Tunisian Librarians and the Book History of African Decolonization, 1956-1988

After Tunisian independence in 1956, librarians confronted new questions about national culture, cultural development, and ongoing cultural decolonization after political independence. The Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie took on new missions in national bibliography and in the cataloguing of Tunisian and African publications; librarians organized their profession and struggled over its leadership; and scholars and students at Tunisia’s schools for information sciences conducted research in book history and in the sociology of literature. Their projects joined with similar efforts by librarians, book historians, and bibliographers across Africa to work through the history of colonization by France and the new needs of national independence in newly-independent nation-states. These Maghribi and African library histories show how decolonization reshaped book history in the twentieth century, as well as how librarians contributed to the invention of new ideas and practices of decolonization and development through books. 

In this episode, Alexander Baert Young, Ph.D. candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University and 2023 AIMS/CEMAT fellow, presents research he conducted in Tunisia during April-May 2023 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie, the Archives Nationales de Tunisie, the Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information, the Institut Supérieur de Documentation, the Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et l’Information, the CEMAT library, and Tunis’ used book sellers. 

Alexander Baert Young is a historian whose work connects African history, French history, and book history. As a PhD candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University, he is researching and writing his dissertation on African print culture in French and the twentieth-century "book revolution." In Tunis during April-May 2023, with support from AIMS and CEMAT, he conducted primary source research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie,  the Archives Nationales de Tunisie, the Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l'Information, the Institut Supérieur de Documentation, the Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et l'Information, the CEMAT library, and Tunis' many used book sellers. This research in Tunisia will contribute to a multi-site project that aims to tell the connected stories of African publishers, librarians, bibliographers, cultural development experts, and media theorists in French-language contexts across Tunisia, Morocco, Cameroon, Senegal, and France. These "book people" theorized and practiced print culture as a battleground in post-independence struggles for "cultural decolonization" and "cultural development," and their stories can inform today's conversations about new media and decolonization.

This episode was recorded via Zoom on the 23rd of August, 2023 by the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT)

To see related slides, please visite our website: www.themaghribpodcast.com

We thank Dr. Tamara Turner, Ethnomusicologist and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions, for her interpretation of Sidna Ali, from the  diwan repertoir.

Posted by Hayet Lansari, Librarian, Outreach Coordinator, Content Curator (CEMA).