Description:

A daylong symposium co-hosted by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC) and the Middle East and North African Studies Program (MENA) & co-sponsored by the Program of African Studies (PAS) through support of the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI NRC program

Program

9:30 am
Continental Breakfast

10:00 am
Welcome and Opening Remarks
     Brian Edwards (Director, Middle East and North African Studies Program, Northwestern University)
     Dilip Gaonkar (Director, Center for Global Culture and Communication, Northwestern University)

Panel 1
10:15 am - 12:00 pm

Abdelhay Moudden (Mohammed V University, Rabat)
"Is There a Moroccan Exception to the Norm in Politics?"

Adria Lawrence (Johns Hopkins University)
"Collective Protest and the Institutional Promise of Monarchy"

lunch break
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Panel 2
1:00 pm – 2:45 pm

Katarzyna Pieprzak (Williams College)
"The Art of Memory and Forgetting: Archive Fever and Moroccan Exceptionalism"

Omar Berrada (Dar al-Ma’mûn, Marrakech)
"Sundry Moors: Racial Exceptionalism and its Revenants"

2:45 pm – 3:00 pm
coffee break

Panel 3
3:00 pm - 4:45 pm

Zakia Salime (Rutgers University)
"Exceptionalism: Gendered Disruptions"

Driss Ksikes (Centre d’Etudes Sociales, Economiques et Managériales, Rabat)
"Exception, Specificity, Universality, Multiversality: Media and Literary Variations"

4:45
Closing Remarks

5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Reception (Hagstrum Room, University Hall 201)

About the Speakers

Abdelhay Moudden is Professor of Political Science at Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco. He is the founder and academic director of the Center for Cross-Cultural Learning (CCCL) in Morocco. He is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Human Rights Council. He is a member of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (Instance Equité et Réconciliation, IER). He is the author of two novels, including Adieux à Tanger, which won the Morocco book award in 2004.

Adria Lawrence is Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (MIT Press, 2010).

Zakia Salime is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University and Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and co-editor of Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (Duke University Press, 2016).

Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Previously, he curated public programs at Centre Pompidou, hosted shows on French national radio, and ran Tangier’s International Book Salon. In 2016 he edited The Africans, a book on migration and racial politics in Morocco, and curated exhibitions centering on the work and archive of writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani, at the Marrakech Biennale and at Witte de With in Rotterdam.

Katarzyna Pieprzak is Chair and Professor of Francophone Literature, French Language, and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She is the author of Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Morocco (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor of Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature: Remapping Uncertain Territories (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

Driss Ksikes is a Moroccan playwright, novelist, journalist, scholar, and human rights advocate. He is Director of CESEM (Centre d’Etudes Sociales, Economiques et Managériales) in Rabat, the editor in chief of Economia, and the author of numerous plays and novels. His 2014 book Le métier d’intellectuel: dialogues avec quinze penseurs du Maroc (The intellectual profession: interviews with fifteen Moroccan thinkers) won the 2015 Prix Grand Atlas, Morocco’s biggest book prize. He is a Visiting Writer-in-Residence with the Center for the Writing Arts at Northwestern for the spring 2017 quarter.

Please also join us the evening before — Wednesday, May 17 at 5:30 PM — for a staged reading of The X-Y-Y Equation, the play-in-progress by Driss Ksikes, in the Hagstrum Room, University Hall 201. For more details:

https://planitpurple.northwestern.edu/event/499848