In the past five years a number of retrospective exhibitions have featured North African artists born in the 1920s and 30s and active at the time of independence (1). Pioneering artists of that generation helped decolonize Maghrebi art practice and the theoretical discourse surrounding it. My paper considers the legacy of critical texts from the early post-independence period for Maghrebi visual arts today. The editors of a recent issue of an African Art journal discuss the Saharan north/south divide in the study of African art. “Today,” they write, “scholars, artists and other producers of visual culture continue to grapple with the partitioned discursive and institutional structures handed down in part from colonialism—divisions further exacerbated in recent contexts of local, national, and global conflict” (2). Critiques of these “partitioned” structures can be found in four essays from Morocco and Algeria in the late 1960s that the editors chose to re-present in the journal, including a manifesto for a new aesthetics in the Maghreb by the Algerian group Aouchem. My paper investigates these essays and others in a 1967 issue of the journal Souffles, along with Toni Maraini’s Écrits sur l’art [Writings on Art], and Mohammed Khadda’s Eléments pour un art nouveau [Elements for a New Art] (1971). I consider their impact on current debates over issues of the local and the global in an era when the Middle East is emerging as a new pole in the contemporary art world and when a rich diasporic production is creating alternative conceptions of nation and belonging. My paper also analyzes how early critical texts shaped thinking, over the next half century, on artistic subject matter, media, styles and taste in North Africa, up to the present. (1) These include Algerians Yellès, Ali-Khodja, Benanteur, Issiakhem and Khadda; Moroccans Belkahia, Melehi, Gharbaoui and A. Elbaz; Tunisians H. Turki and Belkhodja. (2) Katarzyna Pieprzak and Jessica Winegar, “Africa North, South and In Between.” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, No. 5, Fall 2009, page 5.