Decolonising Violence: Revolutionary Affinities Between the U.S. Black Power Movement and the Moroccan Journal Souffles

This article examines how the U.S. Black Power movement and Souffles, the Moroccan journal of culture and politics, sought through their publications and political activism to critique the violence that founds state power. Theories of revolutionary violence by Walter Benjamin and Frantz Fanon ground this comparative analysis, which begins with the two movements' intersection at the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. Close readings of Souffles' homage to the Black Panthers, Souffles' translations of the Black Arts movement poet Don L. Lee, and analyses of poetry and criticism by key Souffles contributors reveal poetic and critical modes that harness the spectacle and rhetoric of violence to condemn it. Just as Souffles' editor-in-chief Abdellatif Laâbi underscores the need for what he terms 'cultural decolonisation' even after political decolonisation has been achieved, so these modes of critiquing colonial violence form a means of 'decolonising violence' in a double sense: both as a predicate indicating the dismantling of state violence that functions as the foundational mechanism of state power, and as an adjective-noun pair that indicates rhetorical violence that does the work of cultural decolonisation. While in the end it may not have been possible for either of these movements to disentangle violence itself from state power, they were able to dismantle the spectacle and rhetoric of state-founding and state-preserving violence in enduring ways that, although they cannot undo that violence, can momentarily and transformationally wrest the power of that violence from the state.