FREN 6030

Multidirectional Maghreb

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

Assia Djebar famously described the Algeria of the 1990s – immersed in the décennie noire's civil war – as a "blank territory" where violence "immured" an entire Nation "in an untranslatability exacerbated by Western media coverage" (Apter). Space, literature and memory collided once again in Djebar's literary project in order to resist aesthetically political sheer violence hic et nunc – "here and now." Focusing on North African cross-cultural legacies with Arabic, French, Berber and Hebrew languages, this seminar will consider key notions such as deterritorialization, disjunctive temporality (Benjamin), hybridity, multidirectional memory (Rothberg), opacity (Glissant), plurality (Khatibi), Postcolonialism, postmemory (Hirsch), repair (Attia), spectrality (Derrida), trauma, and untranslatability to critically understand how Maghrebian authors have undertaken to reclaim their cultural memory beyond the remnants of colonialism by elaborating what we will call aesthetic résistances (Rancière).

When Offered Spring.

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