FREN 4155

Reimagining the Body in North African Literature, Film and Visual Culture

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

In this course we will encounter, imagine and re-imagine lots of different bodies and bodily experiences with writers, artists and filmmakers in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco who have resisted bodily oppression through their work. We will feel, alongside Franz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blanches, the dislocation between the mind and the body experienced by the colonized subject. We will consider women's veiling and unveiling during the Algerian War of Independence, and its political idealization by male writers and filmmakers, for example in Pontecorvo's La Bataille d'Alger. Next we will gaze at the harem bodies of Western fantasy, looking at how contemporary artists and writers question the violence implicit in works like Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartment. Through the films of Nadir Maknèche and Djamila Sharoui, we will journey alongside the body in road trips, expeditions for missing people and escape plots to the other side of the Mediterranean. Finally, we will spend some time with marginal figures who capture some of the tragicomic nature of their bodily restrictions: with homosexual bodies and bodies for sale in the bars, brothels and nightclubs of Algiers and Tunis; with a girl raised as a boy in Marrakech; and with an ex-Nazi who shows up in a remote Algerian village.

When Offered Fall.

Distribution Category (CA-AS)

Comments Co-meets with FREN 6155. Conducted in English.

View Enrollment Information