Rethinking Spaces: Artistic, Literary & Cultural Representations

Research Centre on Culture and Communication

Department of English

Faculty of Arts & Humanities

University of Moulay Slimane

Beni Mellal, Morocco

Annual Conference

Rethinking Spaces: Artistic, Literary & Cultural Representations

22-23 April 2008

How do post-colonial and post-modern theories of space really offer a way out of the binary, Manichean thinking as propagated by the dichotomies of territorial vs. extraterritorial, local vs. global, national vs. international, North vs. South, East vs. West, native vs. foreign, private vs. public? To what extent do these theories succeed in offering new methodologies and positions that help us rethink space as representation, and contribute to our understanding of artistic, literary, and cultural representations?

Such are some of the basic questions that will be considered in the 2008 conference, organised by the RCCC and the University of Beni Mellal. With this conference, the aim is to offer the opportunity to re-examine representations of Space in literature, fine arts, photography, television and film, advertising, popular art, architecture within the context of contemporary works in cultural studies, cultural geography, and visual studies. We would be pleased to see papers reflecting these emphases; however, we welcome papers addressing anyone of the following topics:

 Space and postcolonial theory

National and transnational space

Subjectivity and space

The body as space

Gender and space

Race and space

Space in visual representations

 Architecture and culture

Cultural geography

Real and Imaginary space

Mental space

Memory, history, and space

Space in post-modern literature

Abstracts of no more than 300 words to send before 1^st Feb, 2008 to:

cherkikarkaba@yahoo.fr; chahin60@yahoo.com; fsyad@hotmail.com

Paper presentations should not exceed twenty minutes. Selected proceedings will be published in the coming issue of Middle Ground, the Journal of the Research Centre on Culture and Communication.