Contours of Being and Becoming: Identity, Memory, and Cultural Encounters

Editors: Najah Mahmi PhD and Abdelhak Jebbar PhD

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When we consider writing on the subject of identity through the experiences of researchers from diverse academic and cultural backgrounds, we are able, albeit implicitly, to delve into different qualitative themes that redraw new dimensions of the concept and contribute to the foundation of new readings and interpretations. Since the ability to understand even a small part of these new interpretations will enable a dual and reciprocal understanding of the self and the other, we will be faced with new and complex formulations of meanings based on diversity and aimed at mutual understanding.

This book’s project falls within this context, opening up to several topics related, but not limited, to the dynamics of identity and its construction, the roles of resistance and power, embodiment and performance, hybridity and pluralism, art as a mirror of the self and the other, memory and trauma, among other concerns. The aim remains to shed light on the opportunities offered through understanding the concept in its fluid and multiple layered concretisations, and on the other hand, to comprehend its various complexities embodied in its being an active site of struggle and survival.

This project stems from an urgent need to question the human condition within the actual sites of interconnections and divisions, creating glocal bridges and borders. It explores thus a wide range of topics related to identity and culture, and their intersections in thought and society. Since a final and definitive decision on the nature and limits of the concept remains impossible, we consider the book’s discussions as a continuation of previous discursive trials and a foundation for future ones.