A guest blog by Dr Abdelbaqi Ghorab:
The symposium, held on 19-21 June 2025, was an opportunity to bring together 30 academics, journalists and artists from across the world to discuss urgent issues related to the Maghreb region and North Africa in general. The hybrid nature of the event facilitated a debate across multiple academic spheres that do not usually have the opportunity to converse with one another, despite their shared interest in the region. The discussion covered topics related to artistic production and censorship, linguistic diversity and policy-making, immigration and intergenerational memory, decolonial thought in the Maghreb, humour and different forms of collective identity in the region.
The event was co-organised by Dr Abdelbaqi Ghorab and Dr Lillian Fontaine with the generous support of the Susan Manning Workshop Grant from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the University of Edinburgh Languages Research Fund.
The three-day event included two keynotes by Dr Joseph Ford (ILCS, University of London), and Dr Amina Zarzi (University of Oxford). Dr Ford’s lecture drew attention to how Maghrebi literature in French crosses borders in terms of its material movement and market appeal and engages in new modes of being and knowing. This process encourages us to rethink the power of writing and literary criticism in reshaping our perception of the world and how we interact with it. The second keynote by Dr Zarzi sheds light on the depiction of the Sahara in postcolonial writing and how literature can teach us the problematic nature of a desert-focused imagination that portrays the desert as empty, awaiting European meaning production. More importantly, she showed how we can perceive the Sahara as un lieu de mémoire that challenges these tropes.
As a main cultural event, the institute facilitated the screening of the award-winning documentary This Jungo Life (2024) by David Fedele, followed by a short Q&A. The participants engaged in a profound discussion on the role that scholars of the Maghreb can play in shaping public opinion on the inhumane treatment of refugees and the politics involved in this process.
The panellists and attendees engaged with the Maghreb as a socio-political space with its own extensive history of colonialism and civil unrest. The discussion problematized the Maghreb as the locus of a shifting conception of national and cultural identity that is informed by its geographical location, as well as its religious, ethnolinguistic, and cultural diversity.