Overview
Imane Terhmina is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance Studies. She holds a PhD in French Literature from Yale University. Her research lies at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Areas of specialization include: Francophone African literature and culture, postcolonial theory, affect theory, political philosophy, petrofictions / eco-topias, Afropolitanism.
Prof. Terhmina’s research broadly explores conceptions of Africanness that critically interrogate the relationship between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. Her first book manuscript traces the ways in which Francophone literature and film from North, West, and Central Africa articulate a mythopoetics of bureaucracy. It demonstrates how the staging of bureaucratic encounters individualizes and allegorizes the relationship between state and civil society, in order to illuminate procedural injustices that are bound up with broader political and ethical issues, including immigration, competing conceptions of legal rights and citizenship, and ecological anxieties. Ultimately, her research seeks to show the ways in which African experimental fiction intimates alternative political imaginaries. Her second project will examine African literary and artistic works through the lens of petromodernity.
Research Focus
- Francophone African Literature and Culture
- Postcolonial Theory
- Affect Theory
- Political Philosophy
- Petrofictions / Eco-topias
- Afropolitanism
Publications
“Topographie de la terreur: espaces (inter)textuels dans Moi, Khalid Kelkal,” in Salim Bachi, Agnes Schaffauser (dir.), Coll. Autour des écrivains maghrébins, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2019.
In the news
- Student spotlight: Amber Bal
- Student Spotlight: Sarena Tien
- Cornell Center for Social Sciences names spring grantees
- Community read launches Society for the Humanities’ ‘Repair’ theme