Moroccan Publishing, Cultural Decolonization, and the Book Revolution: The Souffles Experience, 1966-1971

Episode 219: Moroccan Publishing, Cultural Decolonization, and the Book Revolution: The Souffles Experience, 1966-1971

During the 1960s and 1970s, Morocco was a center for the invention of cultural decolonization and a key site in the twentieth-century book revolution. A group of young poets, novelists, critics, painters, and photographers created a cluster of publications, whose centerpiece was the magazine Souffles, and linked their publishing projects to ideas about national cultural decolonization on a global scale. The magazines, paperbacks, chapbooks, and posters they made have loomed large in the landscapes of postcolonial francophone literature and Moroccan modernist art for nearly six decades. The Souffles story also highlights the key roles of print media and cultural institutions for mid-twentieth-century discussions about the end of empire. Important and underexplored primary sources relating to these publishing projects exist in the collections of Moroccan libraries and booksellers. In this episode, Alexander Baert Young, Ph.D. candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University and 2023 AIMS/TALIM fellow, presents research he completed in Morocco during June-July 2023 at the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc, in the library of the Ecole des Sciences de l’Information, and at used book dealers in Rabat and Tangier.

Alexander Baert Young is a historian whose work connects book history, African history, and French history. As a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Johns Hopkins University, Young is currently researching and writing his dissertation, “Africa’s Book Revolution: Print Culture, Decolonization, and Development, 1954-1988,” a multi-site project that will tell the connected stories of African publishers, librarians, bibliographers, cultural development experts, and media theorists across Morocco, Tunisia, Cameroon, Senegal, France, and beyond. His research draws on published paperbacks, little magazines, book fair catalogues, media studies and library science scholarship, and bibliographies, as well as archives of nation-states, international organizations, publishing companies, libraries, and writers. Young’s work has received support from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (including the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies and the Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis), the Western Society for French History, and the Bourse Jeanne Marandon of the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique. During June-July 2023, he conducted research in Morocco as an AIMS/TALIM fellow.

To see related slides please visit our website: www.themagribpodcast.com

Discover an other podcast by Alexander Baert Young: Episode 175: Tunisian Librarians and the Book History of African Decolonization, 1956-1988

This episode was recorded on July 19, 2023, at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM). 

Recorded and edited by: Abdelbaar Mounadi Idrissi, Outreach Director at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM).