Part of MECAM Workshop “Cities in the Arab Imagination: Fiction, Reality, and Futurescapes”, 15-16 May, 2024.
Nowadays contemporary Arabic literature and cultural production abound with depictions of future cities. Yet his topic has occupied the minds of Arab authors and thinkers from the early- twentieth century to the present day. This talk draws on a selection of texts drawn from modern and contemporary Arabic cultural production - including a short story by Mustafa Lutfi al Al-Manfaluti published in 1910, a play by the architect and thinker Hassan Fathy written in 1942, as well as science fiction novels from the 1980s and 2000s, and finally, contemporary dystopian Arabic climate fiction - to address the following questions: What do future cities look like in these fictional texts? How do elements such as class, gender, religion, and socio-economic disparities factor into these depictions? How do visions of future cities change in response to evolving urban and non-urban landscapes in the region? Lastly, what is the connection between these futuristic visions and the changing climate of the Arab region?
The central aim of this talk is to connect these imaginary cities with the realities from which they originate and to show the relation between future thinking and attempts to change the present.
Teresa Pepe is a Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include Arabic literature, media, popular culture, sociolinguistics, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. She is the author of the book Blogging From Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (Edinburgh: EUP, 2019) which explores blogs as forms of digital literature emerging in Egypt during the rise of the political protest of the Arab Spring. She is the co-editor of the volume Arabic Literature in the Posthuman Age (with S. Guth, Harassowitz Verlag 2019), which examines the use of dystopia, necropolitics, monsters and satire in Arabic literature today. She has also edited two special issues for the BRILL Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, one on “Media Transition and Cultural Debates in Arabic Societies” (with Barbara Winckler, 2022) and one entitled: “Arab Futures Re-considered: Historical, Cultural and Ecological Approaches”. Her Chapter on “Futures” is forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion for Modern Arabic Literature.
Rasha Chatta is a comparative literature and cultural studies scholar, specialising in the contemporary Arab world and its diasporas. She is currently an Associate Researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she is completing a monograph titled Sketching Migration in Arab Comics: War Narratives, Conflicted Memory, and Gender. She has published scholarly articles on Arab migrant narratives, war literature, visual archives, and Arab comics, in addition to numerous magazine entries and podcasts on comics.
Please note that the Berliner Seminar will take place on-site at the Forum Transregionale Studien. We kindly ask for prior registration via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.