Wastelands in Contemporary Syrian Cultural Production

The Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Studien in Marburg is hosting a lecture on ‘Wastelands in Contemporary Syrian Cultural Production‘ on 14 February 2017. The lecture will be held by Anne-Marie McManus (Washington University in St. Louis) in Room 00A09.

Further information on the lecture:As Syria approaches its sixth year of conflict, world audiences have become inured to the images of devastation and ruin that continue to pour out of this wartorn country.
The lecture departs from the traditional framing of this issue as “compassion fatigue,” drawing instead on recent anthropological debates over what historian Ann Laura Stoler dubs ruination: the state of living on amid ruin, as well as the human and non-human processes that create and maintain it.

Drawing on literature, the visual arts, and film, this talk argues that Syrian cultural actors are critically engaged in a search to represent the endurance of life in war’s wasteland — on terms that neither reduce Syria to a barren wasteland robbed of life, nor a theater for cheerful human interest stories. As such, Syrian cultural production today has implications not only for tracing the genealogy of creativity that emerged in the 2011 uprising, but also for challenging the suppositions of core debates in the contemporary humanities.

You can find more information on our speaker and her work here:https://pages.wustl.edu/mcmanus

This talk is part of the activities of the Turning Points Research Group (DFG, Leibniz).