Towards a Global Discourse: The “Ethical Turn” in Western and Arab-Islamic Thought (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Bouchra Benlemlih

Co-Organizer: Mustapha Kharoua

Since its inception in the 1990s, the “ethical turn” has laid the groundwork for the exploration of the ethics and politics of representation. Literature stands out as one of the primary cultural forms of expression that especially articulate victim cultures’ identity politics on multiple fronts across the globe. They are driven by the moral prerogative to bring the legacies of violent events to the attention of contemporary readers. Based on Cathy Caruth’s oft-cited view about the fitting correspondence between literature and justice, the role of anti-hegemonic literary expression is to promote new ways of reading and listening in the public sphere. With the ever-growing globalized world today, a rise has been witnessed in the literature of testimony, especially that the last decade attests to the pressing need to come to terms with the cruelties visited upon victim collectivities. Given the pervasiveness of the (epistemic) violence inflicted on oppressed cultures, especially those that have borne the brunt of colonialism, genocide, slavery, displacement, refugeehood and ongoing wars, a need arises to turn literature into instruments of testimony. The ensuing genres of 9/11 and “terrorism literature” have been Western-centric and transatlantic par excellence given that they deny the non-western contexts the right to justice. The unequal distribution of empathy has contributed to a new surge in the counter-hegemonic literatures of the Global South. Their object is to lay bare the very foundations of the dominant discourses that impose silence. Subaltern voices thus label the distinct forms of violence in existence under different nomenclatures such as genocide, educide, memoricide, epistemicide, culturecide and ecocide. Each of these issues poses a risk to the wellbeing of humans in multiple ways. Inflicted brutalism that has taken on different garbs has thus led to realigning the boundaries between the extreme and the everyday. It renders normalized violence all the more precarious and contributes to the multidimensionality that has marked the “ethical turn” in the last decade. Violence has not only been the product of war in the recent years, but also it has partaken in intensifying the psychological and social effects of such issues as racism, ableism, classism that have blighted the social wellbeing of individuals and groups.

The seminar will inquire into the potentials and limits of using literature, philosophy and the social sciences for analyzing the “ethical turn”. We invite papers considering how literature and social sciences have been called upon to grapple with the aftereffects of the aforementioned kinds of injustice and explore alternatives that other civilizations may offer. Our aim is to generate a conversation that considers the possibilities of global modern discourse wherein the literature of the Global South has been engaged in teasing out and counterbalancing the dominant ideologies of the powers that be.