Poetics of Repair

Katarzyna Pieprzak is Massachusetts Professor of Francophone Literature, French Language, and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She is the author of Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco.

Note on Translations and Transliterations ix Preface. Unexpected Paths to Mass Housing xi Introduction. Mass Housing, Maghrebi Art, and the Poetics of Repair 1 1. Sonic Repairs to the Grid: Art Engages the Epistemology of Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca 27 2. Affecting Relation in Climat de France, Algiers: Decolonial Poetics and Embodied Ethics of Recognition 69 3. Remembering and Repairing Women's Homes: Nanterre, Bidonville de la Folie 115 Conclusion. Touching Feed and Moving Hands: Art's Repair from Affective Gesture to Capacious Home 165 Acknowledgments 173 Notes 175 Bibliography 195 Index 205

"Poetics of Repair is a meticulously written, carefully nuanced analysis of the afterlives of colonialism as manifest in mass housing projects across an expanded Maghrebi context that includes urban space on both sides of the Mediterranean. Katarzyna Pieprzak reads artworks in a staggering array of media to give us a beautiful image of the ways in which art names and performs reparations that allow us to reimagine spaces otherwise all too often considered lost to squalor and despair." - Hannah Feldman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania "Poetics of Repair is an amazing, entirely original work of bricolage (in the most laudatory sense) in which Katarzyna Pieprzak combines museology, art history, ethnography, literary criticism, and poetry. She teaches us to critically analyze the culture, typologies, and trans-Mediterranean genealogies of mass housing through the many interventions of contemporary artists. I can't think of another book like it." - Susan Slyomovics, author of (Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage)