Publications
What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Contents
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
Women’s Creative Disobedience in Post-Arab Spring Morocco: Slam Poetry and RAPtivism
Maha Tazi
Abstract
As a young woman who was raised in Morocco, I started attending, in the early 2000s, several music concerts that were organised by the alternative music scene in my native city, Casablanca. These concerts were very much anti-system in that the artists denounced several social issues that were specific to the Moroccan context back then, such as widespread socioeconomic inequalities, regime abuse and corruption, illegal immigration, drug abuse among the youth, etc.1 In that sense, these concerts contributed to shaping my social and political consciousness at a very young age. But at the same time, as a young woman myself, I couldn’t help but notice that even the countercultural sphere was very much male-dominated and that there was very little space for women artists–women performing on stage–or artists talking about gender issues in general. So I wondered: Why did the alternative music scene fail to integrate women as part of its wider social justice agenda?
A few years forward into my PhD journey, I came across a very interesting paradigm in the literature that describes Egyptian women’s contemporary forms of resistance as creative disobedience–or what we can call artivism; art activism.2 Opting to make it the topic of my dissertation, I focused on the existence and patterns of women’s creative disobedience in Morocco today, in terms of the content, aesthetics and thematics that women artists tackle through their productions. Since I also explore women’s artistic expressions post-2011, I ask the following question: Did the Arab Spring constitute a turning point for feminine artistic expressions in Morocco?
1
Moulay Driss El Maarouf, “The Rise of the Underground Moroccan Music Festivals between Laughter, Drunkenness, and Excre-Mentality,” Akademisk 3 (2011), and “The aesthetic and practical fields of excrementality of L’boulevard festival,” Social Dynamics 40, no. 3, (2014): pp. 575–588.
2
Margot Badran, “Creative Disobedience: Feminism, Islam, and Revolution in Egypt,” in Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa, ed. Fatima Sadiqi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 45–60.
Moulay Driss El Maarouf, “The Rise of the Underground Moroccan Music Festivals between Laughter, Drunkenness, and Excre-Mentality,” Akademisk 3 (2011), and “The aesthetic and practical fields of excrementality of L’boulevard festival,” Social Dynamics 40, no. 3, (2014): pp. 575–588.
2
Margot Badran, “Creative Disobedience: Feminism, Islam, and Revolution in Egypt,” in Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa, ed. Fatima Sadiqi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 45–60.
