EUME Workshop
Wed 29 Jun 2022 – Fri 01 Jul 2022

The Literary 1980s in the Middle East and North Africa: Towards A Transregional History of the Present

Convened by Anne-Marie McManus (Forum Transregionale Studien / SYRASP / EUME Fellow) and Amir Moosavi (Rutgers University—Newark / EUME Fellow 2016/17)

Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020). Composition, 1978, cellulosic cutting on panel, 110 x 100 cm. Image courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.
Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020). Composition, 1978, cellulosic cutting on panel, 110 x 100 cm. Image courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Blog series on TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research

Program (PDF)

Poster (PDF)

Located at the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and global history, this workshop uses Arabic, Persian Turkish, Tamazight (Berber), English, and French literatures of the period roughly defined by 1979-1991 to challenge the sense of political and social stalemate that haunts the contemporary Middle East and its diasporas. The 1980s were a uniquely transregional decade that marked the final stage of the Cold War, bookended most notably by the Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979) and the First Gulf War (1991). The decade witnessed dramatic social and political shifts whose effects reverberated around the world but were most acutely felt in the geographic space that extends from Morocco to Afghanistan. In ways that have yet to be acknowledged, literature – which plays the distinctive role of an archive for public history and memory in the greater Middle East – bore witness to these upheavals, their local and national impacts, and to connections of violence, solidarity, and memory that entangled regional societies and cultures in new ways. 

 

The workshop invites literary scholars of the Middle East and North Africa to go beyond national and linguistic approaches to explore how literature’s writing of the 1980s in and across this vast, diverse, and interconnected region provokes new perspectives on the present. Taking the 1980s as a transregional prism will permit participants to interrogate concepts and narratives that have become so dominant in regional and scholarly discourses – such as tradition versus modernity, or political Islam’s absolute triumph over the left – as to be strangely defunct today, emptied of their meaning. By foregrounding literature’s writing of the 1980s’ political and societal transformations, the workshop will open an unprecedented critical dialogue between comparative literary studies and contemporary research in Middle Eastern and global history.  

The workshop is convened by Anne-Marie McManus (Forum Transregionale Studien / SYRASP / EUME Fellow) and Amir Moosavi (Rutgers University—Newark / EUME Fellow 2016/17). It is funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
 

Publications

Samad Alavi, Against Remembering: The Fictional Truth of a Massacre, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 10.11.2022.

Idriss Jebari, Memory and the Repressed: The Possibility of Therapeutic Histories of the 1980s, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 18.11.2022.

Anne-Marie McManus, Trauma and the 1980s in Arabic Literary Studies, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 09.06.2022.

Friederike Pannewick, Silence and Radical Rethinking in Syrian Theatre of the Long 1980s, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 22.12.2022.

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