Vol. 23, n° 2, Winter 2024: Call for Papers
Le Maghreb africain
Edited by Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik
Final Papers Submission Deadline: January 31, 2024
Publication: November 2024
The numerous migratory crises that Europe has crossed in the past ten years have made the Maghreb the epicenter of Europe’s immigration anxieties. Indeed, the Maghreb has become, for many Africans, an entryway into Europe—a place of passage, a liminal space in which to wait for visas, boats, or any other means to enter Europe, an obligatory step and one that they would happily do without. In the Maghreb too, the increase in this Black and migrant population has revived many debates on the relationship of Maghrebis with other Africans, on contemporary racism in the Maghreb, and on the long history of the trans-Saharan slave trade. The recent influx of migrants has also served to highlight the multiple forms of circulation (of peoples, ideas, and goods) that have linked the Maghreb to the rest of the continent for centuries. To understand contemporary North Africa, and the present-day political demands of many Black North Africans, it is essential to explore the relationships between the Maghreb and the rest of the African continent and to look, in particular, at cultural, religious, and economic interconnections.
Despite its prime location on the Mediterranean and its long history as a crossroads between the Middle East, Africa and Europe, North Africa has remained marginal to the historiographies of all those regions. The Sahara still acts as a dividing line between the Maghreb and the rest of the continent, a partition reflected not only in academic scholarship, but also in the organization of many academic departments, for which Africa often signifies merely Sub-Saharan Africa. A new generation of historians and geographers have started to break down this fictitious construct by revealing the dynamic movement of people, goods, and ideas through the various regions of Northern Africa in the pre-colonial and colonial eras. Researchers who study the trans-Saharan space are doing vital work, particularly in the tense contemporary context surrounding the teaching of French colonial history. The question of race and of its vocabulary has increasingly headlined the Maghrebi and international press. It is essential for specialists of Africa and the Middle East to historicize this vocabulary and to demonstrate that the ethnic and racial categories that many Europeans and Africans think of as immutable sometimes have relatively short histories and ones directly linked to the history of colonialism, while other racial categories predate the colonial period and evolved alongside the colonial occupation of North Africa.
This issue of Expressions Maghrébines proposes to consider the Maghreb as an African space. In an attempt to bridge the trans-Saharan divide, we invite researchers and artists to send us their contributions along the following lines:
- Representations of the relationship between the Maghreb and the rest of the African continent in literature, visual arts, and film.
- The use of literary genres and other arts in writing the history of the African Maghreb and of Black Maghrebis.
- Reflective pieces on the interactions between colonial racial categories and those indigenous to the Maghreb.
- Slavery in North Africa.
- Racial issues in the contemporary Maghreb.
Articles should not exceed 40,000 characters, spaces included (approximately 6,000 words). Punctuation, footnotes, and references must conform with the journal’s norms: https://expressions-maghrebines.tulane.edu.
Articles or requests for further information should be sent to the Chair of the Editorial Board at: expressions.maghrebines@ub.edu.
The journal’s VARIA section maintains an open call for articles concerning Maghrebi cultures: literature, cinema, arts…
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