Description:

Speaker: Matthew Brauer

Respondent: Hasheem Hakeem, Dept of French and Italian 

Title: "The Imperial Future of Ruins: French travelers in Morocco before the Protectorate"

Description:

Morocco occupies a special place in the corpus of European travel writing about Africa as one of the last territories of that continent to come under European rule. Across the three decades known as the "scramble for Africa" (1884-1914), a distinct body of French travel writings appears that portrays Morocco as a ruinous land, both politically and architecturally. Drawing on the emergent social sciences of archaeology and ethnography, in addition to history and politics, these texts endeavor to make physical ruins legible as literary inscriptions not simply of Morocco’s past, but of a future French colonial administration and its modes of action.

Bio:

Matthew Brauer is a third-year PhD student in French/Francophone Studies and a participant in the MENA Graduate Cluster at Northwestern. He is currently studying 19th and 20th century European colonial travel writing and 20th century North African literature and is interested in the relation between literature and history, as a problem of both literary production and scholarship.

Lunch Served