Middle East Studies

Djemaa Maazouzi

Researcher in the French Department at Dawson College (Montreal, Canada)

Djemaa Maazouzi holds a doctorate in French Literature, and she is a professor and researcher in the French Department at Dawson College (Montreal, Canada). Her research interests include: the making of memory and history (literature, cinema, web); the weaving of solidarity between bearers of memories of trauma in the arts; issues of postcolonialism and women's subalternity; and migration and the movement of people and goods. A specialist in 20th century French and francophone literatures, she has edited and co-edited several journal issues (Nouvelle Revue Synergies Canada n°6, Alternative francophone n°2 et 6 Vol. 2, Revue Intermédialités n°21, Revue des Sciences Humaines n°320, Genre humain n°59) and published texts in several collective works as well as in journals such as Études françaisesCinéma & CieThéorèmeMédiation et information (MEI) and La Revue des sciences sociales. She is the author of the book, Le Partage des mémoires. La guerre d'Algérie en littérature, au cinéma et sur le web, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2015, 487 p. 

Mohamed Kouaci and the times of history 
At given (photographic) moments
Mohamed Kouaci always took his time and this slowness was performed in praise of the fruitful and providential pause (for meeting with people and with young people in particular), for the observation and the weighing of all things. He took his time to give it back. He made freeze-frames, improvised sudden slowdowns, unexpectedly decided to speed up the pace: to look, to digress, to show, to explain, to tell, to listen... Or to answer, in 1991, with patience to my violent diatribes against the preventers of the bubbling of the social, cultural, and political present in which my generation was struggling. While the Algerian deflagration was going on - we did not suspect at all the possibility of the worst of the worst to come - from the height of my 25 years, I deepened in focal point the colonial past (deciding to recognize myself in an engraving of his beautiful work Algeria of yesterday, Algeria of always) while the future was mirrored in mortal parallax in the manner of the eponymous short story by Chawki Amari. By evoking the work of the image and on the image of this time, I will wonder if the past and the future are never cut of a present of convulsions, congruent in spite of its frightening turns.