America's North Africa

What images come to mind when you think of North Africa? Where do they originate?

North Africa entered the sphere of American pop culture in the late 19th century with the advent of photography and mass consumption. Images of North Africa adorned stereographs and sheet music and the popular coffee trading cards made possible by advances in color printing, which also led to the proliferation of pulp fiction magazines. Orientalist notions of Algiers and Tangier, of the Casbah, the Sahara, and the French Foreign Legion, long dominated print media and films about North Africa.

How did these images of the region known as the Maghreb, or the Arab “Far West”—a region immensely varied in climate, topography, population, and traditions—enter the American imagination, and what are the reasons for their persistence today? These questions frame the design of America’s North Africa, an exhibition of films, popular literature, and cultural artifacts that have captured the imagination of the American public.

What do these American-made commodities represent and convey, and how do they reflect American perceptions of North Africans and Arabs, and Americans’ own self-image? Meandering between fantasy and reality, these visually and aesthetically striking artifacts and the conceptions they represent call for critical study and self-reflection.

Hollywood's North Africa

The film series, From Casablanca to Sahara: Hollywood’s North Africa, complements the America’s North Africa exhibition by showcasing films from the golden era of American cinema, portraying the Maghreb as an "imaginative geography... a place of romance, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences," in the words of Edward Said. Features include the legendary melodrama, Casablanca (1942), the Marlene Dietrich romances, Morocco (1930) and The Garden of Allah (1936), Beau Geste (1939) starring Gary Cooper, complemented by several other films on the foreign legion, and comedies with Laurel and Hardy, and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Ten classic films exemplify Hollywood's obsession with North Africa (see filmography) and raise questions about the implications and the consequences of this fascination for the current moment in history.

Film Series

UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Center for Near Eastern Studies present:
From Casablanca to Sahara

Filmography