Jill Jarvis, Department of French, Yale University
The talk will primarily focus on a recent sculpture/video piece of artwork that recreates a midcentury expedition to prehistoric rock art sites at Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria; it will serve as an introduction to the tensions at stake in Jarvis's current research on representations of the Sahara.
Jill Jarvis specializes in the aesthetics and politics of North Africa. Her forthcoming book, Decolonizing Memory : Algeria and the Politics of Testimony, brings together close readings of fiction with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of violence and the stakes of literary study in a time of unfinished decolonization. She is also at work on a second book project, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara, which envisions the Sahara as a site of material, intellectual, and linguistic exchanges that challenge both disciplinary boundaries and received notions of African studies. Other work appears in New Literary History, PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, and Expressions maghébrines.
In her teaching as well as her research, she is dedicated to questioning the assumptions of area studies and methodological orthodoxies. Her work centers the aesthetic and the literary, making the case for literature as constitutive—rather than simply reflective—of political agency.
Co-sponsored by Art History & Art, Theory, Practice