MAAS-477 Politics of N. African Masculinities

Collins, Rodney

This interdisciplinary course is geared towards an examination of the politics of literary, scholarly, filmic, and journalistic representations of the young North African Muslim man, especially in the shadow of the alarm, fear and anxiety that his presence seems to produce in Euro-American Civilization. Our analytic point of departure will be an examination of the discourses surrounding the male Muslim subject within Western popular media. We will begin by looking at a series of high-profile media cases in which North African masculinity is ‘on trial.’ Early sessions in the semester will explore major scholarly contributions to the field of masculinity studies, prompting us to respond to the following questions: what is masculinity? What is the value of its study? What are the major concerns and preoccupations of scholars in this field of study? How does the scholarly field of masculinity studies provide us with tools to better interpret our chosen real-life cases? Subsequently, we will turn to examine a variety of textual and film sources that have been produced by, about, or, for young North African Muslim men. We will make use of a range of interdisciplinary material on the worlds of men as practiced and imagined in the countries of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, their diasporas, as well as Egypt. We will be especially attentive to the ways in which North African writers and filmmakers have grappled with the question of manhood in specific socio-cultural contexts, as well as the questions, issues, anxieties, and fear that undergird their projects in masculine representation.v

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: None

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