MECAM Fellow (2026–2027)
Project: Rotten Futures: Animality, Madness, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Maghrebian Literary and Cultural Representations
Dr. Hanene Baroumi
(Assistant Professor of English Literature, Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis/Tunisia)
Dr. Hanene Baroumi is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Manouba University and an MA in Cross-Cultural Poetics from the University of Carthage. Her research explores how contemporary Maghrebian literature rethinks the affective and political aftermath of the Arab uprisings through the intertwined figures of madness and animality, read through postcolonial and affect theory. She is co-editor of The Poetics and Hermeneutics of Pain and Pleasure and has published on Maghrebian literature and culture.
Contact : baroumihanene@gmail.com
Interdisciplinary Research Field (IRF): IRF III « Memory & Justice »
This project examines how selected works of post-Arab Spring Maghrebian literature reimagine the aftermath of the Arab Spring through the intertwined figures of animality and madness, foregrounding the political, affective, and ethical dimensions of revolutionary experiences. Emerging from the widespread circulation of animal metaphors across political discourse, popular culture, and literary production after 2011, the study examines how literary texts from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya grapple with unresolved violence, political disappointment, and fractured futures.
Read together, animality and madness expose the limits of liberal humanist conceptions of political agency, opening alternative imaginaries of subjectivity in the wake of revolutionary collapse. Rather than treating the post-2011 moment as a singular historical rupture or historical wound, the project conceptualizes it as an ongoing process of slow decomposition, which it terms Rotten Futures. To theorize this condition, the project proposes a critical framework—Rot Theory—which understands rot as a biological, temporal, and affective process through which revolutionary hope decomposes while simultaneously generating new forms of political and ethical possibility.
Rot Theory shifts attention from spectacular moments of crisis to slower processes of decay, stagnation, fermentation, and transformation. Memory is understood not as restorative but as fermentative: rather than healing historical rupture, it continually reworks it, producing affects such as disgust, anger, exhaustion, irony, and uneasy hope.
The project further places Sufi metaphysics in dialogue with contemporary critical theory by reading madness and animal symbolism as figures of ego-annihilation, ethical transformation, and alternative forms of political subjectivity. Combining close textual analysis, affective reading, and comparative theoretical inquiry, the study highlights how Maghrebian literature does not merely depict political disparity but actively rethinks and theorizes it.
Ultimately, it argues that literature functions not simply as a record of post-revolutionary disappointment and failure but as a site of theoretical innovation, offering a new vocabulary for understanding revolutionary aftermaths, political temporality, and ethical renewal in the Maghreb and beyond.