Maghrebi literature persistently engages the body as a critical site wherein colonial violence, gendered oppression, and social marginalization are simultaneously inscribed and resisted. This panel seeks to examine how Maghrebi writers strategically mobilize gendered, racialized, wounded, and transgressive bodies to interrogate structures of power, formations of belonging, and configurations of narrative authority within colonial and postcolonial frameworks. Rather than conceiving identity as fixed or static, we approach embodiment as a contested terrain through which socio-political engagement, collective memory, trauma, resistance, and ethical possibility are negotiated and articulated.
We invite scholarly contributions that explore, from multidisciplinary perspectives, how literary representations of intimacy, illness, sexuality, silence, and corporeal vulnerability function to disrupt normative orders and expose the limitations of dominant archives. Critical frameworks including but not limited to feminist theory, memory studies, medical humanities, biopolitics, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory, are welcome. By situating embodied writing within broader African and diasporic discourses on belonging, care, and social repair, we contend that Maghrebi literature transforms corporeal rupture into a productive epistemological site for reimagining political agency and relational futures, thereby advancing embodiment-centered methodological approaches within African literary studies.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to: embodiment and counter-archival practices; feminist narrative strategies and gendered resistance; illness narratives and medical discourse; biopolitics and bodily governance; sexuality, desire, and transgression; Fanonian corporeality and decolonial theory; trauma and embodied memory; disability studies and literary representation; intersectionality in Maghrebi contexts; body politics and postcolonial subjectivity.
We welcome comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed proposals.
Submission Requirements:
Abstract: 250-300 words
Keywords: Minimum of 5 keywords
Biographical Statement: Maximum 100 words, detailing institutional affiliation, research interests, and relevant publications
Please submit abstracts and biographical statements to jmasmah@ad.unc.edu and sawuni@crimson.ua.edu by March 12, 2025.
