Brahim El Guabli, Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature, Williams College

Khadija Ikan, Moroccan writer

Atlas Phoenix, Translator

This panel combines poetic readings in both Tamazight and English with a scholarly intervention on the construction of Amazigh literature. The participants will discuss the imbrication of Indigeneity and literary concerns in Amazigh people’s struggle for recognition of their language and culture in their indigenous homeland in Tamazgha (the broader North Africa).

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A Black and Amazigh Indigenous scholar from Morocco, Brahim El Guabli is an Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. His first book is entitled Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023). He’s currently completing a second book entitled Desert Imaginations: Saharanism and its Discontents. His journal articles have appeared in LA Review of Books, PMLA, Interventions, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Arab Studies Journal, History in Africa, META, and the Journal of North African Studies, among others. He is co-editor of the two volumes of Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the “Years of Lead” (1966-1988) (Liverpool University Press, 2022) and Refiguring Loss: Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Cultural Production (Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming). El Guabli is co-founder and co-editor of Tamazgha Studies Journal, a peer-reviewed journal that seeks to place the Tamazgha at the heart of academic conversations.

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Khadija Ikan is a Moroccan writer. She has literary works in Arabic and Amazigh. She is Founding member of the league of women writers of morocco, responsible for the Amazigh literary file in the league’s office (2012 – 2018). In 1996, ISESCO Award for Short Story in the Islamic World for the story “When the Carmina Burana Flows”. 2010, Appreciation Award from the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture. Later published the short stories “Bosnian Days”, which won the Sudanese Altayeb Salih Prize for Written Creativity” in 2018.