Plurality Contested: Moroccan Cultural and Intellectual Production as the New Political
On the 1st-2nd December an international workshop of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” in collaboration with the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies and SARAS – Sapienza University of Rome took place at the institute, organized by Dr. Barbara Winckler and Dr. Fernanda Fischione.
The workshop focused on the idea of Morocco “as a horizon of thought”, as Abdelkébir Khatibi defined the Maghreb. A site of cultural entanglements, diversity and plurality, Morocco is gaining a privileged position in area studies. The workshop aimed to gain insight into recent research focusing on the way the country’s linguistic, cultural and social diversity is both affirmed and contested in cultural and intellectual production.
Morocco has received relatively little scholarly attention, at least in English-language academic studies, especially with regards to its cultural production. Among the reasons for the underestimation of the Maghreb in general is the fact that it is a region that can hardly be framed within the usual disciplinary boxes, such as the largely Mashreq-centred Arabic or Islamic Studies. Multicultural and multilingual, historically located at the crossroads between the Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab Levant (not to mention the Atlantic routes), the Maghreb is a place of complex knots and relationships, of threads and traces that intersect, questioning and provoking the observers, and forcing them to deconstruct their epistemological paradigms.
Representing various disciplinary approaches, international scholars at different career stages based in Morocco, Europe and the US presented their work during the workshop and discussed it with graduate and PhD students from the University of Münster.