Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik

Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik is a historian of 20th century Africa and the Middle East. She specializes in questions of race, gender, and sex in the post-colonial Maghreb. She has published in Jadaliyya, the Arab Studies Journal, World Art, Monde(s), The Markaz Review, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, amongst others. Tolan-Szkilnik is committed to writing and promoting transnational and transregional histories of Africa and the Middle East.

Her first book, Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Post-colonial Future (Stanford, 2023) tells the story of a group of militant-artists, some Maghrebi, others Angolan, Haitian, or American, who led Pan-African cultural and political projects out of the recently decolonized cities of Rabat, Algiers, and Tunis. Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to, what we would now call, the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for militant-artists, and the region reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse through the 1960s and 1970s. Maghreb Noir dives into the personal and political lives of these militant-artists, who collectively challenged the neo-colonialist structures and the authoritarianism of African states.

Entrenched divisions in academia between North Africa and the rest of the continent have obscured the lives and histories of the men and women whose story she tells in Maghreb Noir. By centering figures such as Angolan writer Mario de Andrade, Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, and Algerian poet Jean Sénac, Maghreb Noir challenges the notion that Pan-Africanism was a project led solely by Black Anglophone men. Drawing on Arabic, Portuguese, French, and English sources, and interviews with the militant-artists themselves, the book expands our understanding of Pan-Africanism geographically, linguistically, and temporally. This network of militant-artists departed from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, instead following in the footsteps of their intellectual mentor, Frantz Fanon. They argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, trans-racial, and in defiance of the emerging nation-states. Maghreb Noir establishes the importance of North Africa in nurturing these global connections—and uncovers a lost history of grassroots collaboration among militant-artists from across the globe.

Tolan-Szkilnik is working on a second project on the role of sex and sexual violence in revolutionary movements across the Third World in the second half of the 20th century. In 20th-century revolutionary movements sex had the ability to act both as a liberatory practice and as a subjugating one. The book will explore how revolutionary moments allowed some people to express sex in new and innovative ways while others deployed sex as a violent tool to police the boundaries of the post-revolutionary society.