Cities in the Arab Imagination: Fiction, Reality, and Futurescapes
Workshop convened by Teresa Pepe, and organized by Diana Abbani within the framework of MECAM’s transregional workshop, in a collaboration of Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME), and the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. The workshop aims to explore how Arab cities have been conceived, envisioned, planned in the Arab imagination. As Fredric Jameson theorizes in his seminal essay The Future of the City, this requires “an interdisciplinary approach that mobilizes, alongside the obvious (and anticipated) areas of architecture and urbanism, such heterogeneous disciplines as psychoanalysis and geography, history and business, economics and engineering, biography, ecology, feminism, area studies, ideological analysis, classical studies, legal decisions, crisis theory, et cetera” (2003).
With: Rasha Abbas (Independent, Berlin), Sanabel Abdelrahman (EUME Fellow 2023/24), Ammar Azzouz (University of Oxford), Rasha Chatta (Freie Universität Berlin/MECAM Fellow 2021/EUME Fellow 2017-2021), Muhammad Jabali (Independent, Berlin), Hanan Natour (Freie Universität Berlin), Katarzyna Puzon (Humboldt University), Yahia Shawkat (10 Tooba, Cairo/Berlin), and Loaay Wattad (EUME Fellow 2023/24).
Details:
Venue:Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
When? Wed 15 May 2024 – Thu 16 May 2024
Program
Public Events
Wednesday, 15 May 2024, EUME Berliner Seminars (hybrid sessions)
15.00-16.30 Teresa Pepe (University of Oslo): Cities of the Future in the Arab Literary Imagination
Chair: Rasha Chatta (Freie Universität Berlin)
17.00-18.30 Ammar Azzouz (University of Oxford): Erased City: Imagining a future without ruins?
Chair: Anne-Marie McManus (SYRASP / Forum Transregionale Studien)
(Part of the BEYONDREST Conversation Series “Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm”)
Thursday, 16 May 2024
16:00-17:00: That Was Tomorrow: A Conversation about Arab Imaginaries in Berlin
With writer Rasha Abbas (Independent, Berlin) and artist Muhammad Jabali (Independent, Berlin), moderated by Diana Abbani (MECAM/Forum Transregionale Studien), on the future of Berlin, once envisioned as an Arab cultural hub, exploring the evolving dynamics and narratives shaping the city.
Please register in advance via: eume@trafo-berlin.de (to get the login details for the hybrid sessions)