MAKAN #2: Manufacturing Narratives

In the second issue of Makan, “Manufacturing Narratives,” we collaborated with 16 individuals who we felt engaged strongly with narrative practices in innovative and nuanced ways. The diverse group of practitioner’s heralds from across and beyond the Mashreq and Maghreb and by sharing space in Makan, have already started to bridge new dialogues across these ever-shifting territorialities.

Contributors were invited to right (as much as to write) narratives; to explore authorship and its social collectivities, to retell alternative public histories and explore gender roles, to unpack the exoticism, folklorization, and variant political textures and nuances of fiction as a practice of indiscipline. The outcomes and contents of the resulting issue range from interviews and articles, to essays that explore visual storytelling, streams of consciousness and process, and even a board game. The agency they implicitly hold does not only serve to re-articulate the genealogies of our present by better understanding the plurality of our pasts; it begins to frame tools with which to manufacture alternative contingencies for our future, and for manufacturing our realities otherwise.