International symposium "Writing and geopolitics in the contemporary Arab and Mediterranean world", November 25-26, 2021

Event organized in hybrid by the Centre de Recherche Moyen-Orient Méditerranée-CERMOM (Inalco, France), the Laboratoire des Langues et Cultures Méditerranéennes-LCM (Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik, Lebanon), and the LLS (Université Ibn Tofail, Morocco).

The conference languages are Arabic, French and English.

Thursday November 25 and Friday November 26, 2021 - 09:30-17:00 - Maison de la recherche - Auditorium Georges Dumézil
Inalco - Maison de la recherche - 2, rue de Lille - 75007 Paris

Practical information for attending the colloquium:
Registration required
- in person: health pass and mask required

Organization: Rima Sleiman (CERMOM, Inalco), Sobhi Boustani (CERMOM, Inalco), Joseph Chraim (Université St-Esprit de Kaslik)

Contacts: rima.sleiman@inalco.fr and sobhi.boustani@inalco.fr

Writing and Geopolitics in the Contemporary Arab and Mediterranean World: 2nd edition

While writing is an age-old practice that has fascinated all of humanity, geopolitics, in one of its conceptions as "the study of power relations in space on any scale, including a local one", is now making its way into the language and media landscape. It remains, as some suggest, the object of embarrassment that can go as far as lively suspicion in scholarly circles.

The challenge was therefore to bring these two realities together in a colloquium on the theme of "Writing and geopolitics in the contemporary Arab and Mediterranean world"

It goes without saying that the contemporary Arab world, and the Mediterranean world in general, has been undergoing social and political changes since the beginning of the 21st century, which implicitly or explicitly shape writing as a whole, and determine the very role of the writer and the intellectual. New trends are emerging under regimes that are, despite the so-called "Arab revolution", increasingly totalitarian. A new human geography is defining the demographic landscape in these societies: (population displacement, immigration, the emergence of minorities...).

To what extent could geopolitics constitute the framework, content or object of writing, in the broadest sense of the term in the last two decades, and in all its historical, literary, media, theatrical, etc. dimensions, in a modern world - Arab-Mediterranean in this case - in full effervescence?