Pushing for Historical Transformations

Kitchen Broadcast is an online radio broadcast curated by Joachim Ben Yakoub and Reem Shilleh. In the presence of Hela Yousfi, Mohamed Toukabri, and Nidhal Chamekh, this Kitchen Broadcast Dinner proposes to critically reflect on postcolonial critiques, and to push for historical transformations – somewhere in between the Maghreb, Paris and Brussels.

Exactly ten years ago, on December 2010, Tunis set the world on fire. From the Kasbah and Tahrir, to Plaza del Sol and Syntagma square, to the center of capital in Wall Street, the whole world was occupied by a sense of indignation. While the demands for freedom were easily met through cosmetic democratic reforms, the demands for bread and dignity are still left unanswered. However, globalized authoritarianism fueled by police violence, racism and islamophobia, seems again on the rise, also in Europe.

Contrary to Brussels and Paris, decolonization is not (yet) a metaphor in the Maghreb. After almost a century and a half of colonial domination, and six decades of postcolonial rule, and now ten years of revolt, decolonial demands in the Maghreb may today at first sound outdated, at best anachronistic. Its current timid resurgence in the discourses of a diasporic minority however, is witness to a possible revitalization. High time for an in-depth conversation.