ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the marginalized representations of Blacks in Maghrebian literature and film. The Maghreb includes Northwest African countries such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Novels and films are useful for exploring evidence of racism and for insight into the nature of Black-Arab relations. Race is often described in locative terms, and this is largely because racial identities in the Maghreb are specialized. By focusing on the spatialization of blackness, the chapter sheds light on the ways power operates in the spaces where Blacks live. The chapter also highlights the representations of the imagined identities assigned to Blacks and casts light on how Blacks are often associated with death, the unconscious, and the mysteries of the night and magic. Implicitly, novels and films apply the discourse of fetishism in their representations of the Black other. They subtly suggest that the denigration of Blacks has helped make patriarchy what it is. Marked as superior to its Black other, patriarchy has profited from blackness, which is part of this discourse of fetishism. But even to the extent that Black characters are implicated in imaginary appropriations in service of patriarchal hegemony, their constructions are complex. The chapter discusses novels by Abdelkrim Ghallab, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Fatima Mernissi. It also analyses films by Farida Benlyazid, Moufida Tlatli, Leya Bouzid, and Merzek Allouache.
