Category Archives: ALIF

ALC ALIF Book Club: Don Quixote

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ALC-ALIF Book Club: Saturday, July 15 at 1 PM in Room 1

In our upcoming Book Club gathering, we will read the first modern novel of the Western world: Miguel de Cervantes’s book, Don Quixote. The full (and comical) title of this much-loved book is, “The Ingenious Low-Born Noble Don Quixote of La Mancha”, and the Guardian claims that “Cervantes’s magnificent knight’s quest has cosmological scope and reverberation”. Join us as we tilt at windmills with one of the world’s greatest fictional characters and his sidekick, Sancho, to see what has made the book so legendary and influential. The drawing shown here is by Pablo Picasso.

Here is a link to download the book:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/996

“Cultural Encounters and Colonial Legacies: Morocco in American Writings”

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ALIF Lecture Series Presents

“Cultural Encounters and Colonial Legacies: Morocco in American Writings”
A lecture by Hamid El Mountassir

Wednesday, July 12 at 6:15 p.m. In Room 30

The present lecture is an attempt to approach the dynamics/politics of cultural encounters in relation to Morocco, which has been associated with different forms of representation in the American cultural context since the beginning of the twentieth century. The depiction of the nature of this series of encounters is analyzed through a wide range of texts including travel writing, fiction, and ethnography. Writers such as Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Claude McKay, Anais Nin, Paul Bowles, Elizabeth Fernea, and Rachel Newcomb have constructed ambivalent discourses in their representation of otherness.

This lecture is open to the general public

ALC ALIF Book Club: Bottom of the Jar

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ALC-ALIF Book Club: Saturday, July 8 at 1 PM in Room 1

For this week’s Book Club, we will be reading “The Bottom of the Jar” by Abdellatif Laâbi, a Moroccan poet and novelist. The novel is based on memories from when Laâbi was “finding his footing in the heart of Fez during the 1950s, as Morocco began freeing itself from the grip of the French colonial occupation. The narrator vividly recalls his first encounters with the ebullient city, family dramas, and the joys and turbulence of his childhood.” Join us for an intimate look at our own city of Fes through this award-winning writer’s eyes.

ALC ALIF Film Club: I am Not Your Negro

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ALC-ALIF Film Club: I am Not Your Negro
Saturday, July 1 at 3 PM in Room 6

 

In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, “Remember This House.” The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished.