Suja Sawafta (University of Miami) | Re-reading Abdulrahman Munif's Cities of Salt in the Age of Climate Collapse

In the Arab world, it is often said that there are signs that indicate the end of the world, or at least the transition from one world into another: a fire in Yemen so big that it can be seen in Syria, an age where metal will speak, where structures that scrape the edge of the sky are built by barefoot Bedouins, and a reality where one is unable to easily distinguish truth from falsehood. It is no surprise, then, that the native tribes of Arabia feared that it was the end of the world when bulldozers arrived at the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula; their oases compromised, the trees uprooted, and dunes covered in pavement. In Abdulrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, a society is depicted on the brink of change just as fossil capital and its machinery take over the fictional oasis of Wadi al-Ayoun, transforming it into a petroleum refinery site. Munif's epic quintet famously challenges both the foundational narrative of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and depicts a community that resisted this new reality. In this, the series provides its reader with a guidebook that remains ever-relevant in the age of forest fires: It allows us to glean lessons from literature and illuminates the power of impactful social mobilisation, encouraging us to challenge fossil capitalism and its structures, and to turn to community as nature is destroyed.

Mark Schmitt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) | Embracing Extinction: Pessimist Epistemology and Lost Futures

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in pessimist philosophy and its diversification, from afropessimism to queer pessimism, antinatalism and eco-pessimism. As a philosophy of time, pessimism points to the lost futures haunting the present – whether it is the (no-)future of the unborn child, the (no-)future and the being stuck in the present of Black and queer bodies and subjects, or the death of species, the Earth and even the universe. In my presentation, I will illustrate how pessimist narratives of disruption in philosophy, literary fiction and cinema offer epistemological approaches that allow us to know time and humanity differently, taking non-being and the ahuman as its horizon of futurity.

Amina Zarzi (University of Oxford) | The Sahara Desert: A Crossroads of Colonial Encounters and Re-imagined Futures

For time eternal, the Sahara has informed the imaginary of Muslim travellers, local inhabitants and Europeans, showcasing the legendary desert's liberating potential but also denouncing the constraints inside the walls of the ksour. It is in light of these paradoxical representations that this paper proposes to discuss the ways in which Algerian literature by Malika Mokeddem and Yasmina Khadra (both born in the Algerian desert) negotiates the complex dynamics of the desert against the backdrop of cross-cultural encounters in a way that both resists and celebrates the presence of European travellers and writers such as Isabelle Eberhardt and Charles de Foucauld. As a result, the Sahara acts as a locus where born nomads like Mokeddem and Khadra re-imagine their cultural identities in multicultural societies, remembering and reshaping colonial figures in postcolonial times.