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The Pan-African Festival of Algiers of 1969 (referred to as PANAF) drew over five thousand people as part of a quest for African unity. They included individuals from forty African countries as well as diasporic militants from around the world. While there, they witnessed Black American singer Nina Simone's first rendition of Jacques Brel's "Ne me quitte pas" (Don't Leave Me), South African activist Miriam Makeba singing in Arabic, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's reappearance after fleeing the United States, and many more iconic moments in Pan-African lore.1 Long ignored in scholarship and other writings, scholars, journalists, and curators have recently begun to revisit these few days of July 1969 and celebrate the festival as an unprecedented-and since unrivalled-moment of anti-imperialist unity.2 In so doing, they have identified, made accessible, and highlighted valuable archival documents and footage. In 2010, the European TV channel ARTE restored William Klein's 1969 documentary film, FestivalPanafricain d'Alger (Pan-African Festival of Algiers)-a once very difficult film to find.3 In 2020, the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris organized an exhibition featuring memo- rabilia from the festival, a large program of panels, and an evening of dancing titled "We Have Come Back," in homage to Black American beat-poet Ted Joans's 1969 Algiers performance.4 Works such as Elaine Mokhtefi's Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers have also generated an interest in Algeria's place in Pan-Africanism, or as one writer for The Nation put it, Algeria's attempt at "building another world."5
This article analyzes the radical miscomprehension that took place among PANAF participants-one that is inherent to any attempt to "build another world." In The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism, literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards argues for the necessity of identifying and analyzing the haunting gaps of time and space produced by misunderstandings inherent to the articulation of the African diaspora-what he calls "décalage."6 I draw on this theoretical claim and, like Edwards and other scholars of the Black Atlantic, apply it to the question of Pan-Africanism. In doing so, I do not intend to discredit the project of Pan-African unity. Rather, I hope to explore some of the struggles that constitute the coming together of any group of individuals from radically different backgrounds around a...