Creative Indiscipline: Art, Exile, and Resistance in the Maghreb is a six-week, live online course exploring how artists, writers, filmmakers, and cultural practitioners in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have developed distinctive ways of making, thinking, and imagining since independence. By creative indiscipline, the course understands insubmission as a conscious refusal of colonial legacies, patriarchal norms, religious authoritarianism, and attempts to regulate culture, bodies, and memory. The course explores how indiscipline has been practised through imagination, form, and experiment: as a way of thinking, making, and living otherwise.
Moving across literature, cinema, visual art, oral traditions, and feminist thought, the course situates North Africa within wider African and global decolonial conversations. It approaches the Maghreb not as a margin, but as a vital producer of artistic languages, aesthetic strategies, and critical ideas that have shaped modern cultural thought and postcolonial canons. Sessions combine close reading, film screenings, collective discussion, mapping, and creative analysis of image, sound, and landscape.
Designed for curious adults, artists, educators, and readers, the course requires no prior knowledge and invites participants to engage with the Maghreb as an active force in cultural and intellectual history.
Course Overview
All classes will be held through Zoom, accessed via the Teachable platform. Classes will be recorded and available to watch back for one month after. All class scheduling follows London time.
Week 1 | Tuesday 31 March | 6-8pm
After Independence: Culture, Control, and the Birth of Creative Indiscipline
Focus: Post-independence optimism, nation-building, and early cultural dissent in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
This opening session introduces the historical and political contexts that shaped cultural production after independence. We explore how culture became a site of state control, and how writers and artists began to practise creative indiscipline in response.
Week 2 | Tuesday 7 April | 6-8pm
Writing Under Surveillance: Censorship, Prison, and Risk
Focus: Literature as a dangerous and transformative practice.
This week examines how writers worked under conditions of censorship, imprisonment, and exile. Attention is given to how form, language, and silence itself become strategies of survival and resistance.
Week 3 | Tuesday 14 April | 6-8pm
Feminist Insubmissions: Body, Law, Humour, and Public Space
Focus: Feminism as intellectual, cultural, and activist practice.
This session explores feminist thought and creativity across North Africa, examining how women have challenged patriarchy, legal structures, and religious authority through writing, publishing, art, and popular culture.
Week 4 | Tuesday 21 April | 6-8pm
Indigenous Knowledge and Oral Worlds
This week centres Indigenous cultures that have long been marginalised or folklorised. We explore oral poetry, music, symbolism, and cosmology as living archives and creative practices that challenge dominant historical narratives.
Week 5 | Tuesday 28 April | 6-8pm
Seeing Otherwise: Visual Art, Abstraction, Architecture and the Land
Focus: Reimagining modernism through material, craft, and landscape.
This session examines how visual artists in the Maghreb developed alternative modernisms, drawing on Indigenous symbols, spirituality, and material practices to resist colonial aesthetics.
Week 6 | Tuesday 5 May April | 6-8pm
Cinema, Surrealism, Exile, and Radical Imagination
Focus: Film and imagination as insubordinate practices.
The final week explores cinema and theatricality as spaces of satire, surrealism, and critique. We consider how filmmakers have used humour, fantasy, and estrangement to question authority and imagine alternative futures.
Meet Your Tutor
Hala Chekri is a London-based researcher, writer, and radio curator whose work explores diasporic memory, cultural heritage, and sound.
Hala curates radio shows and music projects that highlight Amazigh sounds and North African music, exploring indigenous rights and musical practices across North and West Africa. She conducts workshops on oral history and field recording, teaching ethical approaches to archiving and documentation.
Her work is rooted in collaborative and interdisciplinary practices across community engagement, sound, and research. Her research focuses on creative disciplines in postcolonial Africa, and the evolving standards and recognition of African artistic and cultural practices, with particular attention to their relationships with Italy, France, and the UK. She contributes to accessible oral history archives, public programmes, and projects combining sound, archives, and visual media.
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