This talk will focus on a recent sculpture installation by Lydia Ourahmane called TASSILI that recreates a midcentury archaeological expedition to prehistoric rock art sites at Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria, and it will also discuss the failed yet consequential French administrative project called the Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes (OCRS) that attempted to redraw the borders of French occupation in the Sahara in order to preserve the desert territory well beyond the end of France’s formal colonization of Algeria. What is the relationship between aesthetic cartographies like Ourahmane’s and maps that target the Sahara for resource extraction and military destruction?
The event is part of the Art History Seminar 220B, and is moderated by Professor Lamia Balafrej (UCLA).
About the speaker:
Jill Jarvis is Associate Professor in the Department of French at Yale University. She specializes in the aesthetics and politics of North Africa. Her most recent book, Decolonizing Memory : Algeria and the Politics of Testimony, brings together close readings of fiction with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of violence and the stakes of literary study in a time of unfinished decolonization. She is also at work on a second book project, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara, which envisions the Sahara as a site of material, intellectual, and linguistic exchanges that challenge both disciplinary boundaries and received notions of African studies. Other work appears in New Literary History, PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, and Expressions maghébrines.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Division of Humanities