Terrorism and the North African Novel

• Wed, 11/14/2012 - 4:00pm

2012-2013 MARTIN WESLEY SERIES

MUSTAPHA HAMIL

French Studies, Languages, Literatures and Cultures

“Terrorism and the North African Novel ”

The talk will be on the unusual encounter between novelists and terrorists wherein the writer and the terrorist emerge as antagonized pairs. In a world influenced by the ways television shapes people’s perception of reality as well as their unsuspecting consumption of the images of violence, the novelist of a terrorist novel challenges the temptation to sacrifice social and historical facts and debunks reductive psychological explanations for terrorist acts.

Representation of violence imposes therefore an arduous struggle to control the means of representation. Mahi Binebine’s novel Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen (2010) re(constructs) the events and circumstances leading to the May 16, 2003 Casablanca terrorist attacks. The story is narrated by a dead terrorist who assumes the role of a narrator, thus blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, absence and presence, and the embodiment and disembodiment.

Reception to follow