Andy Stafford

Tricontinentalism in recent Moroccan intellectual history: the case of Souffles

The 1960s phenomenon of tricontinentalism, originating in Havana in 1966, had its strongest politico-artistic impact on the African side of the Atlantic in Morocco. We can trace this through the avant-garde journal Souffles, published in Rabat between 1966 and 1972. The intellectual space that Souffles came to dominate lay at the crossroads of different anti-colonial ideologies: both Arabist and keen to promote Berber culture; both Moroccan and Maghrebi as it called for a new culture in North Africa; both pan-Africanist and pan-Arabist; and exhibiting signs of ‘Maoisant’ Marxism to boot. It is thanks largely to the ideological scope of Souffles that Morocco became a pivot for the Tricontinental Movement worldwide.

Roland Barthes's Travels in China: writing a diary of dissidence within dissidence?

Considering the style of writing employed in his diaries Travels in China, published posthumously and without the author’s permission, this article traces Roland Barthes’s uneasy resistance to Maoist propaganda during and after his trip to China with Tel Quel in April 1974. By analysing the elliptical and easily distracted manner in which he records his impressions, the conclusion is that the diaries prefigure the quandary in which Barthes finds himself when asked for his views on China by the French daily newspaper Le Monde on his return. His ‘suspension of judgement’ in the subsequent front-page article is qualified by the seminar on China that he gives to his students, and which has been recently published in Le Lexique de l’auteur, the experiment on the ‘self’ and the social image of the writer which becomes Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Introduction: transatlanticism and tricontinentalism

This special issue concerns the confluence of what we have chosen to term ‘transatlanticism’ and ‘tricontinentalism’; or rather, its focus is on a very broad understanding of transatlanticism that encompasses the multilingual, multicultural and multiracial realities of the Atlantic region (with tactical bracketing of the role of traditionally hegemonic ‘white’ European and United States cultures), wherein the discourse and practice of tricontinentalism, stemming from the First Tricontinental Conference of 1966, function as one of the most salient, and indeed most positive, examples of this kind of plural transatlanticism. Hence, our choice of title for the issue ‘new transatlanticisms’ to indicate both the plurality and relative novelty of our approach to transatlantic solidarities, discourses, dialogues and imaginaries. (Of this, more later.) In early 1966, following the First Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, the Organizacion de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, Africa y America Latina (Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, or OSPAAAL) was founded with the aim of promoting and providing support for anticolonial resistance in the three continents. It was, in effect, a way of allowing Latin America to formally join the pre-existing Organisation of Solidarity for the People of Africa and Asia. Nevertheless, despite being the last continent to be invited to join the organisation, for many key Latin American leaders, thinkers and/or activists the creation of OSPAAAL and the ethos of tricontinentalism that the events of 1966 brought into being the consciousness of the comparable and linked trajectories of the nations of the Third World and the will to actively promote solidarity among ‘tricontinental’ nations and groups were quickly ‘Latin-Americanised’, to the extent that the organisation still has its official headquarters in Havana some 40 years later, and is still today publishing its widely distributed and almost infamous journal, Tricontinental. It goes without saying that this ‘joined-up’ anti-imperialist thinking across the Third World as a whole does not start with the Havana conference, and neither, strictly speaking, does Latin American involvement with this movement. With respect to the latter issue first, prior to the 1966 conference, Latin Americans had