Call for Papers: Archiver le Maghreb (Expressions maghrébines, Vol. 21, n.2, Winter 2022)

Vol. 21, n. 2, Winter 2022 : Call for Papers
Archiver le Maghreb
Edited by Marie-Pierre Ulloa

Final Papers Submission Deadline: 31 January 2022

Publication: November 2022

While the labels "Maghrebi literature" and "Maghrebi cinema" refer to well-established fields of study taught in academic settings, the term "Maghrebi archives" is less common. And yet the issue of constituting and preserving archives could hardly be more topical in today's Maghreb: Morocco's reconnection with its Maghrebi Jewish past as it inaugurated a center for memory in Essaouira; Tunisia's releasing hundreds of names of "martyrs" of the revolution that overthrew the Ben Ali regime in 2011; and Algeria's grappling with the vexing issue of access to archives pertaining to the war for independence, especially since the Stora report delivered to the French president in January 2021, a document engaging "issues of memory that bear upon colonization and the Algerian war," and which highlights the extreme political sensitivity surrounding access to archives, whether in France or in Algeria. A geographic area that corresponds to specific historical markers, the Maghreb has its cinema and its literature, but does it have archives, and where are they to be found?

In his famous lecture Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, the Franco-Maghrebi philosopher Jacques Derrida recalls that "the meaning of archive comes from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded." Thus, the word "archive" means a house that has authority, representing the alliance of power and knowledge, of those who hold and interpret the archive. But the archive is also "impression, writing, prosthesis or hypomnesiac technique more generally, not only the place for storing a past archivable content […]. Rather, the technical structure of the ‘archiving' archive also determines the structure of the ‘archivable' content in its very emergence and in its relation to the future."

In what way can the verbal and visual arts be approached as houses that differ from that of public, state-issued authority, to create archives and refresh the way we see the archiving archive of the Maghreb in both its past and future? Two research directions will emerge: that of the material locations of archiving, and that of immaterial locations, from the physical premises that house the Maghreb archives to the "archiving archives" of literature and the visual arts, not overlooking the promise of digitalized archives.

Although the countries of the Maghreb have been re-appropriating the Maghreb question ever since the independence era, the Maghreb archives have been hosted for several decades now in specific sites: the archives of writers distributed among the IMEC (Kateb Yacine, Leila Sebbar, Tahar Ben Jelloun), the BNF (Mohammed Dib), the Aix-en-Provence Cité du Livre (Albert Camus), the National Libraries of Tunis, Algiers, and the Kingdom of Morocco, and featuring documents in several languages: Arabic, Amazigh, Judeo-Arabic and French, but also in English, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, etc.

This issue of Expressions maghrébines will provide an opportunity to better define the issues of archives and archiving of the polysemous, secular, and multilingual Maghreb of the 19th through the 21st centuries, contextualizing the history of how the Maghrebi archives developed into a written and visual culture, insistently distinguishing what makes them distinctive as compared to other archives, be they national, pan-Arab, Berber, Jewish, or European, and finally, highlighting the challenges raised by the question of archives in the Maghreb today when it comes to constituting a university-based Maghrebi archival corpus that will de facto seek to "Maghrebize" the archives.

Some possible axes of inquiry include:

-The Politics of Archives, between history and memory: Is the Maghreb archivable in literature and cinema? Archive of the word "Maghreb," from colonialist/orientalist appropriation to acts of resistance and national advocacy, the sext of archives, gender and archives, other archives: Jewish, Black, Berber, Sahrawi, Andalusian archives; the Maghreb and recent issues arising in archive studies, such as the concept of "minor" archives, following Philippe Artières and Arlette Farge's Vies oubliées; can a Facebook or Instagram post be considered an archive item?

-Archives and dissemination: Publishing (the "Mediterranean" series at Seuil Editions); museums of the Maghreb outside the Maghreb proper (the Institute du Monde Arabe, the National Museum of the History of Immigration, the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MUCEM) in Marseille); book fairs and film festivals (the Tunis International Book Fair, the Marrakesh Book Festival, the Algiers International Book Fair, the French events Maghreb des livres and Maghreb des films, the Montreal Festival of the Arab World); academic journals (L'année du Maghreb, the magazine Maghreb, Journal of North African Studies, Expressions maghrébines); the issue of language and archives; sound archives (the album Maghreb United 2009, radio Maghreb in Montréal).

-The status of archives: classified, censured, destroyed and exiled archives ("Black" Algiers, from the pan-African festival to the Black Panthers); archives in migration (the Génériques association in France); scattered archives (the Jacques Berque papers, between Belfort and Frenda; the Germaine Tillion papers); archives with limited access (limited by whom? Why?); archiving definitive material or what is still in gestation?; archiving manuscript genetics, in the wake of Pierre-Marc Biasi and Guy Dugas; the archiving of film rushes and edits.

-How to archive the Maghreb: paper archives (the Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives [IMEC]), the French National Library (BNF), various cinematheques and museums); monuments (to the war dead from the "Wars in North Africa"); digital archives (Diarna, the Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life; Made in Algeria; the MUCEM; francophone manuscripts at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), including those of Albert Memmi and Mouloud Feraoun.

-Fiction Archives: literature, cinema, comic books and graphic novels: ideal or default site of archiving? The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, Le Pays des autres by Leïla Slimani, Fi rassi, un rond-point dans ma tête by Hassen Ferhani, L'Algérie du possible: la révolution d'Yves Mathieu by Viviane Candas, D'ailleurs, Derrida by Safaa Fathy, etc.

-Personal trajectories as archive: Mohamed Boudiaf, Frantz Fanon, Alice Cherki, Nabil Ayouch, Gisèle Halimi, Georges Burou, Abdellah Taïa, Sami Bouajila, Lubna Azabal, Kamel Mennour, Leïla Sebbar (novelist and editor of anthologies on the Maghreb), etc.

Articles should not exceed 40,000 characters, spaces included (approximately 6,000 words). Punctuation, footnotes, and references must conform with the journal's norms: