Recent examinations of Arab literary history have been conducted within the categories of class, gender, and nation. However, few attempts have been made to bring the question of race into discussions of Arabic literature. In an attempt to reconstruct a Black canon, one finds a wealth of Arab literary production on race from the pre-Islamic era to the present. Studying such representations of Blackness offers a twist to Edward Said’s Orientalism in that Arabs generated a hierarchical representational discourse themselves, one that was predicated as much on a Self-Other binary as Western Orientalism. This has important consequences not just for Black diaspora studies but also for post-colonial studies. In this paper, I will trace representations of Blacks and Blackness through the study of different literary texts and films from the Maghreb. My cultural analysis of the literature and film aims to highlight the representations of the imagined identities assigned to Blacks as a result of slavery and racial stratification. It also aims to shed light on the derogatory messages that are hidden in Black stereotypes and the racist ideology that in subtle and not so subtle ways served to keep Black people in their place. The texts I discuss include short stories such as "Mountain Lion" by Mustapha Tlatli; novels such as Kateb Yacine's Nedjma, and Malika Mokkadem’s Century of Locusts; folktales such as Marguerite Taous Amrouche's “Le Granin Magique," Abdelaziz Aroui's “The Black Merchant," and Jilali El Kodia’s “The Little Sister with Seven Brothers;" and films such as Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace and Farida Benlyazid’s Door to the Sky. This is literature and film produced in both Arabic and French in countries like Morocco and Tunisia. Hence my geography does not perfectly coincide with the geography chosen by other scholars who have written on the topic of Black Africans in Arabic society, since Bernard Lewis focuses his study on “the Middle East,;” Shaun E. Marmon on “the Islamic Middle East;” Alexandre Popovic focuses on Iraq, John Hunwick on “the Mediterranean Lands of Islam,” and Eve Trout Powell on Sudan. My paper will build upon their work and will examine Maghrebian representations of blackness within the context not only of Arab discourse on race, racial identity and empire but also within the context of French colonialism.