It is by now a well-known and remarked-upon fact that there exists a problematic divide between north and south in the scholarship on Africa, a divide that ignores centuries-long continental circulations of people, objects, images, and practices. Another scholarly divide, which is well known to Middle East scholars, but less so to Africanists, exists between the eastern and western parts of North Africa. This regional partitioning is reproduced in the structuring of academic departments/centers, professional associations, funding organizations, and publications, as well as in the often parallel structuring of visual culture venues, such as museums and their collections, exhibitions, and film series. Visual culture practitioners—artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians—also frequently experience and reproduce this divide.

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