Congrès Mondial des Études sur le Moyen-Orient et l'Afrique du Nord

Barcelone du 19 au 24 Juillet 2010

· NOT_DEFINED institution: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: Teresa Velázquez

· NOT_DEFINED language: English/Français

· NOT_DEFINED description:
Panel 4 would focus on political and cultural representations in the region. The main topic would be their simbolic construction, analyzed by a semiotic perspective, which can show the relationship between cultural identities with political, ideological, religious in the region.

Given the variety of cultures, essential characteristic of the Mediterranean region, this session would focus on the treatment media do of cultural signs, from the culture’s semiotic perspective.

Chair: José Manuel Pérez Tornero, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Discussant: Lucrecia Escudero Chauvel, Université de Lille III

Paper presenter: Cristina Marques, Instituto IES-Can de Morvedre, Identités culturelles et représentation symbolique dans les télévisons autonomiques espagnoles
Les télévisions autonomiques espagnoles, en tant que publiques, ont défini sous les principes qui les régissent, la volonté manifeste de rester au service de l’identité et la nationalité propre en devenant défenseuses et diffuseuses de la langue et de l’identité. La représentation symbolique de ces identités est souvent construite sur le contre-pied nous-les autres. Dans ce sens-là et compte tenu du Procès de Barcelone et de sa définition de la Méditerranée comme espace de paix, stabilité et zone de prospérité partagée, nous verrons quelle a été la construction symbolique diffusée par les télévisions autonomiques espagnoles de cet espace d’interculturalité.

Paper presenter: Carmen Martínez Romero, Universidad de Granada, La Méditerranéen dans la culture du voyage
Considérant la culture du voyage comme notion moderne de totalité philosophique dont l'écriture articule cette totalité en décrivant les différentes catégories du voyage nous analyserons leur relation avec la construction symbolique de ce qui est méditerranéen comme un hypertexte du premier monde dessiné des cartes (Cartographie).

Paper presenter: Nieves Ortega, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Translation and border. Terminological clarifications
The concepts of translation and border have been defined by Lotman like Semiosphere, place in which the interpreter, from his own cultural universe, is with the system of signs of that other cultural universe that is offered to him to interpret and how he decides to incorporate it to its own system of signs in the border zone of the translation possibility. It is intention of this contribution to realise terminological clarifications on ideas such as “the East” and “the West” that give rise to ideological and political interpretations from a unidirectional perspective and that affects the social imaginary one the culture of the “Other”.

Paper presenter: Teresa Velázquez, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Discours intertextuel et hybridisme culturel
L'intertextualité conçue comme dialogue permet d'aborder les hybridations culturelles à partir des rendez-vous et des références présentes dans différents types de l'industrie culturelle, ou celle-ci du livre ou de la musique. De cette manière nous prétendons développer la présence de ce qui est mythique et de ce qui est symbolique à travers des passages littéraires qui prennent l'espace méditerranéen comme axe de leur réalisation poétique et musicale.

Paper presenter: Elsa Soro, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, The Semiosis and culture difference in Mediterranean city
The objective of this paper is to analyze the processes of signification in the Mediterranean city, understood as a complex reality constructed by the sum of the experiences of its users in a constant process of re-semantization that transforms the symbolic and material urban landscape.
This peculiar urban scenery creates multiple symbolic nets and it is not possible to find a (unique) isotope of analysis. For this reason we take as a theoretical instrument the concept of “semiosphere” created by Iuri Lotman.
The Lotman semiosphere, being a holistic theory of culture, allows us to cover the complexity created by the overlapping of languages, social and cultural practices and subjectivities. The model we propose seeks to represent the semiotic processes of tension/resistance and tension/attraction that underlie in the encounters between different cultures.
The city, the texts it produces and the discourse about it need also the concept of intertextuality, as it has been developed since Bakhtine and Kristeva. In particular, we will focus on the mass media discourse that, in this constant process of translation, creates again an urban imagery. Our point is that the cultural aspects play a determinant role in the construction of the Mediterranean identity. We want to investigate if this identity is agglutinative or exclusive.


Paper presenter: Susana Frutos (Universidad Nacional de Rosario) “Collectives of identification and their ways of participation as semiotic object”
We attend a consensus in the field of social sciences about the relevance of symbolic and imaginary registries in the collective’s constitution.
The possible ways of taking matter on these identity processes vary according on how they consider their inscription in his relation with cultural, social economic and political processes.
This communication sets out to show that a semiotic point of view, that can specify what is text and what it is not text in the constitution of identities, is called to contribute to critique and reflection on the tension between materiality and representational planes, in the contexts of collective identifications.

Paper presenter: Prof. Elizabeth Martínez de Aguirre (Escuela de Comunicación Social, Universidad Nacional de Rosario)

The aim of this paper is to analyze from a socio-semiotic perspective the “aesthetics of the record” that proposes us the classic documentary photography and his manners of intervention in the contemporary construction of sociocultural identities -from the press photography up to the photography of denunciation - in the Mediterranean region. And, at the same time, to research the new forms that the documentary photography seems to adopt today and his approximation to those symbolic strategies of artistic field: in the documentary photography prevails this "reality effect" but supported on different rhetorical forms.