Plurality Contested: Moroccan Cultural and Intellectual Production as the New Political (en ligne)

The workshop focuses on the idea of Morocco “as a horizon of thought”, as Abdelkébir Khatibi defined the Maghreb. A site of cultural entanglements, diversity and plurality, Morocco is currently gaining a privileged position in area studies. The workshop aims to gain insight into recent research focusing on the way the country’s linguistic, cultural and social diversity is both affirmed and contested in cultural and intellectual production.

Morocco has received relatively little scholarly attention, at least in English-language academic studies, especially with regards to its cultural production. Among the reasons for the underestimation of the Maghreb in general is the fact that it is a region that can hardly be framed within the usual disciplinary boxes, such as the largely Mashreq-centred Arabic or Islamic Studies. Multicultural and multilingual, historically located at the crossroads between the Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab Levant (not to mention the Atlantic routes), the Maghreb is a place of complex knots and relationships, of threads and traces that intersect, questioning and provoking the observers, and forcing them to deconstruct their epistemological paradigms.

Representing various disciplinary approaches, international scholars at different career stages based in Morocco, Europe and the US will present their work and discuss it with graduate and PhD students from the University of Münster. Invited speakers:

From Festivals and Sports to Arts and Crafts: The Power of Popular Culture in Morocco - Amina Boubia, International University of Rabat, Morocco

Rabat School of Thought: A Prelude to an Intellectual Edge - Mohammed Hashas, Luiss University of Rome, Italy / Leibniz-ZMO, Berlin, Germany

Moroccan Feminist Papers and the Building of the Women’s Rights Movement (1983-2004) - Martina Biondi, University of Macerata, Italy / University of Utrecht, Netherlands

Transcolonial Maghreb: The Question of Palestine in Moroccan Literature and Thought - Olivia C. Harrison, University of Southern California, USA

Moroccan Cinema: Globalization, Society, and the Politics of Representation - Jamal Bahmad, Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco

For further information, please contact the organisers, Dr Fernanda Fischione (SARAS Department, Sapienza University of Rome, fernanda.fischione@uniroma1.it) and Dr Barbara Winckler (Institute for Arabic & Islamic Studies, University of Münster, barbara.winckler@uni-muenster.de).

To attend the workshop remotely, please join us on Zoom via the following link: https://wwu.zoom-x.de/j/64310839081 (all times are CET).

The workshop falls within the activities of TRANSECT, a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101027040. For more information on TRANSECT, please visit the website https://www.transect.eu/.