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Translating Politics into Art and Literature in the Arab World
Get PDFThis event with the eminent Lebanese public intellectual and critic Fawwaz Traboulsi draws on his long experience of organizing for and writing about a democratic future in the Arab world. It delves into the political role of art and culture, from the Lebanese civil war to the Arab uprisings and beyond. The wide-ranging conversation will revisit his war-time photo essay Guernica-Beirut, consider the theatre of Fayrouz and the Rahbani brothers in light of the politics of sectarianism in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, and probe the extent to which popular culture can challenge neoliberal ‘culture talk’ about and in the Middle East. Fawwaz Traboulsi has taught History and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University and the American University of Beirut. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, New York University, and Vienna University and a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His publications include A History of Modern Lebanon (2007), Soie et Fer. Du Mont-Liban au Canal de Suez (2017), Guernica-Beirut (A Picasso Mural/An Arab City at War, 1987), In Kan Baddak Ti`shaq (Essays in Popular Culture, 2004), Masrah Fayrouz Wal-Rahabinah (The Musical Theatre of Feirouz and the Rahbani Brothers, 2007), Al-Dimuqratiyah Thawra (Democracy is a Revolution, 2011), Al-Tabaqat al-Ijtima’iyyah wa-l-Sulta al-Siyassiyyha fi Luban (Social Classes and Political Power in Lebanon, 2016), Damm al-Akhawayn (On Violence in Civil Wars , 2017), and Sayks-Picot-Balfour: Ma wara’ al-Khara’it (Sykes-Picot Agreement-Balfour Declaration: Beyond the Maps, 2018). Traboulsi is a long-time journalist and the editor of the Bidayat Magazine. Leyla Dakhli is senior researcher in Modern History at the French Center for National Research (CNRS). Her work deals with the study of Arab intellectuals and the social history of the South Mediterranean region, with a particular focus on the history of women. She also explores the history and politics of languages, archives, and revolts in Tunisia. She is the principal investigator of the ERC-founded programme DREAM (Drafting and Enacting the revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean — ERC-CO 2017 DREAM) and part of the Arab Council for Social Science working group, ‘Gendering the Archive in the Middle East and North Africa’, and the Berlin-based CO2LIBRI working group, ‘Conceptual Collaboration: Living Borderless Research Interaction’ (FU-HU-ZMO). Jens Hanssen is a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Toronto. He will serve as director of the Orient Institute in Beirut from July 2023 onwards. His research explores the cultural entanglements between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East since the 19th-century Arabic reform and revival movement — al-nahda al-‘arabiyya. His publications include Fin de Siècle Beirut (2005), A Clarion for Syria: A Patriot’s Call Against the Civil War of 1860, with Hicham Safieddine (2019), Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age and Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age, both with Max Weiss (2016 and 2018), and the Handbook of Contemporary North African and Middle Eastern History, with Amal Ghazal (2020). He currently serves on the board of directors of MESA and is a member of the international advisory board of the Khalidiyya Library in East Jerusalem
Unseen City:The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor
Get PDFIn this talk, Ankhi Mukherjee will discuss the genesis of the idea animating Unseen City, an experimental and interdisciplinary work drawing on her collaboration with public sector mental health trusts and hospitals, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and social workers in six global cities. Starting with Sigmund Freud’s Budapest speech on free clinics in 1918, which ushered an international mental health cooperative movement, she looks at the afterlife of this idealist moment in initiatives worldwide that offer psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in the community. She will also discuss the use of literary and cultural texts in the book, arguing that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor. Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. Her most recent book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (2021), has won Columbia University’s Robert S. Liebert Award for “outstanding scholarship in the field of applied psychoanalysis.” Mukherjee’s second monograph, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2014), was awarded the British Academy Prize in English Literature. Her other publications include Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007), and the collections of essays she has edited, namely A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (with Laura Marcus, 2015) and After Lacan (2018). Mukherjee has published in peer-reviewed journals including PMLA, Contemporary Literature, MLQ, Parallax, and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and sits on the editorial boards of several international journals. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow of the British Academy (2003-2006), a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (2015), and the John Hinkley (Visiting) Professor at Johns Hopkins University (2019). She was faculty at Harvard University’s Institute of World Literature (IWL) in summer 2023. At present, Mukherjee is writing A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonial Literature in the widely circulated VSI series (2023). A volume she has co-edited with Ato Quayson, titled Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum will be published later this year
Anarchival Practices:The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past
Get PDFWhere is the past? It is not really behind us, but with us, constantly imagined and re-imagined in public discourse through historical narrations. Using the Clanwilliam Arts Project as a case study, this volume is founded on the ‘anarchive’, a conceptual constellation that positions the past in relation to the present, bringing into view strategies to facilitate remembering beyond the colonial archive.Note on Parallel TextNote on Images in the TextFacing the PastArchives: Frustrations and FutilityFacing the Silence: The AnarchiveClanwilliam: Landscape of Past and PresentPerformance and ParadeSignal to Anarchival NoiseMaking History from the AnarchiveReference
The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement:Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue
Get PDFThe essay focusses on how Woolf’s quest for a ‘universal’ language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, The Waves offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf’s stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge’s perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning
Model Narratives
Get PDFThe models of scientists – to be found in their diagrams, equations, maps, and even machines – can be understood as their representations of phenomena in the world. But when we look back into how scientists created those models, we often find processes of narrative-making: scientists, in seeking to understand their part of the world, create narratives about how it might work. And then, in usage, we find those model-representations becoming tools: tools of exploration, explanation and reasoning, activities that often involve scientists telling narratives with their models. So narrative resources come into two processes of scientists’ modelling: first in spinning narratives to help fashion their models of the world, and second in using narrative accounts to reason with and explore their ‘world in the model’. Models and narratives seem odd bed-fellows, but are often conjoined in the creative work of science. Mary S. Morgan is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics; an elected Fellow of the British Academy; and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published on social scientists’ practices of modelling, observing, measuring and making case studies; and is especially interested in how ideas, numbers and facts are used in projects designed to change the world. Her most recent books are How Well Do Facts Travel? (2011) and The World in the Model (2012); and the outcome of a major ERC grant: Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800 (edited with Kim M. Hajek and Dominic J. Berry, 2022)
