The Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech (UCAM) hosted an international symposium from 2 to 4 April on the theme "East-West: Crossed Representations".

This event was co-organised by the Culture, Heritage and Tourism Laboratory of the Faculty of Arts and the teams from CELFA/CLARE (Centre for Literary, Linguistic, Francophone and African Studies/Cultures, Literatures, Arts, Representations, Aesthetics) and TELEM (Texts, Literatures, Writings and Models) of the French University of Bordeaux Montaigne, with the support of the French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations and the French Institute of Marrakech. Following a first symposium organised in November 2013 by the TELEM team of the University of Bordeaux Montaigne, this meeting allowed a group of national and foreign academics and researchers to extend the reflections and discussions initiated around otherness and its representations in the Arab-Muslim world.

The importance and the stakes of this event were unanimously highlighted, as it comes at a time when the gap between the East and the West seems to be widening more than ever, at a moment when popular movements described as the "Arab Spring" have changed the political landscape in many countries. While Europe is sinking into an unprecedented wave of Islamophobia, against a backdrop of a fantasised fear of an Islamist invasion, an educated, open-minded youth, well-versed in the use of the Internet and its tools—in other words, Westernised—is appearing on screens. The famous "Arab street", which was presented as being won over by fanaticism and turned in on itself, has irrefutably demonstrated to the whole world its desire for openness, according to the participants.

These meetings attempt, through crossed perspectives and representations, to get as close as possible to the discordances, tensions, and amalgamations, but also to the happy conjunctions that have always marked the, to say the least, passionate relations between the East and the West.