Special Subject: Art, Culture, and Technology — Publication as Worldmaking: Performative Approaches to Fiction and Publishing (Spring 2025)
4.S34
Raafat Majzoub is an architect, author and artist based in Lebanon. His work negotiates the territory of reality through literature, visual arts and public interventions, inventing and advocating accessible utopic alternatives and possible scenarios.
He cofounded The Outpost, a quarterly magazine of possibilities in the Arab world and was its Creative Director for the first four issues. He penned two of its literary supplements, including an illustrated children’s book that was later turned into a play.
Majzoub is a contributor to various publications in digital and print including rekto:verso, Prince Claus Review and was a weekly columnist in the Beirut-based Al-Akhbar newspaper’s English editions.
At ACT, Majzoub worked on developing a methodology of devising fiction as a constructive and speculative-historiographic tool, pushing the potential of (literary) authorship in the Arab world as a major stakeholder in its political architecture. His thesis, A Lover’s Discourse: Fictions, documents this research, elaborating his decision to found The Khan: The Arab Association for Prototyping Cultural Practices in Lebanon, an NGO that creates a cultural infrastructure to reify fictions born in a serial-novel, The Perfumed Garden, whose first title is An Autobiography of Another Arab World.
