About the event
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first issue of the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas and the publication of the first English-language anthology of the journal, Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative presents a bilingual reading in the original French and Arabic as well as in English translation of poems and texts published for the first time in Souffles.
Founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laâbi and other avant-garde Moroccan poets and artists – and banned in 1972 – Souffles-Anfas was one of the most influential literary, cultural, and political reviews to emerge in postcolonial North Africa. An early forum for tricontinental postcolonial thought and writing, the journal published texts ranging from experimental poems, literary manifestoes, and abstract art to political tracts, open letters, and interviews by some of the period’s most important artists and intellectuals, including Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Memmi, Abraham Serfaty, Etel Adnan, Sembene Ousmane, Amilcar Cabral, René Depestre, and Mohamed Melehi.
A list of suggested reading material is available here.
Cosponsored by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
