A Tidal Wave of Color: The Promises and Limits of Third Worldism in Postcolonial Algiers

The Algerian Revolution (1954-62) helped catapult Algeria and the Front de Libération Nationale onto the Third World political stage. Following independence, a combination of cultural production, media coverage, and cross-border solidarity efforts, including military training for African, Asian, and Latin American liberation movements, made Algiers one of the many global nodes of anticolonialism and South-South internationalism. As the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary and intellectual Amilcar Cabral observed during the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in 1969, for some, the city was indeed a “Mecca of revolutionaries.” Beginning with the psychic and social dynamics of built form and spatial arrangement in Algiers, this paper interrogates how the afterlife of the Algerian Revolution operated and resonated with Third World radicals across the 1960s and early 1970s. In doing so, it traces the regional and international political arrangements made possible through Algiers’ transformation into a revolutionary city, and examines a diverse set of intellectual currents emanating from the Maghreb that brought a host of revolutionaries and liberation movements–from the Palestine Liberation Organization and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, to the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola and the Black Panther Party–to Algiers during this period.