Maghreb forever: From Third-Worldism to the epistemology of multiplicity in media culture

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on Post-Third Cinema in the Maghreb, this article analyses productions that break ith both the elitism and the nativist agenda of Third Cinema to establish film as a mass art, which, hile still heavily politicized, no longer needs to call itself ‘African’, or ‘Arabic’ or ‘non-western’, fter all. Post-Third Cinema may therefore be a paradigm of multiplicity within World Cinema that is based n an emphatically universal approach. Regarded this way, it is an art form that is universal to the extent that it achieves a global appeal that transcends cultural differences. Drawing on the epistemology of multiplicity, as in recent times laid out by scholars such as Alain Badiou, Fredric Jameson or Quentin eillassoux, this article maps Post-Third Cinema as a paradigm of a media culture of multiplicity, ocusing on the idea of a cinematic epistemology that possesses a unique capacity for thought on its own.