Another Country: Black Americans, Arab Worlds, 1952-1979
[Thesis]
Sophia Azeb
Gualtieri, Sarah
University of Southern California
2016
175
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor;
Ph.D.
University of Southern California
2016
'Another Country' constructs a multilingual Afro-Arab cultural archive of the transnational currents of blackness that manifested in France, Algeria, and Egypt during the Cold War. This project argues that Afro-Arab cultural encounters and collaborations between Egyptians, Algerians, African Americans, and other African diasporic communities in this era mobilized blackness as a language through which North Africans could communicate their respective anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles to black people in 'Arab spaces." The people and subjects that constitute this archive-among them, James Baldwin, William Gardner Smith, David Graham Du Bois, Sun Ra, Frantz Fanon, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Front de Libération Nationale's dual-language newspaper, el Moudjahid, and the Cairo-based literary magazine, Lotus-are largely familiar in the study of black transnational politics and cultures. However, this dissertation reorients its subjects as representative of a series of racial and cultural reimaginings that are made possible through the entanglements of distinctive and varied black identities in translation. Though these translational efforts often revealed tensions between African Americans and their African/Arab counterparts, I contend such tensions fomented new and expansive articulations of blackness and the African diaspora across and through the boundaries of difference. Through this analysis, "Another Country" theorizes the place of Arabic-speaking peoples within the African Diaspora with the aim of contributing to a more thorough historical understanding of blackness in North Africa.
Black studies; Cultural anthropology; North African Studies; Ethnic studies