Part of MECAM Workshop “Cities in the Arab Imagination: Fiction, Reality, and Futurescapes”, 15-16 May, 2024.
Since 2011, several cities in the Arab Region have turned into the sites of battlefields. From Mosul and Tripoli, to Aleppo and Gaza, cities have become symbols of urban misery and mass destruction. Sieged, shelled, and destroyed, cities have been left in ruins even when bombs have stopped. But can we imagine a future without ruins? To answer this question, it is essential to deconstruct the word reconstruction and investigate the multiple ‘re’s within it. In this presentation, I will look at the city of Homs, Syria, where over half of its neighbourhoods have been destroyed, and explore the complex and difficult questions of a reconstruction yet to come.
Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the Principal Investigator of Slow Violence and the City, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. His research has been published by several platforms including The Guardian, the New York Times and the New Statesman. He is the author of Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury, 2023). Ammar is on X: @Dr_Ammar_Azzouz.
Anne-Marie McManus is a comparative literary scholar of Arabic, English, and French literatures in the 20th and 21st century. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She has published essays on poetics, comparative and theoretical methods, and contemporary Arabic literatures and cultures in venues such as Critical Inquiry (2021), The Cambridge History of World Literature, Books & Ideas, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of World Literature, and Expressions Maghrébines. Her first book – Of Other Languages, under contract at Cambridge UP – tracks theories and practices of linguistic clarity, ambiguity, and emotion that circled the Algerian War of Independence during the decades of decolonization between the Maghreb and Mashreq. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, NYU Abu Dhabi, and the European Research Council (ERC). She currently oversees the ERC-funded project SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.
Please note that the Berliner Seminar will take place on-site at the Forum Transregionale Studien. We kindly ask for prior registration via . Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
