Ursula Biemann is an internationally exhibited artist, theorist and curator whose recent work has been concerned with issues of migration, mobility, technology and gender. Her video projects and books have focused on the gendered dimension of migrant labor, from smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border to migrant sex workers in the global context, connecting a theoretical macro level with the micro perspective on political and cultural practices on the ground. Insisting that location is spatially produced rather than pre-determined by governance, she has made space and mobility her prime category of analysis, as seen in her video and installation project on trans-Saharan mobility. Sahara Chronicle (2006-2009) was developed in the context of a collaborative research project, The Maghreb Connection (2006), between Swiss artists Biemann, Charles Heller, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Iorio, Cairo-based artists Hala Elkoussy, Doa Aly, Tangier-based artist Yto Barrada, the media activist network Observatorio Technologico, and Milanese photographer Armin Linke. In The Maghreb Connection the artists explored the North African region as a matrix of cultural, economic, and spatial transitions. They tracked the borders, routes, and modes of trans-Saharan migration toward the Mediterranean region and examined the elaborate, though precarious, systems of information and social organization that have grown up around them. Biemann’s own project, Sahara Chronicle, is comprised of short videos documenting the present sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. It examines the politics of mobility, visibility and containment which lie at the heart of current global geopolitics, based on material gathered during three fieldtrips to major gates and nodes of the trans-Saharan network in Morocco, Mauritania, and Niger, at locations where migratory intensity is bundled. No voice-over narrative strings these stories together. Meaning has to be extracted from the interstices between the documents, from the stretch of the journey that is invisible to the eye. For this issue of Critical Interventions Ursula Biemann has graciously shared a series of photo-text panels from Sahara Chronicle and a text that traces a political context for her project along with description, analysis, and media critique. Further details on the artist may be found at her website: [www.geobodies.org].—Eds.

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During the 2005 African Studies Association annual meetings in Washington, DC, Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi was confronted by a query regarding her personal identity as "African" in a forum that was not only public, but was composed entirely of regional specialists. Essaydi, who now lives in New York and has also lived in Saudi Arabia, is best known for her photographs of Moroccan women whose attire and skin are inscribed with Arabic script (Figure 1). As she told me, following her presentation, two members of the audience questioned her participation in such an Africa-oriented program, suggesting that she was less African than Arab. They cited the usual exhibition and discussion of her work as an "Arabic" artist, which have glossed over her origins as, geographically speaking, "African."1 In a similar vein, someone at her gallery at the time was also surprised that Essaydi was attending an African Studies conference, and asked why she was going. Essaydi noted that this question brings out the difference between how one identifies oneself versus how one is represented by others. When I asked her about this issue, she responded: "Being Moroccan, I identify first with the land that gave me birth—Africa. I, therefore, identify myself as an African. At the same time, I also identify myself as an Arab since Morocco is considered part of the Maghreb, representing the fusion of the civilizations of Africa and Arabia since the seventh century."2 Since she perceives her own identity as equally rooted in the African continent, it is interesting that only recently has Essaydi’s work been included in exhibitions of African art.

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In the Saharawi town of Zagora, in the south of Morocco, a now-famous sign painted in naïve style shows a local guide wearing traditional garb, dressed as one of the "blue men" (so named for their blue robe, the gandoura) with his desert caravan and camels (Figure 1).1 The French and Arabic captions recall the history of the trans-Saharan trade: "Timbouctou 52 jours." Widely reproduced globally, via the 2002 BBC television program and book, Sahara with Michael Palin, and locally via smaller copies and postcards for sale all over town, the image serves to suggest this region’s focus southward as it enters a world market for adventure tourism.2 A recent report gives a mean time of 62 days for launching a new business in Morocco—ironically longer than the trek to Timbuktu on foot—but for Zagorans working through the Rabat ministries to set up businesses in desert tourism it can be much longer.3 In fact, the quickest route to Mali is a day’s journey north, via the Casablanca airport; for those going by car, a first stop in Marrakech is necessary to get the transit visa for passage through Mauritania. Yet, the image of trans-Saharan routes to the south holds out a historic ideal of travel without visas, recalling a greater Moroccan empire; or more significantly, recalling the freedom symbolized by the desert. Given the powerful northward emigration from Africa to Europe, much of it through Morocco, this romanticization of Saharan freedom seems outdated—an image suggesting a Western fantasy rather than a North African reality—but it also dramatizes a local folklore that freedom does not lie to the north.

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By the end of 2007, years of increasingly punishing conflict in the Sudanese region of Darfur incited many American and European journalists and documentary-makers to project, on film, the experience of the conflict’s refugees. This was a time, as David Campbell has noted in his study of visual culture and world politics, when the UN’s special envoy for Sudan, Jan Pronk, "linked the world’s lack of concern about Darfur with an absence of photographic witnesses, and called on photojournalists to produce more pictures as part of the struggle for attention and action in Darfur."1 This rallying call for "attention and action" was sounded soon after the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and it carried a sense of shame over the international community’s failure to prevent the murder of hundreds of thousands in that African country. In this article, with this rallying cry in mind, I explore the history of cinematic representations of the Sudan, with special emphasis on two documentaries about the conflict in Darfur: Darfur Diaries: Message from Home (2006) and The Devil Came on Horseback (2007). The producers of these well-publicized films heard Pronk’s call in some form or another, whether as a research assignment or as a quasi-military mission. For each group of documentary-makers and their sponsors, Pronk’s message was clear: attention equaled action.

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This special issue of Critical Interventions is dedicated to problematizing ideas of Africa in relation to North African art and visual culture, and was guest edited by Jessica Winegar and Kashia Pieprzak. Winegar is a noted author on modern Egyptian art (Creative Reckonings, Stanford, 2006) and Pieprzak’s book on art and modernity in Morocco will be published by University of Minnesota Press in 2010. We are honored to have received contributions from among the leading scholars of North African and Islamic studies, and this attests to the dedication and the diplomatic gifts of the guest editors. Winegar and Pieprzak argue in their introductory essay that there is a rich history of cross-Sahara engagement between Africa’s culture-makers that has for the most part remained off the map for scholars interested in either (sub-Saharan) "African" modernity, or "Middle Eastern" art and culture, or problems of "race." One indicator of other possibilities: today the supposedly windswept and barren Sahara itself is being rewritten as fertile ground, as both metaphor and geographic site for an interstitial realm of identity formation and culture creation.

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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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In this article, I focus on a well-trodden, though perennially enigmatic area in social-science scholarship—that of spirit possession, particularly the performance of sub-Saharan forms of spirit possession in North Africa. My aim is twofold: to briefly chart the performance and effects of "African" possession cultures in the North African diaspora and to understand how these performances come to be iconic of possessions of other sorts—in this case, the possession of "culture" in the form of heritage. How are intangible and sacred rituals like possession trance made into tangible notions of "heritage" that come to stand for identity? What’s more, how does the ethnographic imagination inhabit multiple subjects and spheres to live a life of its own? To answer these questions, I offer a somewhat esoteric analogy: like spirits, heritage inhabits and possesses its subject, erasing the boundaries between past and present. The subject I speak of is that of sub-Saharan ritual music and ritual as performed and transformed into heritage in North Africa. What’s more, this heritage combines tangible culture with perhaps the most intangible—spirit possession—in order to create a trans-African and trans-national identity that then takes on a life of its own. Beginning with the efforts of one North African spirit master to represent his tradition, I question the role of the visual in the production of African heritage in multiple spheres (heritage, tradition, possession, Africa, North Africa, music, performance).

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This paper examines how the contemporary Egyptian children’s animated cartoon series Bakkar has entered Egyptian visual culture and language as a sign of essential Egyptian identity, Nubian culture, and Africanness in the ten years since its 1997 premiere. Bakkar was the first Egyptian-produced animated cartoon featuring Egyptian characters, created by the late Dr. Mona Abou El Nasr (Figure 1). The main character, Bakkar, is a little Nubian boy from a village near Aswan. His Nubianness is referenced visually by his dark skin color and his colorful clothing, geographically by the setting, and linguistically through some features of his speech, such as accent and vocabulary. However, the primary objective of the show is to demonstrate that he is like any Egyptian boy of humble rural origins. After introducing the cartoon and its place in the Egyptian media environment, I explore how the name Bakkar is used in the names of businesses and the image of Bakkar is used on both local products and foreign imports. I consider how the name Bakkar references skin color, Nubianness, and Africanness in discourse. Stereotypes of Nubians in Egyptian performance and media have situated Nubians both in a subordinate class position as rural villagers and at the same time as essential participants in the nation for over a century. But, racial stereotypes also exclude Nubians from dominant concepts of Egyptian identity by associating Bakkar with blackness and sub-Saharan Africa.

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Africa today is a world of great variety. Its diversity cannot be summed up by the smugly stressed opposition between today and yesterday, all too often expressed by the biased terms "town" and "bush." As if pre-colonial Africa had never known city life, as if it had been nothing but bush country, lacking in civilization! In the course of time, Africa has passed through several important stages, besides that of colonization. Its complexity has developed in many dimensions besides that of time. There is the distance between places and also between life-styles, the difference between occupations and also between social functions, the contrast between farmers and herdsmen, and also between rulers and subjects. The African is the Yoruba craftsman and the Tutsi lord, the Nairobi mechanic and the Ibadan professor, the Fulani nomad and the Congolese villager, the hunter of the great forest and the warrior of the high plateaus, the woman trader of Dakar and the factory girl of Bouaké, the Benin sculptor and the Lubumbashi painter. This list of differences within sub-Saharan Africa could be extended indefinitely.

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Four years ago African chiefs of State and heads of Government assembled at Addis Ababa to lay the foundations for the unity of the African continent. As you know, a new international organism emerged: the Organization of African Unity (OAU).

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Employing all modern means of propaganda (as well he should), a great Senegalese chief— typical example of a Greco-Roman Negro—has long called for the mobilization of black forces around the world, surrounded by sad ethnologists and fake champions of decolonization and liberation of the people. Such an effort of mobilization has led to the organization of the first World Festival of Negro Arts, a colossal and ambitious event (first of its kind) that aims to demonstrate the fundamental unity of the black spirit.

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It is obvious that the first Pan-African Cultural Festival, which took place in Algiers in July of 1969, has not yet attracted the attention it deserved or been subject to a serious revision. Apart from pseudo-advertisements, dry informational pieces, and violent oral reactions, no individual or collective entity has commented on the continental and international impact of this festival and of the magnitude of the problems that were discussed.

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The Realities of African Culture

The people are the starting point of culture insofar as they create themselves and they transform their environment. In its widest and most total sense, culture allows mankind to put order in their lives.

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Abdellah Karroum (b.1970, Morocco) works as an independent art researcher, publisher, and curator. He is the founder and artistic director of several art spaces and projects and is deeply invested in cross-continental, as well as global collaborations. In 2002, Karroum founded L’appartement 22, a space for encounters, exhibitions, and artists’ residencies in Rabat, Morocco. L’appartement 22 is conceived primarily as a site of diffusion and exists not only physically, but also virtually through its internet site (www.appartement22.com) and sonically through its experimental radio station (www.radioapartment22.com). Karroum obtained his PhD in Communication, Visual and Performance Art in 2001 from the Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3, with a thesis entitled "Nomadic Works: Towards a Post-Contemporary Aesthetic," a thesis that embodies the spirit of his curatorial approach.

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