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Tracks and Traces of Violence explores the social conditions, political contexts, and cultural spaces of violence in Africa. It is comprised of accounts that underpin the visible and hidden 'tracks and traces' of violence in the memories of traumatized individuals and groups. It also interrogates the gaps, silences, and vacuities of/in these memories, as well as the role they play in shaping the facial contours of our modern societies. Weaving together views from literature, anthropology, art, cultural studies, and museum studies, this book provides deeper insight into the meanings of violent socialities, spatialities, and temporalities, as well as into how they materialize in poetry, fiction, art, and popular culture. (Series: Contributions to African Research / Beitrage zur Afrikaforschung, Vol. 80) [Subject: African Studies, Sociology, Art, Literature, Anthropology]
Our Civilizing Mission is both an exploration of colonial education and a response to current anxieties about the foundations of the ‘humanities’. Focusing on the example of Algeria, it asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education.
Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. Through careful examinations of various transnational, hybrid, border, and diasporic forces and practices, these essays push at the edge of cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory and raise crucial questions about ethnographic methodology. This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventi...
The LAMALIF anthology presents a wide variety of articles from LAMALIF, Morocco’s longest-serving Francophone journal. Active between 1966 and 1988, LAMALIF covered the most critical periods of Moroccan history and engaged in crucial debates about democratization, feminism, culture, education, Third World relations, and decolonization. However, LAMALIF was not just a journal; it was a real school, where Morocco’s, North Africa’s, and the developing world’s emerging and established writers, artists, and thinkers found a space to disseminate their ideas and address readerships across different cultures and geographical areas in French. This anthology is the first comprehensive translat...
This selection of Hassan Najmi’s poems, translated by Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin, provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of Morocco’s foremost poets and to a school of modern verse emerging in the Arab World. Scenes of late night cityscapes, lonely interiors, awe-inspiring desert wastes, and seaside vistas are found within the exquisitely subtle lyric moods and nuances of Najmi’s ars poetica, providing insight into the geographical, political, and linguistic ferment that have made Morocco an exciting hub of creative activity in the twenty-first century.
The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art is situated at the crossroads of language, culture and genre; it contends that suffering transcends time, space and cultural specificity. Even when extreme trauma is silenced, it often still emerges in surprising and painful ways. This volume draws together examples from throughout the Francophone world, including countries such as Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Rwanda, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, New Caledonia, Quebec and France, and across genres such as autobiography, poetry, theater, film, fiction and visual art to provide a cohesive analysis of the representation of trauma. In addition to the survivor...
Story of Water and Fire is a captivating account of the joint life of two prominent figures in the Iraqi art scene, poet and art critic May Muzaffar and artist Rafa Nasiri. This book offers a glimpse into the social and artistic milieu of Baghdad from the 1960s to the 1990s, as well as the couple's travels during this period and their years of exile in Amman and Manama. Through vivid descriptions and rarely seen photographs, May Muzaffar provides insights into their position in the Arab and international art scenes. The book serves as a guide to the archival material that al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi has digitized and made available for researchers, creating an...
This book examines the phenomenon of the post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fictional narrative.
Cultural expressions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have a rich tradition, communal narratives, and spiritual connectivity. This tapestry, distinct from the secular drama prevalent in Western cultures, is a unique blend of indigenous traditions and Western influences. This book introduces the rich and diverse theatrical practices developed and matured in the region from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The introduction of Western-style theatre in the nineteenth century marked a shift from traditional entertainment forms. In the twentieth century, subjects of colonialism, nationalism, independence, and Islamic ideology have often dominated the theatrical discourse, reflecting the region’s socio-political realities. The book’s final section looks at theatre from a twenty-first global perspective, including the crucial role of the diaspora. This book shows how colonialism, Islamic ideology, politics, war, refugee crisis, and nationalism have permeated MENA’s theatre in the past and have continued to shape it in the present.
To the world they are known as Berbers, but they prefer to call themselves Imazighen, or “free people.” The claim to this unique cultural identity has been felt most acutely in Algeria in the Kabylia region, where an Amazigh consciousness gradually emerged after WWII. This is a valuable model for other Amazigh movements in North Africa, where the existence of an Amazigh language and culture is denied or dismissed in countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. By tracing the cultural production of the Kabyle people—their songs, oral traditions, and literature—from the early 1930s to the end of the twentieth century, Fazia Aïtel shows how they have defined their own cultur...