Lhoussain Simour – författare

Established in 1971, Nass el-Ghiwane is a legendary musical group that transformed the Moroccan music scene in the last decades of the 20th century.The charismatic founding member Larbi Batma (1948-1997) through his lyrics brought to light Moroccan folklore and obscure poetry. His autobiography Al-raḥīl, blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and deals with social issues plaguing post-independence Morocco.Providing a reading of Al-raḥīl, this book is the first in English to examine the work of Nass el-Ghiwane, as well as the emergence of al-Ūghniya al-Ghīwaniya as a musical genre and the social conditions that fostered its growth.

This book works on the interface between literature, culture, and discourse. It is entirely devoted to the reading of some of Zafzaf’s novels that came out in the early 1970s and in the late 1980s, and attempts to chart the trajectory of the aesthetic imaginary of an exceptional writing experience that marked out the literary and cultural landscape in Morocco and in the Arab world for long. Zafzaf and his writings are associated with aspects of the country's social contradictions, cultural transition, and political transformations, expressed through various aesthetic patterns that translate the crisis of the intellectual within a society weighed down by poverty, political instability, social conflict, and cultural disintegration. Given the relative scarcity of resources that are written in English about the Moroccan novel of Arabic expression, this work is an attempt to theorize and approach in an interdisciplinary manner a set of narratives that have not been previously explored in western academia. Using postcolonial discourse as approach and a metaphor of reading, it draws attention to the often-neglected texts in Moroccan literature of Arabic expression and explores their aesthetic, discursive, and cultural implications that rethink and disturb canonical formations of literary texts in Morocco. This book will be adopted in the now burgeoning fields of the Humanities, and will provide useful resources for courses about Moroccan Literature and culture.

This book explores the intersections of migration and film festivals, with particular attention to their social functions . Adopting an interdisciplinary and multi-bottom line perspective, the authors address the purposes and circumstances of migration film festivals; their delimitation as distinct from other genres of festivals; their cinematographic creation; and their approaches to the curation and programming of films. Numerous questions arise in the process: Is social function prone to homogenization among migration film festivals? What are these festivals’ main constraints in negotiating their social functions? What is their actual capacity to foster social transformation? How do we conceive of the fact that most migration festival goers are rarely the ones in need of changing their perceptions? How are migrants actually involved in these cultural events? What are the specific challenges that undermine migration film festivals in achieving a greater social impact, and in turning into true axes of critical reflection towards more empathetic, inclusive and respectful ways of life?