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Imagining Contemporary Algerias: Communities, Nation-State, the Maghreb, and the Mediterranean

Imagining Contemporary Algerias: Communities, Nation-State, the Maghreb, and the Mediterranean

Publié le par Alexandre Gefen (Source : Megan MacDonald)

 

Call For Papers

‘Imagining Contemporary Algerias:

Communities, Nation-State, the Maghreb, and the Mediterranean’

Keynote speakers: Salim Bachi (writer) and Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College, Oxford)

 

International Workshop to be held at University College Cork, Ireland

September 7-8 2012

This workshop asks what kinds of communities and identities have been imagined within Algerian literature and film in recent decades. Has the relationship between communities and the nation-state been re-imagined in ways that undermine or reinforce the nation-state? And can we speak of the emergence, or re-emergence, of Mediterranean and trans-Maghrebian perspectives?  

Prior to recent, revolutionary events across the Maghreb, a number of competing forces have been in play in Algeria including nationalist disenchantment, Islamism, and globalization. How have they been given aesthetic form? How has their impact on communities been addressed within cultural production?  And in what ways have these texts and films imagined Algeria, and future Algerias, over the last twenty five years?

The workshop asks participants:

--  to think of ways in which communities located within specific places (such as Bab el Oeud), or formed through identifications (with, for example, Islamist groups or ethnic formations) are given cultural articulation within wider frames of reference.

-- to explore how the Algerian nation-state has been represented in ways that suggest not only nationalist disenchantment but the hope of a new, democratic dispensation.

-- to situate the nation-state of Algeria within its trans-Maghrebian context and in terms of its national borders (that can be porous yet serve as barriers to ‘transit’).

-- Finally, if the movement of peoples both across the Mediterranean and across the Maghreb suggests the continuing strength of the nation-state, this conference asks how the nation-state has been questioned within, and through, a re-thinking of the Mediterranean.

We invite proposals that focus on cultural forms including, but not limited to, literary, cinematic, and artistic productions. Contributions may address the question of new and imagined Algerian identities through inter-disciplinary approaches, comparative case studies, or close readings of cultural products from the Maghreb or wider Mediterranean.  

 

In addressing the questions outlined above, topics may include:

-- questions of national belonging and new imagined communities

-- New allegories for old national questions

-- the making-Mediterranean of the Maghreb

-- new Mediterranean humanisms in Algeria

-- borders

-- how Algeria is viewed across the Maghreb

-- hybridity, assimilation, and marginalization in nation-state discourses

-- colonial/postcolonial correspondences

-- questions concerning national literatures, la francophonie, and Arabic literatures

-- poetics and littérarité of imagining communities

-- madness, nostalgia, homesickness

-- francophone texts and publishing politics

-- bodies and transit: Mediterranean/African/European

-- questions of origin (real, imagined, haunted or otherwise)

 

Abstracts in English or French (max. 300 words) for 20 minute papers due to pcrowley@french.ucc.ie or mgn.macdonald@gmail.com by May 1 2012.Submissions should include the paper title and the presenter’s name, affiliation, and email address.

This workshop forms part of the Algeria: Nation and Transnationalism 1988-2010 project supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS).

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