The past decade has witnessed the mushrooming of local and regional comics collectives throughout the Arab world, at a precise moment when revolutions and socio-political movements of contestation were unfolding in the region. While the published comics strips reflect the different struggles on the ground as well as the inspirations and hopes ignited by these uprisings, I contend that there is a dialectical relationship between the emergence of a new comics scene that is closely tied to the revolutionary moment, which has precisely allowed its emergence. This talk maps the different cultural practices and the new aesthetic forms that have emerged in the wake of revolutions, and resituates them in longer genealogies of local practices and collective memories on which they draw. By delineating the creative impulses associated with the revolutionary moment, it asks: how are struggles related to political, social, and gender issues addressed? How can we critically assess the collective reappraisal of the visual, both locally and regionally? How is agency regained collectively and against repressive national narratives? what kind of imaginaries and imaginations of the future do these graphic interventions renegotiate?
Mi 26 Mai 2021 | 17:00–18:30
Comics in Times of Arab Revolutions: Tracing Visual (Hi)stories of Socio-Political Transformations (2010-2021)
Rasha Chatta (MECAM Fellow 2021), Chair: Friederike Pannewick (Philipps-Universität Marburg / EUME)
This seminar is held jointly with the IFG “Aesthetics & Cultural Practice” of the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM)
Rasha Chatta is currently a MECAM fellow. She was most recently a EUME fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, affiliated with the Freie Universität Berlin (2017-2021). She earned her PhD in Cultural, Literary, and Postcolonial Studies from SOAS, University of London and has held teaching positions at SOAS, Bard College Berlin, and NYU London. Her research interests include visual aesthetics and memory, approaches to world literature, Arab migrant and diasporic literatures, ‘alternative’ archives, and war literature with a focus on Lebanon and Syria. Her publications include “Conflict and Migration in Lebanese Graphic Narratives”, in Smets, K. et al. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (2019) and “An Archive For the Future? Syrian Comics and the Visually Real” edited by AFAC (forthcoming). Rasha serves as Secretary of the MLA’s Global Arab and Arab American Forum.
In accordance with the measures against the spread of the coronavirus, this seminar session will be held virtually via ZOOM. Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de to receive the login details. Depending on approval by the speakers, the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available via the account of the Forum Transregionale Studien on SoundCloud.
