Anne-Marie McManus: Writung under duress/ in prison

DREAM Seminar: Le script de la révolte. Écritures, consignations, transcriptions dans des mondes en révolution / The script of revolt. Écritures, consignations, transcriptions dans des mondes en révolution 8. Sitzung Writing under duress/ in prison / Écrire sous contrainte/ en prison Anne-Marie McManus, Comparative Literature of Modern Arabic Literature (SYRASP-ERC project): What Do Syrian Prison Narratives Do? Reflections on Genre and Documentation from the 1970s to the Present Kommentar: Cécile Boëx (Political Scientist) Sitzung auf Englisch Anne-Marie McManus is Principle investigator of the ERC-funded project SYRASP (The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria, Voices, Texts, Publics) at Berlin’s Forum Transregionale Studien. Her research explores 20th and 21st century literary and cultural practices around the representation of violence, me, and memory, drawing on both literary and anthropological methods. Along with Dr. Nancy Reynolds, she co-founded the interdisciplinary Wastelands seminar (2014-present), which critically investigates ecocritical and environmental approaches to the MENA and its representations, and which has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She was previously a EUME fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2016/2017) and received her PhD in comparative literature from Yale University (2013). Cécile Boëx is Lecturer at EHESS Paris (Césor) and Founding member of the ANR SHAKK. Her research focuses on moving images and politics and the uses and grammars of video in contexts of revolt and conflict in the Arab world. Furthermore she works on the making of images (cinema, vernacular videos) in the face of war and violence and new practices of representation and narration of martyrdom on YouTube. Anmeldung: dream@cmb.hu-berlin.de Weitere Informationen: http://dream.hypotheses.org/ Seminarbeschreibung: The semi-public seminar of the DREAM project “ The Script Of Revolt. Writings,Consignments, Transcriptions In Worlds In Revolution”focuses this year on the written word. We propose to open the discussion to a plural reflection on the place of texts and written traces and how they accompany the revolutionary moments in the Mediterranean Arab world from the second half of the 20th century. This exploration will focus on gestures that have a place in the study of collective revolutionary journeys: those that propose to leave traces, whether they are tiny and ephemeral or constitute sums, testimonies, resources. The seminar is oriented towards archives, libraries and spaces of knowledge, it questions the place of literature and commitment, and it tries to draw a line of reflection between the practices of writing and the fields of revolt. In a way, this semester we will try to go beyond the opposition between letter and practice to understand how they meet at the heart of action. Thus, it is a form of script of the revolt that we will try to find together; that is to say, both a thread of writing that tells and a meticulous recording that makes traces. We will also walk through the different media of writing, from walls to computer screens, from paper to mobile phones, from newspapers to materials that can be found in prison cells. The written word is also the place where relationships between powers and societies develop, forms of policing, as well as forms of subversion. If “graphic delinquency” (Philippe Artières) is a modern invention, it opens up a field of confrontation that is constantly being renewed through all these media. They also say something about our work as researchers, in contact with traces. We propose here to turn away from words and their meanings to understand how they come to our attention, and the battle they allow us to witness.