Quin Nugteren reviews Idriss Jebari’s Leaping Decolonization: North Africa in the Global 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge University Press, 2026, 336 p.)
In his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, the philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon writes: “Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe.” The Martinican had assisted the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in its fight for independence from French colonialism, which became the basis for his revolutionary writings. It is tempting to understand his warning to have been made in vain. As countries like Algeria established independence after years of anticolonial struggle during the 1960s, very little was left of the promises only a decade later. Many postcolonial states suffered from the birth pangs of independent statehood and turned towards authoritarianism. Critics often lambasted this development, pointing back to the anticolonial rhetoric of African, Asian and Arab leaders during the revolutionary 1960s and revealing them to be nothing but hollow words in retrospect, as local elites started to mirror the practices of their earlier colonizers. Fanon’s words materialized in the negative and showed the mere transfer of sovereignty fail to establish societies rid of European influence, power, and most of all, thinking.
In his newly published book Leaping Decolonization: North Africa in the Global 1960s and 1970s, published by Cambridge University Press last February, historian Idriss Jebari grapples with exactly that problem. Jebari is a lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at Trinity College Dublin, researching the transnational intellectual history of Arab and North African thought post-decolonization, with a specific focus on thinkers from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The title of the book already hints at Jebari’s interpretative framework: a ‘leaping’ kind of decolonization, one that stretches and jumps over things. In the work, he carefully lays out how states in the Maghreb after independence were obsessed with overcoming their so-called ‘historical delay’, feeling as if they lost their chance at modernization during colonization and now had to catch up with their European counterparts. To overcome its own ‘backwardness’, Maghrebi states prioritised socio-economic development and industry. In doing so, the historian argues, they overlooked the implications of adhering to such notions of progress, understanding their former colonizers to be the model to aspire to. In the process, they failed to conceptualize their unique and indigenous social and cultural identity.
Jebari’s effort is to recover the specific debates among Maghrebi intellectuals during the 1970s who challenged their states’ notion of North Africa’s ‘historical delay’. Through their work, they sought to fulfil the project of decolonization beyond the mere transfer of sovereignty in intellectual, social and cultural terms. In other words, they were looking for alternatives to the European models and ways of thinking that their political overlords put in place after independence.
By zooming in on what he calls ‘Debates of Decolonization’, Jebari shows the authoritarian turn away from anticolonial rhetoric to have been anything but historically determined. Instead, by tracing the critical essays and monographs these scholars wrote, he uncovers a region and society that knew a rich, diverse and innovative intellectual culture for whom the future was up for grabs.
Those Debates of Decolonization are each attributed a different chapter in the book, aligning together the different intellectual challenges that postcolonialism faced and at the same time following developments chronologically. The first two lay bare the discourses of decolonization in the immediate independence period; from 1956 in Morocco and Tunisia, 1962 in Algeria. The first follows Algerian discussions in the prominent journal Révolution Africaine discussed ‘the recovery of the national subject’ after colonization through language and education reforms. It picks up on how intellectuals such as Mohammed Harbi and Ahmet Taleb provided the arguments for the later political disputes on Algeria’s future between Ben Bella and Boumédienne. The second follows this trend in the other two countries of the Maghreb, on conferences and research groups that debated ‘the way’ to national socio-economic development and industry. In all three countries, there was an intellectual confidence in the promise of a European-style nation-state, with a distinct linguistic and cultural identity, and an individual path to modernity. Chapter 3 and 4 go more in depth, focusing on the writings of the historians Abdallah Laroui (Moroccan) and Hichem Djaït (Tunisian) as the 1960s progress. Jebari shows them to be pioneers of the critique of the national development projects in North Africa, attacking modernization as a philosophical colonial remnant, and, as a consequence, making an attempt to revive the pre-colonial past in different fashion. The last two chapters take up the critiques of these historians and historicizes the novel methods of two different sociology departments in the universities of Tunis and Rabat. It shows how their effort to move away from the attempt to modernize their countries, in a period where it had clearly become a pipedream, could promise a renewed interest in Arab cultural heritage, religion and language.
Intuitively, the turn away from secular development models proved somewhat of a ‘win’ for the North African authoritarian regimes, who placed Islamic religion and culture at the centre of their popular narrative. In general, it was also lamented by progressives from the diaspora and at home; it represented a treason of the revolutionary culture of the 1960s that discarded tradition and religion as elements holding postcolonial countries back. However, in his last chapters Jebari finds discussions on Arab cultural heritage to exactly fulfil the promise of epistemic decolonization. By turning away from ‘Western’ ideologies of development – whether they be nationalist, liberal, or socialist – these North African intellectuals tried finding a way in which Arab cultural heritage could be something radical, unentangling itself from the chokehold of colonial modes of thought.
For example, Jebari describes at length Laroui’s 1974 essay La crise des intellectuels arabes: traditionalisme ou historicisme (The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals: Traditionalism or Historicism) as a work that explored that possibility. In it, the Moroccan historian posed to revive a positivist interpretation of the country’s past. He thereby tried to disrupt the impasse between the Salafist obsession with a pre-modern past before decolonization and the developmentalist mindset that discarded any occupation with history as a regressive obstacle. For Laroui, a rigorous, academic study of history could demystify pre-colonial times and recover elements of it that were swept away by French efforts to modernize the country. He revived an attempt to engage with the past that took it seriously, asking how Moroccan society could conceive a distinct, future-proof cultural identity without falling for cheap romanticisation.
It is an attempt reminiscent of how anthropologist Arjun Appadurai portrays the notional opposition between culture and development; whereas we often shroud the first with terms like tradition, authenticity and locality, we see the latter as trying to eradicate these things in the name of progress. The modern, this way, becomes a place that should be devoid of culture; culture is seen as ‘pastness’, lacking the capacity to be forward-looking and progressive. The effort to surpass that opposition is noble; Jebari shows that the intellectual search for cultural authenticity and locality were neither anti-modern nor regressive but simply a desire to emancipate the nation from the external gaze.
More broadly, Jebari’s book demonstrates in a thrilling way why the cultural turn came about in the humanities during the 1970s, and how Maghreb societies were a key testing ground for its applicability. During the 1960s, the paradigm for understanding social change was mostly done through a Marxist lens. To understand society and where it was going one needed to point only to its underlying economic conditions, all explanations about culture, tradition and religion done away with as false consciousness. Yet, Jebari argues, the 1970s made it difficult for Maghrebi academics to keep looking at their societies in this way. He discusses at length how Abdelwahab Bouhdiba inspired a new generation of sociologists to study rituals, tradition and religion among young people who, despite their growing economic alienation in the 1970s failed to be mobilized by the left. It proved that class analysis did not hold as much prediction power as was long assumed and that new methods were required with which to look at young people’s political motivations. Participant observation, for example, provided a way to access personal opinions directly. These sociologists understood people on their own terms, taking their motivations and opinions seriously, and thereby put back in culture and tradition as a justified category of inquiry. Before, a photograph of a woman in hijab riding a motorbike represented a society in transition, tradition being confronted with modern industry, as the country moved from periphery into semi-periphery. Now, it allowed sociologists to understand such scenes beyond the impasse between the developed and the non-developed. Tunisian society was instead a composite of different norms and values that ‘claimed the right of self-definition’ and went beyond the logic of its own historical delay.
The historian traces these discourses around decolonization in periodicals of the time, found in, to the outsider unnavigable, hole-in-the-wall bookstores of Rabat, Algiers and Tunis. In it, issues of publications like Révolution Africaine, al-Fikr and Lamalif display the imagery of 1960s global radicalism blended with North African aesthetics. The bookstores function as clandestine archives, having kept the specific publications and all their issues in order; in the contemporary climate of (soft) authoritarianism, booksellers offer refuge for periodicals that contain a past these states want to control.
As so often the challenge with postcolonial research, using state archives to tell a subaltern history ends up replicating the power dynamics in which the archive came to be. It is how historical colonial subjects die, as Ann Stoler calls it, ‘a second death’ in the archive. One reason to circumvent it is to read against the grain, to shift the attention to those who are not mentioned, another is to circumvent the archive altogether and build a parallel one. Jebari’s attempt to do so is impressive.
The list of periodicals and magazines is both extensive as well as intricately studied, so that it escapes the risk of mere anecdotal use. This way, he contextualizes a rich network of publishing both within the Maghreb as well as its outward interactions with Parisian journals like Les Temps Modernes and the al-Tali’a publishing house in Beirut.
Quibbles about reliability and consistency of a ‘guerrilla archive’ aside, this method does come with structural problems. Conventional historical practice scrutinizes the archive and can question under what authority it falls, how it is financed and, most importantly, how one archive differs from the other. That differentiation now lacks, while the archival content comes from vastly different places. It speaks to a wider problem in Jebari’s narrative. Although he pays respect to the fashionable trend of transnational history, problematizing North Africa’s place in networks, connections and transfers, there is little evaluation of intra-Maghreb historical-political difference.
Little attention is given to the fact that Morocco and Tunisia were French protectorates with their respective royal families still in place, while the three Algerian départements were legally part of the French hexagon. While the first two countries knew a relatively peaceful and elite-driven transition of power in 1956, the latter fought a violent eight-year-long war from which it suffered over a million deaths. To this day, that discrepancy is felt in their respective geopolitical allegiances. It leads to the question if and how that difference was being navigated by the intellectuals discussed in Jebari’s book, yet it fails to be mentioned.
In fact, only one of the chapters deals with an Algerian case study, while the other five are on Moroccan and Tunisian ones. Despite the similarities in their respective national development ideologies, those different historical experiences must have mattered. Pointing out the lack of differentiation between the three countries is not mere pedantry. It resembles the problems transnational histories often have; laying out interactions, networks and channels of transfer that may show mutual dependence and interaction, they often fail to adequately address structural differences. Especially with intellectual histories, where travelling avant-garde writers, authorial translations and multilingual readerships find themselves in an environment that is incredibly transitory, it remains difficult to establish how much that transfer effected in terms of embedded societal change.
In all, however, Leaping Decolonization makes an important contribution that should not only be received welcomely by the discipline of intellectual history but by the wider academic community as well. In uncovering how postcolonial North Africa after the transition of power grappled with the question of decolonization, it laid bare the epistemic frameworks it had rested on for so long, which were not easy to shred off. In a moment and decade wherein calls for the decolonising of the university and other institutions have become widespread, Jebari’s work provides an interesting take on what theoretical models and progress-ridden ideologies could be subject of scrutiny for such an undertaking. Further, it is a work that refreshingly sets things right in the historiographical record, by attributing postcolonial North Africa as not only a receiver and transmitter of intellectual history but one that shaped it in its own right. The only way to get to such an understanding, is by digging through the shelves and turning these societies and their histories from the bookstore inside out. Jebari has definitely done so.
Quin Nugteren is an Assistant Editor at the Review of Democracy.
