MULOSIGE, SOAS University of London

Amazigh Literature in Translation: Launch Event

This final event of the MULOSIGE research project showcases the corpus of Moroccan Amazigh oral and written literature translated into English. Lhoussain Simour presented and discussed oral literature from the Moroccan Middle Atlas,  Mohamed Daoudi explored selected Riffian literary texts, and Fadma Aït Mous discussed gender and Amazigh literature, with some examples from the Souss region.

About the Speakers:

Lhoussain Simour is an Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Hassan II University of Casablanca (Morocco). He is also Senior Research Associate at the University of Gibraltar (UK). His research interests include cultural studies, colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial Moroccan literature, Moroccan cinema, cultural festivals, travel literature, performance studies, popular music and culture. He has written on these issues in various international journals and he is the author of “Recollecting History beyond Borders” (2014); “Larbi Batma, Nass el Ghiwane and Postcolonial Music in Morocco” (2016); “The Construction of Marginalities and Narrative Imaginary in Mohamed Zafzaf’s Texts: The Postcolony in Secrets and Intimacies” (forthcoming).

Fadma Aït Mous is currently Tenured Professor of Sociology (Professeur Habilité) at Aïn Chock Faculty of Letters and the Humanities (Hassan II University of Casablanca); Head of the Sociology department and Researcher at Laboratoire de recherche sur les différenciations socio-anthropologiques et les identités sociales (LADSIS) at the same Faculty.

Her research interests focus on questions related to collective identities, nation, nationalism, Amazigh culture, social movements, history and memory, gender and socio-political transformations, youth participation, social media, and migration.

Mohamed Daoudi is an assistant professor of English at Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco. He earned his doctoral degree from Mohamed V University, Rabat, with a thesis on contemporary American postmodern fiction. He was a Fulbright scholar at The University of California, Berkeley (November 2005-December 2008) and Harvard University (Summer 2016). His research interests include American literature and culture in the twentieth century, cultural criticism, critical theory, and translation (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Riffian Tamazight). His translations include Vincent Sheean’s An American Among the Riffi (to Arabic, forthcoming). He is currently working on two research projects: “the American expatriate writers in 1920s Paris and the Rif War in Morocco,” and “the language of internal othering in Moroccan political and media discourse on Hirak of the Rif.”