An International Conference on
“Space and Cinema in Morocco,”
Organized by the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre,
University of Fès, Morocco,
This conference aims at providing insight into contemporary film production from Morocco. Focus is both on « films in space » which involves the socio-economic and political context of film production, distribution and consumption, and « space in films » which refers to the representation of different spaces and the spatial details treated in films themselves. Whatever the case might be, the “spatial turn” in social and cultural theory has provided us with a renewed interest in the problematic of space by redirecting our attention not only to how relations of power and discipline are spatially inscribed into social and cultural life, but also to how they are contested, subverted and transformed. Of all other cultural forms, cinema is best suited to reflect this spatial turn, because it is itself a spatial form of culture. On these theoretical grounds, the conference hopes to raise and debate ideas such as the decline of cinema theatres in Morocco, the emergence of new consumption patterns, the intervention of the state/Moroccan Television in the field of cinematic production, as well as issues of colonial and post-colonial representations of space in Moroccan films, gender and space, national identity and globalization. In addition, the organizers seek papers drawing from or expanding on the following themes:
- * French Colonial Cinema: A Moroccan Context.
- * Otherness in the Hollywood Imaginary: A Moroccan Context.
- * Cinema & the politics of (trans)location.
- * Trans/nationalism and Reflections on Space in Moroccan Diasporic Cinema.
- * Overlapping Territories and Imaginative Geographies in Moroccan Immigration Cinema.
- * History and the Production of Space.
- * Landscapes, ethnicity and Language.
- * Representations of the City and/or the countryside.
- * Representations of the body and Space.
- * Moroccan cinema & social space.
Please send a 200 word abstract of paper to: lkhayati@hotmail.com Deadline for abstracts/proposals: 15 March 2010; and for full papers 30 April 2010. Participants are expected to cover their own travel costs. However, accommodation and meals are on the University.
For more information please contact: lkhayati@hotmail.com