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CMES is pleased to present the Hazem Ben-Gacem Postdoctoral Fellow
Yosra Amraoui
Associate Professor at the High Institute of Languages of Tunis
Violent histories live on beyond traumatic historical events to leave an inter-generational scar that will continue to affect the lives and well-being of people. It is therefore necessary to make sense of the interwoven link between trauma and history to draw forward-looking lessons for new futures to come. In so doing, people can develop a historical consciousness of their past by acknowledging wrong doings and collectively attempting to heal. This is also a way to revise selective historiographies, fill the previously-left out gaps and reshape the collective consciousness with new ideals that may have economic, legislative, gender-related and even educational impacts on society. In order to examine such processes, this talk is particularly dedicated to political prison writings as part of a historiographical continuum that aims at subverting hegemonic official discourses usually set out by authoritarian regimes to exert control on history writing and collective memory. The corpus is a selection of texts from the Maghreb region—Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Lybia—that examines carcerality, time and space under a different light than the one cast on the general framework of Prison Literature. Themes of resistance, resilience, authorship, collectivity of the experience, corruption, trauma, systemic torture, and healing through writing are explored by region to draw intersections between the experiences of « free men and women » in post-colonial systems in the Maghreb context.
Yosra Amraoui holds a PhD in English Language, Literature and Civilization specialized in Jewish History from the University of Manouba, Tunisia, and teaches at the High Institute of Languages of Tunis, University of Carthage, Tunisia.
Her areas of research and teaching revolve around Historiography, Media Studies and Interpreting. She was the head of a master’s program in English for Communication for 5 years, is an entrepreneurship coach, a conference interpreter and a consultant in countering violent extremism (CVE).
She co-edited two volumes with Cambridge Scholars Publishing: On History and Memory in Arab Literature and Western Poetics (2020) and Poetics of the Native (2021) and has published a number of articles on the history and identity of British and American Jews and their role in the creation of Israel. She is now in the process of writing a book on Contemporary Political Prison Narratives in the Maghreb Region.
Contact: Liz Flanagan