Zoom Lecture by Jill Jarvis, "Crossed Lines at Tarfaya?" // September 19 @ 3 PM ET
The France and the World seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center is proud to announce that Professor Jill Jarvis (Yale) will deliver a Zoom lecture entitled “Crossed Lines at Tarfaya”on Thursday, September 19, at 3 PM Eastern Time.
To join, please register online at:
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Crossed Lines at Tarfaya’ picks up trans-Saharan air and radio lines to track the strange transmissions of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s desert writings across the contested borders of what is now the Western Sahara. Saint Exupéry’s well-known fable Le petit prince (1943) is one of the most beloved books in the world, and it is also the most translated book on earth aside from religious texts—its spare images of a pilot who crashes in a remote desert land and there befriends an extraterrestrial prince have become iconic. What few readers know is that these captivating illustrations and the story itself are deeply informed by Saint Exupéry’s time spent running a small airfield at Tarfaya, in southern desert of modern-day Morocco, during the 1920s. My talk will both tease out a colonial infrastructural history of this desert fable and locate it in a larger argument about the power of aesthetic works to both produce and contest ideologies of desert emptiness.
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Jill Jarvis is an associate professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her first book Decolonizing Memory : Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021) charts a new itinerary for literary studies and theories of testimony, cultural memory, and decolonization in the wake of French empire. Her next book, Signs in the Desert : Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara (University of Chicago Press), builds a case for how contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the colonial ideology of desert emptiness. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective.
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If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me at yanzhao@g.harvard.edu
Yan Zhao, PhD Candidate in French
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Harvard University.