Our Mission & History

Souffles: The Platform of Post-colonial Subjectivity

Public education in Tamazgha, the broader North Africa, is in a shambolic state. Universities are caught between brutal regimes that stifle free inquiry and starve academic departments of resources, and religious movements that are staunchly illiberal and intolerant of critique of patriarchy or tradition. In addition, the scholarship that does reach students is using concepts derived from a non-African context, and often written in languages few can read. The downside of globalization is that scholars and researchers from the Global South are putting American labels on their problems, deploying American and European categories in incongruous contexts. Social scientists in India have pushed back against this dominance by launching the “subaltern school,” Latin America has responded to intellectual marginalization with “decoloniality.” South Africa is responding with a discourse of “African Renaissance.” Yet North Africa, squeezed between Western and Arab-Islamic hegemony, and bled by brain-drain, has not mounted an effective response. It is high time that intellectuals and scholars from this region generated both theory and language that expresses their own processes of decolonization in their own terms, and our resurrection of Souffles is a contribution to this lofty endeavor. One benefit of the information revolution is that it is now possible to bypass state bureaucracy and borders by starting initiatives online. Our hope is to create a platform that will function like an academic and decolonial hub online, publishing original research, promoting South-South intellectual dialogue, promoting and translating scholarship from different parts of Africa and the Global South, developing local social science paradigms to analyze African and global developments.

Souffles Monde/Anfas al-‘alam follows in the footsteps of Souffles, which fifty years ago, was a flagship journal of the pan-African and Third World Left. Our hope is to use this august publication as a platform for academic exchange across Africa. From its modest base in Rabat, this cultural review sought to liberate North Africa from colonial paradigms and nativist thinking, and put forth a new discourse of Tri-Continentalism and Afro-Arab cosmopolitanism. The journal would go on to connect a range of discourses and literatures: the editors would put Frantz Fanon and the authors of Présence Africaine into dialogue with Arab nationalist poets, bringing proponents of Third World Cinema into conversation with theorists of the Bolivian and Vietnamese revolutions. For six years, this publication would publish political commentary and literature in French and Arabic. Our time is different from the 1970s when Laâbi and Serfaty had to pay for their right to intellectual freedom with political disappearance, torture, and lengthy jail periods. In resurrecting Souffles, we are not striving to resurrect the mother-journal but rather envisioning to build off of this history to put the broader North Africa into dialogue with itself and the wider world.

In term of mission, our credo is “Decolonizing Decoloniality.” For all the talk of “epistemic freedom” and “intellectual sovereignty,” much of the thinking about the Global South is framed using concepts produced in the Global North; even decoloniality is studied through frameworks produced at Harvard and Berkeley, rather than the theories of Kwame Nkrumah or Amical Cabral. As decoloniality is caught up in discursive practices developed in the Global North, the colonial and its effects are forgotten about. The challenge then is to push against a Global-North-focused decoloniality, which has been reduced to a discourse, and foreground scholar and civic action in the Global South, for which colonial legacies are life issues, to decolonize education, culture, language, and even economies. We hope to promote the work of scholars in Africa, but also to promote direct South-South contact.

Our second objective is to transcend Africa's language divides. Africa’s universities are struggling for multiple reasons, but also the little scholarship that does reach students in Africa is often written in languages few can access. Our objective is to create a platform to support and showcase original research, but also to support translation that will bring research from scholars across Africa to the rest of the world, and to translate cutting edge scholarship in Western languages into local languages. The long-standing geographic and discursive division between “North Africa” and “sub-Saharan Africa” has had grave consequences for social science research in Africa and the West. It has led to the marginalization and Middle East Studies of North Africa (from African Studies), a sidelining that has carried over to the canonical outlets of production of knowledge. In reinventing Souffles' trans-African and transnational spirit, the journal will not only bridge the scholarly divide between North and sub-Saharan African, but will also reflect the changing cultural and political mood in North Africa that has been turning southward. Souffles will help normalize scholarly research that puts North and sub-Saharan Africa in dialogue in a consistent and systematic manner.

Central to this initiative is mentorship. As part of its mentoring mission, Souffles Monde will hold writing and editing workshops for African contributors. The journal will be a space for intergenerational mentorship and exchange; we will connect younger researchers with established scholars to work on thematic issues relevant to their shared interests. The editors will make every effort to reach minority writers and underprivileged groups to help them benefit from the opportunities the journal will offer in terms of training, mentorship, and guidance. Our base will be the American Legation in Tangier, though we are already building ties with various universities and institutions in the region.

Read more about the Editorial Committee.

Our History

Souffles was launched in March 1966, in Rabat, Morocco, ten years after Morocco’s independence and only four years after the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) ended. The moment of the journal’s establishment was rife with post-colonial struggles, transnational solidarities, and relentless endeavors to create a different and new world order. Led by poet Abdellatif Laâbi in collaboration with poets Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine and Mostafa Nissaboury, who had already started Poésie Toute in 1964, this small group of literary figures was joined by artists Mohamed Melehi, Mohammed Chabaâ, and Farid Belkahia from the Casablanca School. Abraham Serfaty, an associate of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers then based in Algiers who would later become one of Morocco's most well-known political prisoners, joined the editorial board in 1968, marking the political turn in the journal’s trajectory. In a matter of a few years Souffles became a node, a medium and interface in the intellectual, political and artistic production of a nascent Moroccan postcolonial subjectivity. Faced with the traditional language used then, Souffles’ editors strove to renew language as a segue into a larger renewal of literature, thought, and society.Although postcolonial Morocco had several Arabic cultural journals, Souffles’ publication in 1966 marked a departure from the prevalent literary and intellectual discourses. Before it was officially banned in 1972 and its editors Laâbi and Serfaty arrested respectively 1972 and 1974, the journal turned the linguistic and literary scenes in Morocco upside down. It announced the advent of a new dawn, and its authors were the heralds of a Morocco that fully embraced its post-coloniality to reorder the priorities of a decolonizing world in conversation with like-minded people across the globe. Part of embracing this post-coloniality was replacing the stale and archaic language of culture and literature by a fiery and rebellious aesthetics that imploded language from within. Linguistic guerilla, as it came to be known, tarted language as a site of literary renewal and cultural regeneration, and Souffles played a crucial role in this effort.

Abdellatif Laâbi, the lead founder

Born in Fès in 1942, Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet, writer, playwright, literary critic and translator. He studied French literature at the Université Mohammed V in Rabat. In 1963, while still a student, he launched the Moroccan university theater in Rabat. In 1966, Laâbi founded the literary journal Souffles (Anfas) in collaboration with Mohammed Khair Eddine and others. The journal became popular among Moroccan leftists. A few years after the March 1965 protests, he joined the Party of Liberation and Socialism and Ila al-Amam movement. In January 1972, he was arrested and condemned to 10 years in prison in Kenitra. He was released in 1980 and moved to France where he developed his literary career. Laâbi received the Prix Goncourt de la poésie in 2009 and Mahmoud Darwish Award for Culture and Creativity in 2020 among many other prizes. In 2002, Laâbi published his autobiographical novel Le fond de la jarre.

A translated letter from Laâbi to Souffles Monde
‍‍Six years ago, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Souffles’ establishment in Rabat. The event, which lasted for three days and included an international colloquium, exhibits, debates, and recitals, brought together the majority of the living participants in this adventure and allowed us to pay homage to those men and women who left us along the way. On this occasion, we succeeded in republishing Souffles’ complete issues in both French and Arabic and have since made them available to the public.

And now there is the major event of the publication of Souffles Monde’s first issue in the United States! I believe that this is a very strong sign of the sustainability of the spirit of a publication that only lasted for a few years in the middle of the past century : a « fiery season*», as I have written elsewhere, where forms of literary and artistic expression as well as critical thought in Morocco, and beyond the Maghreb, have been transformed completely; where the trial of colonial domination, particularly in the cultural arena, took place in a radical manner, which dealt with the question of identity in a precocious and remarkable pertinence. That a new generation feels the need to reactivate the spirit of Souffles fills me with joy. The fact that the editorial team and the collaborators hail from diverse horizons and that the Maghrebis among them work and take action in their country of origin or in the diaspora will contribute, without any doubt, to the expansion of the journal’s vision and its field of investigation. The universal, which had always been the indefectible horizon of the predecessors, will necessarily become even more reinforced by the successors.To these women and men, I say courage! And good luck to Souffles Monde!

Abdellatif Laâbi
Créteil, March 21, 2023

Translated from the French by Brahim El Guabli
*See Une saison ardente. Souffles, cinquante ans après. Coédition Éditions du Sirocco (Casablanca) et Fondation Laâbi pour la culture, 2016.

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“Bon vent à Souffles Monde!”
Il y a six ans, nous avons célébré à Rabat le cinquantenaire de la création de la revue Souffles. L’événement, qui a duré trois jours (colloque international, expositions, débats, récitals), a réuni la plupart des participants encore vivants de cette aventure et permis de rendre hommage à celles et ceux qui nous ont quittés en cours de route. À cette occasion, nous avons réussi à rééditer l’intégrale des numéros de Souffles, en français comme en arabe, et les remettre ainsi à la disposition du public.Et voilà qu’aujourd’hui un autre événement d’envergure voit le jour, avec la sortie aux États-Unis du premier numéro de la revue Souffles Monde ! Je crois qu’il y a là un signe très fort de la pérennité de l’esprit d’une publication qui n’a vécu que quelques années au milieu du siècle précédent : une « saison ardente* », comme j’ai pu l’écrire ailleurs, où les formes d’expression littéraires et artistiques ainsi que la pensée critique au Maroc, et au-delà au Maghreb, ont été transformées de fond en comble, où le procès de la domination coloniale, notamment sur le plan culturel, s’est opéré de manière radicale, où la question de l’identité a été traitée avec une pertinence d’une précocité remarquable.Qu’une nouvelle génération ait ressenti le besoin de ranimer l’esprit de Souffles me comble de joie. Le fait que l’équipe de rédaction et les collaborateurs viennent d’horizons divers, que les Maghrébins d’entre eux travaillent et agissent dans leurs pays d’origine ou fassent partie de la diaspora, contribuera, à n’en pas douter, à un élargissement des champs de l’investigation et de la vision. L’universel, qui a toujours été l’horizon indéfectible des précurseurs, va nécessairement être encore plus affermi par les continuateurs.À elles et à eux, courage ! Et bon vent à Souffles Monde !

Abdellatif LaâbiCréteil, 21 mars 2023
* Voir Une saison ardente. Souffles, cinquante ans après. Coédition Éditions du Sirocco (Casablanca) et Fondation LAÂBI pour la culture, 2016.