ImagiNation.s: Reconfigurations of National Imaginaries in the Cultural Production of Contemporary Maghreb

What is the Maghreb today? How does it brand and “sell” itself in global cultural marketplaces? How are national identities and imaginaries dealt with in today’s North Africa? Which image(s) of themselves do North African countries explicitly sponsor or implicitly convey through cultural and artistic productions? How has the idea of the nation in the Maghreb changed through time and by which mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion, reconciliation, minoritization, racialization, etc.? Here are but a few lines of thought to help potential participants in this conference to locate areas of discursivities, define dialogic configurations, and urge theoretical debate on the idea of the nation-on-trial, prescribing a re-imagined nation building as a process, tracking the conditions that help fabricate a patchwork design of everyday actions, street performances, visual representations, literature, and other artistic practices that constitute cultural production ingredients of the final act of the narrative of a nation.