Souffles: revue maghrébine littéraire et culturelle (1966-71) [French, Arabic]

““This slim booklet contains dynamite,” wrote Policy in its 1966 review of new Moroccan quarterly magazine, Souffles. Instigated by a small group of self-professed “linguistic guerrillas” as “a manifesto for a new aesthetics in the Maghreb”, it became a conduit for a new generation of writers, artists, and intellectuals to stage a revolution against imperialist and colonial cultural domination. The starting point for this revolution was language.

From its first issue, Souffles posed an aggressive challenge to the traditional Francophone and Arabophone literary divides by encouraging experimentation, translations and collaborations. It wasn’t long before its trademark cover emblazoned with an intense black sun radiated throughout Africa, the Arab world, West Indies and the Black Atlantic. In the early 1970s the magazine changed focus. Motivated by the crushing Arab defeat in Six-Day War and the Paris uprisings, its founder, editor and publisher Abdellatif Laâbi declared that “literature was no longer sufficient.” After the 15th issue, dedicated to Palestine, Souffles underwent a major redesign, emerging as a new firebrand organ of leftist revolutionary group, Ila al-Amam. This new political agenda caught the attention of the authorities and in 1972 the magazine was banned and Laâbi arrested. While in prison he was awarded several international poetry prizes. After a long solidarity campaign, he regained his freedom in 1980.

Souffles was inspired by Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, as well as early postcolonial writers such Aime Cesaire, Mario de Andrade, and René Depestre and journals like Presence Africaine. Since its demise, few publications have matched its stature, appeal, or intellectual authority. Its influence can however be felt in contemporary magazines such as Le Journal, Nichane and Biddoun.” (Source)

Up to the double issue 10-11, the magazine was in French only, afterwards it also included Arabic section entitled Anfâs. The magazine cover was designed by painter Mohamed Melehi.

Edited by Abdellatif Laâbi
Published in Rabat, Morocco, 1966-71
via Bibliothèque nationale du royaume du Maroc

Editor
Writings about the magazine

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Marie Marchand: The Minitel Saga: A French Success Story (1988)

The only English-language monograph on the popular Videotex online service Minitel, which operated in France between 1978-2012.

“Minitel was proposed and adopted in 1978, the same year that Simon Nora and Alain Minc submitted their influential report The Computerization of Society in which they coined the term ‘telematics’. Minitel also came on the heels of a “phone-in-every-home” program (pre-dating the One Laptop Per Child project by many decades) that was proposed in 1975 by then-general manager of France Telecom Gérard Théry to increase subscriber telephone lines; Théry firmly believed the telephone was going to be the cornerstone of any computerized country – “A phone in every home is the cutting edge of a computer in every home.” Just three years later in 1978, 2500 people in the Parisian suburb of Vélizy had volunteered to use the system initially called “Teletel.” Marie Marchand tellingly writes in The Minitel Saga: A French Success Story that while “households used the system six times a month on average, consulting 20-odd services for a total connect time of one-and-a-half hours per month…”, “These overall figures concealed a number of pronounced disparities…Age disparity: people under 30 used their terminals more than those over 30. Gender disparity: women used them but little. Class disparity: top executives connected more often than midle management types, who in turn called more often than blue collar workers. Further, a flagrant disparity emerged in terms of services used. Five service providers alone accounted for over half the calls…” (53)

In 1982, instead of delivering increasingly expensive and difficult to update telephone book directories, France Telecom loaned Minitel terminals to residents all across France. By 1988, 3.5 million Minitel sets had been installed with users logging six million hours per month and taking advantage of 8000 services. And by 1999, roughly 9 million terminals could access to the network in turn used by 25 million people who took advantage of 26,000 services. By this time, not only had Minitel inaugurated an era that continues today of disparities between visible and invisible (or even absent) users based on gender, race, sexuality, and socio-economic status, but it also inaugurated the era of online pornography, the use of networks to coordinate student protests, and experiments with pseudonymous online identity.” (Lori Emerson)

Translated and adapted from the French by Mark Murphy
Publisher Larousse, Paris, 1988
ISBN 2035182409, 9782035182401
197 pages
via Lori Emerson

Resources: Minitel.org, Minitel Research Lab.

WorldCat

PDF, PDF (25 MB)

Philippe Sollers (ed.): Bataille (1973) [French]

Proceedings of a conference held June 29-July 9, 1972 at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, with contributions by Roland Barthes, Jean-Louis Baldry, Denis Hollier, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers, François Wahl, a.o.

Publisher Union générale d’éditions, Paris, 1973
10/18 series, 805
318 pages
via lostobserver

WorldCat

PDF (18 MB)