Lobna BEN SALEM

Project at the MaCI

September - November 2024

This book project aims at exploring the relationship between literature, culture, and the environment in the context of the MENA countries. Such an endeavor is alert to postcolonial perspectives that emphasize the region’s violent colonial history that resulted in human, animal, and natural exploitation, resource extraction, and environmental degradation. It also takes its cue from studies in petroculture. More than a century of imperial and neo-imperial attitudes and practices have left indelible marks on indigenous landscapes and people and have completely altered their cultural geographies. Thus, this research project acknowledges the rich cultural and historical background across the region as well as its environments’ diversity; it explores how traditional knowledge, folklore, and indigenous practices influence the relationship between people and the environment. It also draws from Arabian and Islamic ecological traditions that inform contemporary environmental ethics and practices.

The research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from anthropology, environmental history, culture studies, and geography to analyze literary works in their ecological and cultural contexts. Drawing from these studies contribute to novel ways of reading literary texts, enriching interpretations and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue. It also actively engages with global environmental debates, such as biodiversity loss, desertification, and sustainability, demonstrating the region's contributions to global ecological conversations.

When numbers and statistics no longer shock, imagination can tell us how to feel, or think, or interrogate environmental crisis. In bringing together varied and variegated literary works from the MENA region into dialogue, it is possible to discern shared conceptualizations of the ecological crisis of marginalized environments that attempt to cope with the burden of encountering environmental change. Affectively, this endeavor could result in feelings of helplessness, distress, and fear, but it could also hold the promise of hope, care and response-ability in both its critical and restorative reifications. This optimistic view would be the culminating point in this research.

'The main objective to achieve during my stay at the MaCI is to gather and consult reserach material pertaining to my book project. Online library resources will be used for this purpose. 

I intend also to work on a couple of articles related to urban and rural environmental ethics in the African context, which will be submitted for review and eventual publication.'