Name: Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality in Modern Tunisian Fiction
Start: 2026-01-07T17:00:00+01:00
Location: c/o Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin, Germany

EUME Berliner Seminar
»Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality in Modern Tunisian Fiction«
https://tinyurl.com/4sxt2rfd
Speaker: Hanan Natour (Freie Universität Berlin / EUME Fellow 2024-26)
Chair: Yvonne Albers (Freie Universität Berlin / EUME Fellow 2021-26)
This event will be take place at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin). Please register in advance via [email protected]
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This talk aims to introduce the monograph, The Tunisian Novel: Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality, which is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. The book explores the evolution of the novel genre in Tunisia during the 20th and 21st centuries. It analyses how the Tunisian novel in Arabic narrates personal and collective resistance to colonial and domestic regimes, as well as from restrictions based on class, generation and gender. Looking beyond the act of protest during political caesuras like the Bread Riots (1983/1984) or the Uprisings of 2010 and 2011, it centres on developments of these narratives between moments of upheaval. As the first English-language study focusing on the Tunisian novel in Arabic within its literary historical and aesthetic context, it introduces key figures like Mahmud al-Masʿadi and studies a canon of twelve novels published since 1987. It provides an in-depth engagement with an underrepresented region in the study of modern Arabic literature. By drawing on the works of Tunisian scholars in Arabic and French, the book paves the ground for decolonial approaches to North African literatures.
• Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature and an Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” (Freie Universität Berlin). She obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on modern Tunisian fiction (Freie Universität Berlin, 2024). Her first monograph The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Together with Mohamed-Salah Omri (University of Oxford) she co-edits the first English-language volume devoted to the varieties of modern Tunisian literatures Tunisian Literatures – Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies (Bloomsbury, June 2026). During her PhD, she served as Research Associate to the ERC-funded project “PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present” where she explored literary networks between the Maghreb and Mashreq. Hanan holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford, 2018) and a BA in Arabic and German Literature (University of Göttingen, 2016), including a year of studying abroad at Paris-Sorbonne University. In the academic years 2025-27, Hanan is an affiliated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
• Yvonne Albers is an affiliated postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities" at Freie Universität Berlin as well as an affiliated EUME fellow (2021-26). Her current research focuses on time and temporality in/of Arab periodicals since the 1960s. Her last book, published with Brill in 2023, is an intellectual biography of the Beirut-based cultural magazine Mawaqif (1968-1994).