Competing Temporalities in Decolonial North African Fiction
Previous Fellowships: 2024/ 2025
(c) Lorenz Brandtner
Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” (Freie Universität Berlin). She obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on modern Tunisian fiction (Freie Universität Berlin, 2024, summa cum laude). Her first monograph The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Together with Mohamed-Salah Omri (University of Oxford) she co-edits the first English-language volume devoted to the varieties of modern Tunisian literatures Tunisian Literatures – Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies (Bloomsbury, 2026). Hanan currently teaches BA and MA classes at Freie Universität Berlin and at the University of Goettingen, Germany, relating to narratives of upheaval and how literature and politics interact in the modern Maghreb. During her PhD, she served as Research Associate to the ERC-funded project “PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present” where she explored literary networks between the Maghreb and Mashrek. Hanan holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford, 2018) and a BA in Arabic and German Literature (University of Göttingen, 2016), including a year of studying abroad at Paris-Sorbonne University. In the academic years 2025-27, Hanan is an affiliated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Competing Temporalities in Decolonial North African Fiction
Embracing an interdisciplinary, transnational, and bilingual approach, this project explores North African fiction in Arabic and French. It aims to comparatively examine the literature of a region whose cultural heritage is often categorised in the university research landscape as either Romance studies or Arabic studies. The project is inspired by the tendency of modern Maghrebi fiction to reference early modern figures and texts that shaped conceptions of the region’s literature, historiography and “imagined geographies” (Edward Said). It departs from the hypothesis that by choosing certain intertextual references over others, Maghrebi writers contribute to decolonial literary histories from within. Indeed, many authors engage with early modern personalities who shaped how the history of the Mediterranean is remembered today. Returning to travelling intellectuals like Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) and Ibn Battuta (1304– 1377), they reach back to a time before imposed nation-states restructured the regional order in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on this observation, my book project investigates the correlation between intertextuality and temporality. Which (literary) histories do texts from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco narrate? How does their relationship to temporality manifest itself in choices of intertextual and historical references? How do these choices change throughout the 20th century, and in the beginning of the 21st century?
