Anouar Majid invited to talk about his creative process at Yale conference

Scholar and novelist Anouar Majid, Ph.D., UNE associate provost for global initiatives and director of the Center for Global Humanities, was an invited participant in a conference at Yale University titled “Beyond French: New Languages for African Diasporic Literature" March 29-30, 2013.

“In recent years, Africans from former French colonies in both the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan regions have been settling in countries other than France and writing in languages other than French,” write the conference organizers. “This break with the colonial and postcolonial habits of la Françafrique — the familiar bind of metropole and colony — has been going on for years and is now ripe for analysis. Writing in German, Italian, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, English, and other languages, these authors suggest new patterns of diasporic belonging and raise new questions about the postcolonial world."

Issues of immigration, language choice, cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, and world literature were among the topics explored at the conference.

Majid, who was originally from Morocco and now writes in English, participated in a roundtable held at the Whitney Humanities Center that culminated the two-day event.  The two other novelists are Pap Khouma, who was originally from Senegal, and now lives in Italy and writes in Italian; and Rachida Lamrabet, who was originally from Morocco, and now lives in Belgium and writes in Dutch. All three novelists were asked to reflect on their itineraries and creative processes.

Majid is the author of five critically acclaimed books on Islam and the West, including Islam and America: Building a Future without Prejudice, and a novel, Si Yussef, which has been the focus of much scholarly and critical interest. He is the editor of the magazine TingisRedux.