A round-table discussion

Thursday, March 29, 2018
10:00 AM
10383 Bunche Hall
UCLA

      

Considered marginal in Middle East and French and Francophone studies, the Maghreb remains a province of established academic departments, despite the recent rise of the interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean studies. But the Maghreb’s marginal status is also an invitation to question the very disciplinary, regional, and linguistic formations that govern academic fields. What would it mean to take “the Maghreb as horizon of thinking” in the twenty-first century (Khatibi)? This round table explores new directions in Maghreb studies, with a focus on recent developments in literary, historical, and anthropological approaches to the contemporary Maghreb.


Hakim Abderrezak is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He specializes in Mediterranean, Maghrebi and Francophone studies. He is the author of Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music. His research focuses on clandestine sea crossings in literary and artistic works that have appeared in French, Arabic, Spanish and Italian. Hakim Abderrezak has contributed several chapters, published articles and co-edited a special issue of Expressions maghrébines on literary works produced in and about North Africa in languages other than French and Arabic.

Lia Brozgal is Associate Professor at UCLA, where she teaches in the Department of French and Francophone Studies. A specialist in contemporary North African and French literature and culture, her research and teaching are driven by critical reflections on colonialism, its afterlives, and the enduring nature of Franco-Maghrebi entanglements in the contemporary moment. She is the author of Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory, and co-editor of Ninette of Sin Street (a Franco-Tunisian novella by Vitalis Danon) and Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture, and Politics Today.

Yasser Elhariry is Assistant Professor of French at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation & the Postfrancophone Lyric and guest editor of the special of issue of Expressions maghrébines on Cultures du mysticisme. With Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, he is coeditor of Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis, forthcoming in Palgrave’s Mediterranean Perspectives series. His essay, ‘Abdelwahab Meddeb, Sufi Poets & the New Francophone Lyric’, was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Riley Parker Prize. His writing appears in French Forum, Parade sauvage, Contemporary French Civilization, Francosphères, and Europe.

Olivia C. Harrison is Associate Professor of French and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on postcolonial North African, Middle Eastern, and French literature and film, with a particular emphasis on transcolonial affiliations between writers and intellectuals from the Global South. She is the author of Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization and, with Teresa Villa-Ignacio, coeditor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics and “Translating the Maghreb,” a special issue of Expressions maghrébines.

Susan Slyomovics is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her publications include The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance; The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village, awarded the 1999 Albert Hourani book prize; The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib (editor); The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco; Clifford Geertz in Morocco (editor) and How to Accept German Reparations. Her areas of research and teaching are literary translations from Arabic and French and anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa.

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University. Her research focuses on the intersection of modernity, postcolonialism, and transnationalism in the Maghreb-Mediterranean contact zone. She is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean and co-editor of The Mediterranean Maghreb: Literature and Plurilingualism and Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis . She is Editor of Expressions maghrébines, the peer-reviewed journal of the Coordination Internationale des Chercheurs sur les Littératures Maghrébines. Prior to coming to Tulane, she was Assistant Professor of French at Yale University.

Cost : Free and open to the public.

Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, French and Francophone Studies