Poets, playwrights, and filmmakers rubbed shoulders with—and sometimes took turns as—revolutionaries and freedom fighters in the era’s global struggles. As they agitated against imperial powers and autocratic regimes, these men supported one another with financing, military training, venues to publish and perform, and, perhaps most important, opportunities to serve as ideological sparring partners. Tolan-Szkilnik is perceptive and candid about the limits of liberation: women were hardly present except as the typists and messengers for a predictably patriarchal generation of revolutionaries. The ghost of one of the movement’s most acute analysts, the Marxist revolutionary and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, who died of leukemia at 36, in 1961, hovers over the entire assembly. Please enable JavaScript for this site to function properly.

Source: The North Africa Journal December 12, 2023 05:13 UTC