This paper discusses ways of thinking about Maghrebi visual culture. I take visual culture to be the shared practices of a group, community, or society through which meanings are made out of the visual, aural, and textual world of representations. I delineate select characteristics of Maghrebi visual culture that generally varies by place, local culture, gender, and over time. I begin with the modern era and photography, namely, how camera technology developed locally to create camera culture. With the advent, first of film, and later TV, horizons of the possible, that is, horizons of expectation, channeled certain of the directions that these technologies took. Governments in particular played important, sometimes determinative, roles regarding funding, censorship, and distribution. Development of the Internet, including email and blogging, and of social media technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, have built on and elaborated in turn earlier horizons of expectation. Access to and spread of social media has entailed individual and societal costs, as well as government regulation and censorship. Cellphone cameras enabled citizen journalists posting to the Internet during the Arab Spring to disseminate news and documentary footage outside commercial and government networks. In important ways, Maghrebi visual culture is transnational; it is marked by degrees of hybridity and in-betweenness. Certain visual artists born in the Maghreb live and work in the US or Europe; in their lives and works they traffic back and forth. During the Egyptian Arab Spring video artists created mashups editing together protest images with scenes from V for Vendetta. In short, this paper engages several themes adumbrated by the panel organizers, namely, the production and spread of alternative visual cultures in the Maghreb, ways in which Maghrebi visual culture in the diaspora engages with local production of art, and critical theories of visuality that Maghrebian cultural products exemplify and interrogate.

Throughout the colonial era photographers such as Marcelin Flandrin, an Algerian pied-noir who settled in Morocco at the establishment of the protectorate, collaborated with the government and tourism boards to construct a European vision of North African society and history. Known as the photographer of Casablanca because of his heavy involvement with the Protectorate government, in the era immediately following independence Flandrin’s work was criticized for reproducing Orientalist stereotypes and supporting the colonizing mission. Since the 1980s, however, Flandrin’s images have been appropriated as a critical part of Moroccan identity in order to resituate the protectorate as a part of Moroccan, rather than solely French, history. This paper argues that the appropriation of colonial visual culture was central to the establishment of postcolonial national identity in Morocco. In it, I examine Flandrin’s transformation from an archetypal French colonial photographer to a part of Moroccan heritage through an analysis of key events in Flandrin’s colonial career, and the subsequent appropriation of Flandrin by Moroccan scholars and cultural institutions. In 1928 and 1956, Flandrin published collections of his work that presented the French colonial project as necessary and beneficial to the nation. Though 1956 marked the year of Moroccan independence, Flandrin’s work presented French colonialism as unwavering and looked forward to a colonial future. In 1988, the Groupe de Recherches et d’Etudes sur Casablanca (G.R.E.C.) at the Hassan II University in Casablanca republished these works and reframed them through the incorporation of two new prefaces. With these new prefaces, the G.R.E.C. directed the book towards a new, Moroccan audience. Whereas Flandrin’s work was originally created in order to convey the progress and modernization that justified colonialism, the reprint allows the formerly conquered Moroccans to expand their knowledge of Casablanca as well as disprove the predictions and ideals of Flandrin and the French colonial project that he represented. The appropriation of Flandrin continued in 1994 when the Fondation Banque Populaire pour l'Education et la Culture purchased the Flandrin archive as part of their ongoing effort to maintain essential parts of Moroccan heritage within the country. The effort of the G.R.E.C. and the Fondation Banque populaire to integrate Flandrin into Moroccan heritage and history symbolizes the attempt to reinterpret this era of history through a Moroccan lens. This paper examines the ways in which these images cross political and temporal boundaries as Moroccans insert new meanings onto these historical photographs.

In the wake of Tunisia’s political independence from France in 1956, the country had set out to actively preserve its built heritage and cultural monuments. Through the establishment of the Institut National d’Archéologie et d’Art (INAA) in 1957, and later, the Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina de Tunis (ASM) in June 1967, these institutions were the first of their kind in the Middle East or North Africa to promote a coherent notion of heritage. Yet the theoretical underpinnings of both the INNA and ASM were modeled after France’s ‘Loi Malraux’ of 1962 for protecting cultural patrimony. Chartered with the task of preserving Tunisia’s great historic cities, the association focused less on restoring monuments to their initial glory and more on recovering the timeworn urban fabric to a viable, livable state. With many decrepit low-income homes at risk of destruction—in part due to President Habib Bourguiba’s formal decree of 1957 demanding the razing of gourbivilles, or mud-built slum districts—certain areas received the privilege of preservation while others were neglected. This paper—which constitutes a chapter of my dissertation—questions the construction and self-evidence of heritage in Tunisia, illustrating how the voices of certain social strata are suppressed in its making, while those bolstering its legitimacy service the coherence of nationhood. In the case of preservation, how does the vernacular forward a politics of indigeneity? This paper illuminates the complicities and ambivalence of the post-colonial nation-state, and how the translations of utopic, state-sponsored rhetoric into programmatic aestheticization and demolition, clashed with the ever-growing crises of habitation.

Nouri Bouzid is the doyen of Tunisian cinema. Not only was he involved in every major postcolonial film, whether as a screenwriter, scriptwriter or even actor, but he singlehandedly directed more than half-a-dozen films, each of which enjoyed wide national and international acclaim. Perhaps because of his firsthand experience of prison and torture for five years under the ancien régime of Habib Bourguiba, Nouri Bouzid’s cinematographic passion has centered on staging defeated and broken individuals in search of human dignity, societal justice and political reckoning. For example, in his 1986 début feature film Rih essed (a.k.a Man of Ashes), he tackles the issue of child molestation and the ways in which a sexually abused apprentice carpenter grows into adulthood marked by the scandal of homosexuality and lack of manhood, which prompts him at the end to avenge himself against his molester, the boss carpenter. Similarly, in Akher film (aka Making of), he chronicles the fate of yet another defeated and broken individual (here a street break-dancer and something of a crook) whose pursuit of an illegal passage to Europe turns into a misguided pursuit of paradise and martyrdom at a time when the 2003 illegal British and US-led military campaign against Iraq was well under way, igniting feelings of shame, humiliation, and anger throughout the Arab world. The disoriented 25-year-old Bahta (Lotfi Abdelli) falls into the hands of a clandestine fundamentalist (intégriste) faction and is gradually indoctrinated into believing that the best thing he could do with his life is literally to blow it up for the sake of a guaranteed paradise and dozens of voluptuously beautiful houris, or young women. This paper will engage with the reverberations of the topoi of defeat, failure and impotence in Bouzid’s filmography in order to discern the counterintuitive strategies and visions of dissent his films present us with.