles makes between 1966 and 1969 from literary and cultural journal to revolutionary mouthpiece of Marxist anti-Zionism, and which takes place in a period of pan-Arabist crisis and during the social unrest of 1968–1971 in Morocco; and second, by looking closely at the theoretical and philosophical innovations of Abraham Serfaty, alongside the agitational poetry of Abdellatif Laâbi and the political theories emerging in sub-Saharan Africa and the Francophone Caribbean, that appear in Souffles in the wake of May 1968 in France. Finally, it locates an incipient Maoism in the radicalization of Souffles.