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The Red in Red-Carpet Regalia: The Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage and the Fight for African Liberation
Abstract
In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role that Algeria played throughout the 1960s in fostering freedom fighters from around the world. Books such as historian Jeffrey James Byrne’s 2016 Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World and Elaine Mokhtefi’s 2018 Algiers Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers, have established Algeria as a hub of revolutionary activity and as a key player in determining the ideology and composition of the Third World or Pan-African communities. Algeria hosted and trained what Byrnes calls the “pieds rouges” [red feet], a babel of leftists, revolutionaries and other idealists from around the globe drawn by the country’s reputation as the Mecca of Revolution. With the assistance of the Organization of African Unity, the Algerian government organized the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers, bringing together artists and militants from across Africa in an effort to achieve cultural decolonization. While scholarship on Algeria has played a crucial part in recentering the Maghreb in the history of the postcolonial world, Morocco and Tunisia are still eclipsed by their revolutionary next-door neighbor. This article turns to Tunisia’s attempt to match Algerian efforts towards cultural decolonization. In 1966, the Tunisian cultural ministry, determined to become a key player in the African cultural scene, created the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage [JCC]. The JCC’s beginnings were weak and geared towards European approval. But under the joint leadership of Tunisian intellectual Tahar Cheriaa and Senegalese novelist and director Ousmane Sembene, the biennale emerged as a panafrican forum for anti-colonial resistance and criticism. By the end of the 1960s, with the Maghrebi post-colonial governments’ increasing control over the printing press and the media, the hopes for the role that poetry or fiction could play in liberation were dying out. A number of African writers turned instead to film, exchanging cameras and cameramen, carrying reels halfway across the continent to show in cinematheques, or in town-square projections. With film, they felt, they could more easily reach the masses. Through interviews with JCC participants and administrators, pamphlets, press coverage, and personal correspondence this article looks at the JCC as the final Maghrebi home to a transnational network of young artist-militants in the mid-1970s, before the Tunisian government eventually reclaimed the space and turned it into red-carpet regalia.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
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