Megan C MacDonald | University College Cork (original) (raw)
Current CFPs by Megan C MacDonald
Koç University Suna & İnan Kıraç Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Antalya, Turkey June 13... more Koç University Suna & İnan Kıraç Center for Mediterranean Civilizations
Antalya, Turkey
June 13-15, 2019
Comment opère la violence et quelles sont ses conséquences ? Est-ce que les pays autour de la Méd... more Comment opère la violence et quelles sont ses conséquences ? Est-ce que les pays autour de la Méditerranée ont un rapport spécifique à la violence?
Ces questions, et bien d’autres encore, seront abordées lors de la journée d’études « Penser la violence en Méditerranée : une approche comparée du 19ème siècle à nos jours. »
Le débat se propose notamment de souligner les liens entre violence politique et violence physique – sans pour autant négliger la violence symbolique. La question posée est : comment la violence advient en Méditerranée et comment elle se transforme, à travers le temps et selon les lieux ? Le but de cette journée est de souligner les différents chemins pris par la violence, à partir d’une approche comparée et d’une histoire diverse.
Quelques grandes questions seront abordées comme: la violence liée aux rôles sexuels autour de la Méditerranée ? Violence coloniale et anticoloniale ? Violence durant les guerres et criminalité ? Violence des Etats et stratégies pour légitimer la violence ?
Il conviendra notamment de préciser si l’introduction tardive et incomplète des mécanismes de construction des Etats (state building), contribue à alimenter des réactions violentes ? Est-ce que les blocages des mécanismes et des processus démocratiques augmentent l’attrait pour des réactions violentes ? De nouvelles formes d’organisations et de réseaux dans la région peuvent-ils contribuer à diminuer les réactions violentes? On n’abordera pas la Méditerranée dans sa totalité, mais on proposera une analyse comparée qui traite des violences dans les villes comme dans les campagnes.
Une journée d’études qui invite à une approche transnationale et multidisciplinaire, qui réunit des spécialistes de différents pays, à partir d’une multiplicité de points de vue et de problématiques.
Edited Volumes by Megan C MacDonald
Liverpool University Press, 2020
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38571 Ce numéro spécial d'Expressions maghrébines s'intéresse à l'h... more https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38571
Ce numéro spécial d'Expressions maghrébines s'intéresse à l'héritage de l'œuvre de Djaout vingt-cinq ans après sa mort, et étudie les formes à travers lesquelles ses textes littéraires et commentaires politiques continuent de résonner dans l'Algérie contemporaine et ailleurs. En examinant la production de Djaout avec un tel recul, nous espérons aujourd'hui ne pas tomber dans le piège des réinventions historiques, ni être tentés d'enfermer des récits nationaux et culturels ayant trait à l'Algérie dans des cases bien définies, des logiques binaires ou des « triptychs », selon l'expression de Walid Benkhaled et Natayla Vince, qui nous mettent d'ailleurs en garde contre ce genre de dérives lorsqu'ils écrivent que:
This search for counter-versions of Algerianness also had an impact on how political history before the war of independence was (re)visited in the 1990s – this time positing the hegemony of the FLN explicitly or implicitly as the original sin. The 'black decade' corresponded with the opening in France of many archives dating from the colonial period. (2017 : 268)
Puisque Djaout lui-même, aussi bien l'homme que son travail, représente aujourd'hui sa propre archive, nous soutenons qu'il importe de l'étudier, et qu'il peut être lu de multiples façons. Les contributeurs de ce numéro spécial évaluent le travail de Djaout et son héritage dans des domaines aussi variés que l'intime et le politique, pour arriver au purement formel, en passant par l'historique et le social. Nous sommes en outre extrêmement reconnaissants envers Ameziane Ferhani, qui nous a permis d'inclure un poème inédit de Djaout en le partageant...
CONTENTS 1 Editors’ Introduction Articles 8 Heteroglossia and the Poetics of the Roman Maghré... more CONTENTS
1 Editors’ Introduction
Articles
8 Heteroglossia and the Poetics of the Roman Maghrébin
Hoda El-Shakry
18 The Novel in Morocco as Mirror of a Changing Society
Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla
27 Le Roman Maghrébin en Berbère
Mohand Akli Salhi and Nabila Sadi
37 The Critical Pulse of the Contre-enquête: Kamel Daoud on the Maghrebi Novel in French
Lia Brozgal
38 Figure of an Anartist: Keeping Local Francophone Literature Engaged with Mustapha Benfodil’s Literature-action
Alexandra Gueydan-Turek
58 “On peut apprendre de la littérature à se méfier”: Writing and Doubt in the Contemporary Algerian Novel
Jane Hiddleston
67 Le Nouveau roman algérien : une réinscription de la thèse de Khatibi
Lynda-Nawel Tebbani
76 L’Effet Barzakh
Corbin Treacy
85 The Maghreb’s New Publishing House: les éditions barzakh and the Stakes of Localized Publishing
Mary Anne Lewis
94 Old Stories, New Histories: The Past in the Francophone Tunisian Novel
Debbie Barnard
102 For a Transcolonial Reading of the Contemporary Algerian Novel
Olivia C. Harrison
111 Between Men: Homosocial Desire and the Dynamics of Masculinity in the Novels of Rachid O. And Abdellah Taïa
Alessandro Badin
122 L’Espace littéraire de Mahi Binebine: pour une esthétique du désenchantement social
Afaf Zaid
131 Clandestine Emigration as Twenty-First Century Meme in the Roman Maghrébin
Meg Furniss Weisberg
141 The Roman Maghrébin in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring
Nina Wardleworth
Fiction
150 james joyce
Salim Bachi
Dossier/Gallery
161 Un Artiste autodidacte
Robert Albouker
Œuvres
la matrice du conte (2005–2006)
les rois mages (2005–2006)
mauvaise rencontre (2005–2006)
valet de cœur (2005–2006) voodoo child (2005–2006)
Abdel Mir
163 Editorial Assistants
164 Acknowledgments
Reviews by Megan C MacDonald
"La terre passe" / Documentaire en lien avec les recherches de Megan MacDonald Réalisé par Nicol... more "La terre passe" / Documentaire en lien avec les recherches de Megan MacDonald
Réalisé par Nicolas Travaux et Anne Raveau - 16/9 - 1920x1080 - 2019 - 13min40
Prix du public et prix du jury au Festival Libres Courts de Montpellier (mars 2020)
Les étudiants en Master1 du Département SATIS (Sciences Arts et Techniques de l’Image et du Son) de la faculté des Sciences de l’Université d’Aix-Marseille ont réalisé 5 documentaires de 12 à 15 minutes chacun en lien avec les recherches de 5 résidents de l’IMéRA en 2018-2019.
https://imera.hypotheses.org/6462
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers by Megan C MacDonald
Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts
Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s), 2021
This chapter considers the movement of boats, Mediterranean archives, and possible futurity via t... more This chapter considers the movement of boats, Mediterranean archives, and possible futurity via the logic of the wake, as a way out of Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. I argue that the ways in which Algeria is discussed in contemporary French artistic spaces is beginning to change, and coincides with the 2019 hirak protest movements in Algeria. I expand on what I am calling Algeria Time in three movements. First, the maritime output of contemporary visual artists moving between France and Algeria (Abed Abidat, Zineb Sedira, Bruno Boudjelal, Naime Merabet, The Blaze). Second, through contemporary museum shows in France where Algeria is on the agenda (Mucem, La Piscine, IMA-Tourcoing). And finally, I turn briefly to the 2019 Algerian protests in order to illustrate how the placards, jokes, language politics, and memes from the protests offer alternative maritime and Mediterranean passages for the future, dislodge the logic of the migration boat, and allow us to rethink archives on the gro...
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2018
The Journal of North African Studies, 2015
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2011
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2013
This article examines incarceration and socialization as depicted in Jacques Audiard’s film Un Pr... more This article examines incarceration and socialization as depicted in Jacques Audiard’s film Un Prophète (2009). The postcolonial prison in the centre of the nation, called ‘Centrale’, is a site where postcolonial humanism is pushed to its limit. A close reading of the film reveals currency and mobility working in tandem, as illustrated by the appearance of a 50-franc bill depicting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Le Petit Prince in the opening and closing scenes. The main character of the film negotiates how to stay alive in prison, and how to get ahead on the outside. As insides and outsides are governed both by surveillance and the bio-political in the postcolonial nation, it becomes increasingly clear that the nation itself is its own prison.
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2013
ABSTRACT Salah Guemriche's Dictionnaire des mots français d’origine arabe (2007) gathers Fre... more ABSTRACT Salah Guemriche's Dictionnaire des mots français d’origine arabe (2007) gathers French words that originally come from Arabic, putting them in the context of French literature, illustrating how Arabic has had a presence in French literature through various histories. Reading Assia Djebar's preface to this dictionary reveals a navette, or shuttle, between not only the linguistic sites of French and Arabic, but also a particularly trans-Mediterranean geographic space. The navette as a reading strategy allows for a reading of the dictionary that can travel on, and between, texts and locations. Djebar's preface is compelling not only for its content, but also for its position as a narrative coming before that of the bilingual dictionary. Her membership in the Académie française renders her an expert in French who is at once inside and outside multiple languages and nation-states. She offers up the bilingual tome as a hopeful site where “mots-passerelles” (“bridge-words”) are in constant movement or shuttling, and maintain the tension on the in-between spaces in, and of, the Mediterranean.
Surrealism in North Africa and Western Asia: Crossings and Encounters, 2021
In this contribution, the plague is reassessed in a Mediterranean frame, in order to establish al... more In this contribution, the plague is reassessed in a Mediterranean frame, in order to establish alternative kinships and genealogies between surrealisms which inhabit and cross the Mediterranean. The plague is a “crisis” which “puts a special pressure on personhood” as well as a “catalyst” that makes us “rethink the idea of what it means to be human”. The modern subject is constituted by and travels via plague vectors, and connects the work of Antonin Artaud (1870–1952) and Habib Tengour (b. 1947), offering another avenue towards the relationship France–Algeria in and across the Mediterranean. Surrealism and the plague come together in the figure and the writing of Antonin Artaud as a disruption. Richard Barney and Helene Scheck consider the plague in the early modern context as “a disruption in apparently continuous temporal experience of historicity”. If the present volume addresses the avant-garde and its “networks”, how are these networks constituted and measured? What is their temporality? If surrealism erupted as an avant-garde practice in early twentieth-century European spaces, what can we make of a resurgence or reappearance in the figure of Habib Tengour’s French-Algerian surrealist manifesto written in 1981? What is it disrupting? And how might this contribute to discussions of modernity and the modern in the Mediterranean basin?
Koç University Suna & İnan Kıraç Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Antalya, Turkey June 13... more Koç University Suna & İnan Kıraç Center for Mediterranean Civilizations
Antalya, Turkey
June 13-15, 2019
Comment opère la violence et quelles sont ses conséquences ? Est-ce que les pays autour de la Méd... more Comment opère la violence et quelles sont ses conséquences ? Est-ce que les pays autour de la Méditerranée ont un rapport spécifique à la violence?
Ces questions, et bien d’autres encore, seront abordées lors de la journée d’études « Penser la violence en Méditerranée : une approche comparée du 19ème siècle à nos jours. »
Le débat se propose notamment de souligner les liens entre violence politique et violence physique – sans pour autant négliger la violence symbolique. La question posée est : comment la violence advient en Méditerranée et comment elle se transforme, à travers le temps et selon les lieux ? Le but de cette journée est de souligner les différents chemins pris par la violence, à partir d’une approche comparée et d’une histoire diverse.
Quelques grandes questions seront abordées comme: la violence liée aux rôles sexuels autour de la Méditerranée ? Violence coloniale et anticoloniale ? Violence durant les guerres et criminalité ? Violence des Etats et stratégies pour légitimer la violence ?
Il conviendra notamment de préciser si l’introduction tardive et incomplète des mécanismes de construction des Etats (state building), contribue à alimenter des réactions violentes ? Est-ce que les blocages des mécanismes et des processus démocratiques augmentent l’attrait pour des réactions violentes ? De nouvelles formes d’organisations et de réseaux dans la région peuvent-ils contribuer à diminuer les réactions violentes? On n’abordera pas la Méditerranée dans sa totalité, mais on proposera une analyse comparée qui traite des violences dans les villes comme dans les campagnes.
Une journée d’études qui invite à une approche transnationale et multidisciplinaire, qui réunit des spécialistes de différents pays, à partir d’une multiplicité de points de vue et de problématiques.
Liverpool University Press, 2020
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38571 Ce numéro spécial d'Expressions maghrébines s'intéresse à l'h... more https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38571
Ce numéro spécial d'Expressions maghrébines s'intéresse à l'héritage de l'œuvre de Djaout vingt-cinq ans après sa mort, et étudie les formes à travers lesquelles ses textes littéraires et commentaires politiques continuent de résonner dans l'Algérie contemporaine et ailleurs. En examinant la production de Djaout avec un tel recul, nous espérons aujourd'hui ne pas tomber dans le piège des réinventions historiques, ni être tentés d'enfermer des récits nationaux et culturels ayant trait à l'Algérie dans des cases bien définies, des logiques binaires ou des « triptychs », selon l'expression de Walid Benkhaled et Natayla Vince, qui nous mettent d'ailleurs en garde contre ce genre de dérives lorsqu'ils écrivent que:
This search for counter-versions of Algerianness also had an impact on how political history before the war of independence was (re)visited in the 1990s – this time positing the hegemony of the FLN explicitly or implicitly as the original sin. The 'black decade' corresponded with the opening in France of many archives dating from the colonial period. (2017 : 268)
Puisque Djaout lui-même, aussi bien l'homme que son travail, représente aujourd'hui sa propre archive, nous soutenons qu'il importe de l'étudier, et qu'il peut être lu de multiples façons. Les contributeurs de ce numéro spécial évaluent le travail de Djaout et son héritage dans des domaines aussi variés que l'intime et le politique, pour arriver au purement formel, en passant par l'historique et le social. Nous sommes en outre extrêmement reconnaissants envers Ameziane Ferhani, qui nous a permis d'inclure un poème inédit de Djaout en le partageant...
CONTENTS 1 Editors’ Introduction Articles 8 Heteroglossia and the Poetics of the Roman Maghré... more CONTENTS
1 Editors’ Introduction
Articles
8 Heteroglossia and the Poetics of the Roman Maghrébin
Hoda El-Shakry
18 The Novel in Morocco as Mirror of a Changing Society
Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla
27 Le Roman Maghrébin en Berbère
Mohand Akli Salhi and Nabila Sadi
37 The Critical Pulse of the Contre-enquête: Kamel Daoud on the Maghrebi Novel in French
Lia Brozgal
38 Figure of an Anartist: Keeping Local Francophone Literature Engaged with Mustapha Benfodil’s Literature-action
Alexandra Gueydan-Turek
58 “On peut apprendre de la littérature à se méfier”: Writing and Doubt in the Contemporary Algerian Novel
Jane Hiddleston
67 Le Nouveau roman algérien : une réinscription de la thèse de Khatibi
Lynda-Nawel Tebbani
76 L’Effet Barzakh
Corbin Treacy
85 The Maghreb’s New Publishing House: les éditions barzakh and the Stakes of Localized Publishing
Mary Anne Lewis
94 Old Stories, New Histories: The Past in the Francophone Tunisian Novel
Debbie Barnard
102 For a Transcolonial Reading of the Contemporary Algerian Novel
Olivia C. Harrison
111 Between Men: Homosocial Desire and the Dynamics of Masculinity in the Novels of Rachid O. And Abdellah Taïa
Alessandro Badin
122 L’Espace littéraire de Mahi Binebine: pour une esthétique du désenchantement social
Afaf Zaid
131 Clandestine Emigration as Twenty-First Century Meme in the Roman Maghrébin
Meg Furniss Weisberg
141 The Roman Maghrébin in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring
Nina Wardleworth
Fiction
150 james joyce
Salim Bachi
Dossier/Gallery
161 Un Artiste autodidacte
Robert Albouker
Œuvres
la matrice du conte (2005–2006)
les rois mages (2005–2006)
mauvaise rencontre (2005–2006)
valet de cœur (2005–2006) voodoo child (2005–2006)
Abdel Mir
163 Editorial Assistants
164 Acknowledgments
"La terre passe" / Documentaire en lien avec les recherches de Megan MacDonald Réalisé par Nicol... more "La terre passe" / Documentaire en lien avec les recherches de Megan MacDonald
Réalisé par Nicolas Travaux et Anne Raveau - 16/9 - 1920x1080 - 2019 - 13min40
Prix du public et prix du jury au Festival Libres Courts de Montpellier (mars 2020)
Les étudiants en Master1 du Département SATIS (Sciences Arts et Techniques de l’Image et du Son) de la faculté des Sciences de l’Université d’Aix-Marseille ont réalisé 5 documentaires de 12 à 15 minutes chacun en lien avec les recherches de 5 résidents de l’IMéRA en 2018-2019.
https://imera.hypotheses.org/6462
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts
Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s), 2021
This chapter considers the movement of boats, Mediterranean archives, and possible futurity via t... more This chapter considers the movement of boats, Mediterranean archives, and possible futurity via the logic of the wake, as a way out of Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. I argue that the ways in which Algeria is discussed in contemporary French artistic spaces is beginning to change, and coincides with the 2019 hirak protest movements in Algeria. I expand on what I am calling Algeria Time in three movements. First, the maritime output of contemporary visual artists moving between France and Algeria (Abed Abidat, Zineb Sedira, Bruno Boudjelal, Naime Merabet, The Blaze). Second, through contemporary museum shows in France where Algeria is on the agenda (Mucem, La Piscine, IMA-Tourcoing). And finally, I turn briefly to the 2019 Algerian protests in order to illustrate how the placards, jokes, language politics, and memes from the protests offer alternative maritime and Mediterranean passages for the future, dislodge the logic of the migration boat, and allow us to rethink archives on the gro...
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2018
The Journal of North African Studies, 2015
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2011
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2013
This article examines incarceration and socialization as depicted in Jacques Audiard’s film Un Pr... more This article examines incarceration and socialization as depicted in Jacques Audiard’s film Un Prophète (2009). The postcolonial prison in the centre of the nation, called ‘Centrale’, is a site where postcolonial humanism is pushed to its limit. A close reading of the film reveals currency and mobility working in tandem, as illustrated by the appearance of a 50-franc bill depicting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Le Petit Prince in the opening and closing scenes. The main character of the film negotiates how to stay alive in prison, and how to get ahead on the outside. As insides and outsides are governed both by surveillance and the bio-political in the postcolonial nation, it becomes increasingly clear that the nation itself is its own prison.
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2013
ABSTRACT Salah Guemriche's Dictionnaire des mots français d’origine arabe (2007) gathers Fre... more ABSTRACT Salah Guemriche's Dictionnaire des mots français d’origine arabe (2007) gathers French words that originally come from Arabic, putting them in the context of French literature, illustrating how Arabic has had a presence in French literature through various histories. Reading Assia Djebar's preface to this dictionary reveals a navette, or shuttle, between not only the linguistic sites of French and Arabic, but also a particularly trans-Mediterranean geographic space. The navette as a reading strategy allows for a reading of the dictionary that can travel on, and between, texts and locations. Djebar's preface is compelling not only for its content, but also for its position as a narrative coming before that of the bilingual dictionary. Her membership in the Académie française renders her an expert in French who is at once inside and outside multiple languages and nation-states. She offers up the bilingual tome as a hopeful site where “mots-passerelles” (“bridge-words”) are in constant movement or shuttling, and maintain the tension on the in-between spaces in, and of, the Mediterranean.
Surrealism in North Africa and Western Asia: Crossings and Encounters, 2021
In this contribution, the plague is reassessed in a Mediterranean frame, in order to establish al... more In this contribution, the plague is reassessed in a Mediterranean frame, in order to establish alternative kinships and genealogies between surrealisms which inhabit and cross the Mediterranean. The plague is a “crisis” which “puts a special pressure on personhood” as well as a “catalyst” that makes us “rethink the idea of what it means to be human”. The modern subject is constituted by and travels via plague vectors, and connects the work of Antonin Artaud (1870–1952) and Habib Tengour (b. 1947), offering another avenue towards the relationship France–Algeria in and across the Mediterranean. Surrealism and the plague come together in the figure and the writing of Antonin Artaud as a disruption. Richard Barney and Helene Scheck consider the plague in the early modern context as “a disruption in apparently continuous temporal experience of historicity”. If the present volume addresses the avant-garde and its “networks”, how are these networks constituted and measured? What is their temporality? If surrealism erupted as an avant-garde practice in early twentieth-century European spaces, what can we make of a resurgence or reappearance in the figure of Habib Tengour’s French-Algerian surrealist manifesto written in 1981? What is it disrupting? And how might this contribute to discussions of modernity and the modern in the Mediterranean basin?
Surrealism in North Africa and Western Asia
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2012
Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes From Crisis to Critique Editors: Boletsi, Maria, Houwen, Janna, Minnaard, Liesbeth (Eds.), 2020
Title: Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity This chapter conside... more Title: Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity
This chapter considers the movement of boats, Mediterranean archives, and possible futurity via the logic of the wake, as a way out of Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. I argue that the ways in which Algeria is discussed in contemporary French artistic spaces is beginning to change, and coincides with the 2019 protest movements in Algeria. I expand on what I am calling Algeria Time in three movements. First, I examine the maritime output of contemporary
visual artists moving between France and Algeria (Abed Abidat, Zineb Sedira, Bruno Boudjelal, Naime Mrabet, The Blaze). Second, I discuss contemporary museum shows in France where Algeria is on the agenda (Mucem, La Piscine, IMA-Tourcoing). And finally, I turn briefly to the 2019 Algerian protests in order to illustrate how the placards, jokes, language politics and memes from the protests offer alternative maritime and Mediterranean passages for the future, dislodge the logic of the migration boat, and allow us to rethink archives on the ground rather than in the sea, digital or otherwise.
Keywords
Mediterranean Futurity, Archive, the Wake, Algeria Protests, Contemporary Art, Museum
studies
![Research paper thumbnail of Bare Life at Sea (the Leper and the Plague) [excerpt]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/62183205/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Biotheory: Life and Death Under Capitalism (Routledge), 2020
Currents and Currency: Cultural Circulations in the Mediterranean and Beyond aims to bring togeth... more Currents and Currency: Cultural Circulations in the Mediterranean and Beyond aims to bring together cultural works that constitute alternative archives of the Mediterranean in order to reassess the current geographical divides that shape typical understandings of the Mediterranean and beyond. It thus opens up comparative paradigms that suggest new perspectives on translation, circulation, migration, art, and literature. What can circulation and currency tell us about current Mediterranean cultural productions? How do they travel? Do they leave traces?
Feminist Media Studies, 2018
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2018
In 2016 French-Algerian artist Kader Attia filed a lawsuit against the French rappers Dosseh and ... more In 2016 French-Algerian artist Kader Attia filed a lawsuit against the French rappers Dosseh and Nekfeu, accusing them of plagiarizing Attia's 2007 installation piece Ghost in their music video “Putain d’époque.” Looking closely at both artists’ work, I ask: what is at stake in Attia's claims of plagiarism, especially for an artist who traffics in bricolage, memory, and, in his own words, “les blessures” of history? I argue that, with the current refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, the “trauma blanket” (couverture de survie) is an object that travels—and appears, without plagiarism or copyright—in both real life and artistic productions depicting Mediterranean crossings.
Expressions maghrebines, 2018
26 March, 2021
GENERI DI CONFINE: ATTRAVERSAMENTI, SCRITTURE, CULTURE / BORDERING GENDERS/GENRES/GENERA: CROSSIN... more GENERI DI CONFINE: ATTRAVERSAMENTI, SCRITTURE, CULTURE / BORDERING GENDERS/GENRES/GENERA: CROSSINGS, WRITINGS, CULTURES
Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara
Neighborliness in Global Perspective - Fifth Annual Conference of the Max Weber Foundation I 12-14 December 2019 I Cairo, 2019
Framing the Penal Colony, National Justice Museum, Nottingham, 2019
I begin this paper in the archive looking at two guillotines held in the archive of Marseille’s M... more I begin this paper in the archive looking at two guillotines held in the archive of Marseille’s Mucem Mediterranean museum, and the end of capital punishment in France in the 1980s, asking: how are these two historical objects related to the history of trans-oceanic penal colonies? This paper works in multiple times—the 19th century to today—and via multiple spaces: Marseille, Algiers, Paris, Saint Pierre, New Caledonia. New Caledonia is an interesting third space in this Mediterranean topography, as it serves as a historical site of memory, a place where Algerians were sent as prisoners after participating in the uprisings of 1870-71 in French Algeria. During that same year, 4,500 communards were exiled to New Caledonia after the failure of the Paris Commune. How is this represented in film and literature?
Community Building Seminar, Institut d'études Avancées, IMéRA, Marseille, March 2019
In this paper I explore what is at stake with northern crossings which embody the Mediterranean b... more In this paper I explore what is at stake with northern crossings which embody the Mediterranean but transplant it to a famously dead sea: one without oxygen or life, one that preserves shipwrecks at its deepest bottom, and carries bare life which travels South to North and back again, without arrival or redress.
Trafficking (in) Glissant: Mediterranean Futurity, Caribbean Routes “When Derrida suggested that... more Trafficking (in) Glissant: Mediterranean Futurity, Caribbean Routes
“When Derrida suggested that ‘nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”’, he probably did not have the Caribbean in mind, even though it provides a fitting example.” – Alison Donnell, “Caribbean Archives”, 2016
“Glissant is still our best guide this decade” - @theunread (Twitter, November 2016)
My contribution to this workshop is an exploration of what I am calling “The Mediterranean Turn” in francophone literatures. This turn, while located in/between the Mediterranean basin, is one that cannot be thought without Caribbean genealogies, specifically the work of Edouard Glissant. In a way, I am arguing that thinking the Mediterranean Turn is impossible without Glissant, and thus argue for bringing Glissant into a conversation which already includes Caribbean thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, due to his prolonged engagement in Algeria.
In her introduction to the Caribbean Quarterly issue on “Caribbean Archives” (2016), Alison Donnell explores the Caribbean and its cultural output and heritage in relation to what she calls “a growing conversation around literary heritage and the future of the region’s literary past” (307). Archives, as she notes, “do not deliver a literary heritage on their own. Rather, this rich inheritance needs to be circulated, examined and appreciated among multiple audiences in order to refresh its meaning, value and relevance as part of the Caribbean’s cultural fabric as well as the scholarly and intellectual traditions that it has served” (307).
Glissant pops up at unexpected moments. Recently deceased French-Algerian novelist and member of l’Académie Française Assia Djebar wrote of a conversation she and Glissant had in the mid-1990s in her book Algerian White about the Algerian Civil War/Dark Decade of the 1990s. Djebar recounts how Glissant detailed his final meeting with Frantz Fanon in Rome in 1960, and for her part Djebar tells the reader how it was she who described Fanon’s funeral to Glissant, describing Fanon as “Algerian-Martinican” (Algerian White 107). Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a friend of Glissant, writes that Glissant “bears the intellectual significance for our time that Foucault and Deleuze bore for theirs” (Documenta 38, p. 2). He uses Glissants work as a “toolbox”, and beginning in the 1980s, “it soon became a ritual for [him] to read in Glissant’s books for fifteen minutes every morning” (3).
There have been some forays into including Glissant, or, as I put it, trafficking (in) Glissant in francophone Maghreb studies. Patrick Crowley flags Glissant on identity and the name in order to read Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (French Forum 2004), and more recently, l’Institut du Tout-Monde staged a “rencontre” in the form of a two-day conference bringing together Fanon, Yacine, and Glissant. What we owe these three ethically, reads the conference description, is “d’ouvrir le champ d’une lecture neuve, dynamique et croisée de leur oeuvre.”
All of these anecdotal stars form a wider constellation, where I ask: what is at stake in writing the Mediterranean Turn through/with Glissant; does creolization travel, and if so, is the Mediterranean creole (as Spivak claims, at an angle, naming Cixous and Derrida “creole” thinkers)? And finally, are Caribbean archives to be found in the Mediterranean, considering that Fanon’s book collection (which contains one Glissant title) currently resides in Algiers?
This paper is a reflection on visiting Frantz Fanon’s and Kateb Yacine’s archives, respectively, ... more This paper is a reflection on visiting Frantz Fanon’s and Kateb Yacine’s archives, respectively, located at l’IMEC in Normandy, France. More specifically, I will examine the affect and politics around the entombment of two passports in this archive. How did Fanon and Yacine ‘travel’ and arrive in Normandy? What is at stake in the high-security location of these passports? The archive necessitates translation, perhaps a very specific kind of translation. Fanon and Yacine become translated and strangely silenced in the archive, located at the polar opposite coordinates of their political lives – Algeria translated back into Normandy/metropolitan France.
These passports are written in two languages, and since these are French and Arabic, they must be read from two sides, in two different directions – boustrophedon, of a kind, in the archive. The languages of the archive, its silences, and historical vectors must also be translated. Fanon’s and Yacine’s passports at l’IMEC are objects that require translation from all directions. What kind of translations (plural) are necessary in order to ‘access’ (or even assess) this archive?
Remnants of the Nation, Annual Conference in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Yaşar Uni... more Remnants of the Nation, Annual Conference in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey (October 30, 2014)
Annual Conference of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (SFPS), “Postcolonial Bodie... more Annual Conference of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (SFPS), “Postcolonial Bodies” London (November 2012)
Abstract: Annual Conference of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies
Disposability/Mobility, Or France/Algeria in Jacques Audiard’s “Un prophète” (2009)
What can a prison filled with Mediterranean subjects reveal about otherness, monolingualism, and ‘French’ bodies in the prison of the nation? Reading Jacques Audiard’s film “Un prophète” (2009) next to Jacques Derrida’s dreams of flight and transport as transcribed in Hélène Cixous’s Insister of Jacques Derrida (2006) brings together two bodily archives: Derrida and the postcolonial bio-political body as excesses of the nation.
In “Un prophète” viewers first meet protagonist and repeat juvenile offender Malik entering adult prison. Most of the film takes place in a prison in located in postcolonial France, setting up Malik as the uncanny prisoner (Unheimlich and un-homed), as well as the otherly or other-than assimilated immigrant. Malik is a stubborn reminder or remainder of postcolonial melancholia in the former metropole, traveling between historical locations of domination and unbelonging. Though not from the Maghreb, he is presented as someone who did not enjoy the benefit of becoming ‘civilized’ at the hands of the French at home.
Insides and outsides become blurred: prison, camp, nation-state, belonging, the living and the dead. The nation-state is laden with madnesses ranging from homesickness and nostalgia to issues of mother tongues and la francofolie at the very foundation of the postcolonial nation. My paper will offer a comparative look at Jacques Derrida and Malik as postcolonial bodies with intersecting trajectories, revealing a cleaving that both connects and separates disposability and
mobility.
ACLA Annual Conference, New York University, New York (March 2014)
Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Annual Conference, London (November 2013).
Entangled Legacies: Enlightenment, Colonialism and the Holocaust, Goethe University Frankfurt, Ge... more Entangled Legacies: Enlightenment, Colonialism and the Holocaust, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany (September 2012)
Turkish-German Frontiers of Humanities Symposium, Koç University, Istanbul (November 2013)
We invite abstract submissions for the 3-day workshop Currents and Currency: Cultural Circulation... more We invite abstract submissions for the 3-day workshop Currents and Currency: Cultural Circulations in the Mediterranean and Beyond, to be held in Antalya, Turkey, at the Koç University Suna & İnan Kıraç Center for Mediterranean Civilizations (AKMED) on June 13-15, 2019. Antalya is a Mediterranean inlet, an overlapping archive of historical legacies, and Turkey's gateway to its southern Mediterranean shores. The current emphasis on migrations and cultural circulations in humanities corresponds to a return to the Mediterranean in literary and cultural studies. Currents and Currency: Cultural Circulations in the Mediterranean and Beyond aims to bring together cultural works that constitute alternative archives of the Mediterranean in order to reassess the current geographical divides that shape typical understandings of the Mediterranean and beyond. It thus opens up comparative paradigms that suggest new perspectives on translation, circulation, migration, art, and literature. What can circulation and currency tell us about current Mediterranean cultural productions? How do they travel? Do they leave traces? We encourage submissions engaging with diverse Mediterranean cultural and artistic productions from the 19th to the 21st century, including, but not limited to: literature, photography, artistic productions, travel narratives, cinema and documentaries, as well as TV series. All workshop participants will be eligible for travel assistance/funding (details below).
Feminist Media Studies
18.6 Gender, Migration, and the Media Contemporary Western mediascapes are overflowing with con... more 18.6 Gender, Migration, and the Media
Contemporary Western mediascapes are overflowing with contradictory images of movement across borders. While goods and capital are cast as successfully and often innocently mobile in a world shaped by the triumphant discourse of globalization, human mass movement seems to encounter ever-increasing obstacles, from legal constraints to military prevention. In the context of what has become known as the recent " refugee crisis " , human migration fostered by warfare and socioeconomic unbalances has become increasingly associated with powerlessness (a condition in which moving appears to be the only choice for survival) rather than with individual agency, which is regarded as the organizing principle for middle-and upper-class Western citizens relocating abroad. While media coverage of " irregular crossings " in the Mediterranean has reached a fever pitch in Europe after the Arab Uprisings and since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the complex gendering of this mediatic narration has remained largely overlooked. In the contexts of generalized violence that migrants escape (and live through while migrating), women are typically subject to specific further abuse that is often structural and programmatic, and that tends to go underreported. On the other hand, Western news coverage is more likely to represent female (rather than male) refugees and migrants as hapless victims of a violence deemed endemic to their geographic, cultural, religious, and ethnic " origins " , thus fuelling racist political discourses on the " West and the rest ". As news coverage increasingly intersects literary and artistic production, mediatic (and mediated) discourses on migration thus appear more and more inescapably shaped by gender, both with regard to the authors/artists' own gendered identities and in terms of their discursive choices in representing gendered experiences of border-crossing. Who gains access to the means of cultural production? Who gets to tell their own stories or embarks on representing collective experiences? And how do the unequal relations of cultural production inform the Western casting of migrants as " victims " versus " willed individuals " , or " good " versus " dangerous " subjects? The patterns and dynamics of media and artistic production seen through the lenses of gender and race (as well as ethnicity and class) are crucial to a critical understanding of the contemporary Western discourse on migration. With this gender and migration-focused " Commentary and Criticism " issue, we hope to gather original contributions that tackle these important questions by looking for women's voices, exploring how (and if) they are amplified, and who, in this case, hears them. Contributions from a broad range of disciplines and theoretical approaches are encouraged, including those challenging the conventional borders among research fields and promoting dynamic interchange between critical reflection and creativity. Though we have privileged Europe and the Mediterranean in this narrative, we also welcome articles considering gender, media, and migration from other geographic spaces, comparative or otherwise. We are particularly interested in submissions from scholars beyond North America and the UK.
As a space of cultural and linguistic exchange, multiple migrations and identities, the Mediterra... more As a space of cultural and linguistic exchange, multiple migrations and identities, the Mediterranean is also space of trade between the major, and ancient, cities situated on its coasts. From Beirut to Casablanca, Marseilles to Tripoli, these cities, often administrative capitals in their own right, rival their inland counterparts. This collection focuses on the concept of ‘bridging’ in narratives that originate, or are located, in the exchanges between, or voyages to, these Mediterranean urban centres. In particular, we will consider the figure of the bridge, the passerelle, as passage between these locations facilitating transcultural dialogue.
Following Jacques Derrida’s peregrinations in L’Autre Cap (1991), we might ask, following Derrida: What is Europe? When or Where is Paris? Who is the Mediterranean? Perhaps the Mediterranean falls under the rubric of paleonomy, that is, as Michael Naas recalls Derrida’s words in Positions: “the ‘strategic’ necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept.” The Mediterranean is such a word: an old name to launch a new concept. Is there a desire to counter-identify against a Mediterranean identity in favour of a Metropolitan, European, Arab or African one? How are trans-Mediterranean bridging narratives thwarted by the reinforcement of borders in the region – between Africa and Europe, most notably? Finally, how does defining a Mediterranean city, such as Marseilles as European Capital of Culture, feed into the cultural production of a city whose multi-ethnic identities are as outward-looking towards North Africa as they are inward towards the French capital?
We invite essays written in French or English that look at bridging narratives in fictional texts, migratory or travelling tales, and other cultural productions. We especially welcome contributions that address one of the following concerns:
(see attached file)
Archival Formations and Boundaries in Comparative Literary Studies Organizer: Angela Veronica Wo... more Archival Formations and Boundaries in Comparative Literary Studies
Organizer: Angela Veronica Wong, The State University of New York at Buffalo
Co-Organizer: Megan MacDonald, Koç University, Istanbul, TURKEY
In the past two decades, scholarship in the humanities has taken a well-documented archival turn. This seminar invites papers that consider the archive and its uses, particularly for comparative literary practices. As many scholars have pointed out, archives cannot be considered as solely raw material to be sifted through by the neutral eye of a historian or scholar with the goal of assembling the truth of history. They can be mechanisms of managing cultural memory and asserting national power. They can be monuments and institutions, material and a process, and importantly, filled with absences. What can the archive yield, even if the archive is incomplete? What is at stake in reading literature in/through an archive, and which ones do we choose? If archives play a role in shaping and maintaining imagined communities, what is the relationship and/or difference between archive and history? What can archives, archival research and the “archival turn” tell us about the field of the humanities?
Additional topics could include:
collecting, modernity and literary practice
management and disciplinary functions of an archive
colonial archives and postcolonial legacies
location, circulation, and fluidity of archives
politics and legality of the archive and archival research: permissions, access, copyright
temporality and time of the archive
digital archives/digital humanities
archive and canonization, literary history and so-called world literature
gender and the archive; the domestic archive
ecology of the archive
the archive and diaspora; the ocean/sea as archive
translation and the archive
national/extra-national spaces
the unarchiveable and what can’t be found in the archive
American University of Cairo, April 2019
"Just Theory" Lecture Series, SUNY Buffalo, September 2016
Seminar on Comparative Studies in a Globalizing World, Veliko Tarnovo University, Bulgaria, 15 N... more Seminar on Comparative Studies in a Globalizing World, Veliko
Tarnovo University, Bulgaria, 15 November, 2014
Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, Topkapı, Istanbul, 19 December, 2013
Feminist Media Studies, 2018
This Commentary and Criticism section of Feminist Media Studies on the theme of "Gender, Migratio... more This Commentary and Criticism section of Feminist Media Studies on the theme of "Gender, Migration, and the Media" collects short essays by Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi ("Methodological Heteronormativity and the 'Refugee Crisis'"); Giuliana Sorce ("Sounding the Alarm for Right-Wing #MeToo: '120 Dezibel' in Germany"); Krista Geneviève Lynes ("Drowned at Sea: What Haunts the Stories of Trafficked Women?"); and Faith Aanu Oloruntoba, Abigail Odozi Ogwezzy-Ndisika, Babatunde Adeshina Faustino, Kelechi Okechukwu Amakoh ("Transnational Gender Narratives on Migration: The Nigerian Media and Female Migrants en Route to Italy from Libya").