Dear Friends and Colleagues, 

For those of you who have an interest in modern Arabic literature and wish to attend the 2013 ACLA Conference in Toronto, please consider submitting an abstract to the following panel: 

Mapping the Politics of Arabic Literature

Seminar Organizer(s): Anne-Marie McManus (Yale University), Amir Moosavi (NYU)

This seminar seeks to explore how comparative spatial approaches inform our readings of politics and poetics in modern Arabic literatures, both within texts and across disciplinary boundaries. First, how do we map the relationship between literary form and politics within texts?  For example, how have writers claimed the literary as a realm in which to assert memories of circulatory networks obliterated by national borders, document contemporary grids of resistance, or posit future spatial configurations?  And, how do comparative reading methods, by asserting new common grounds on which to bring literary texts together, contest geopolitical, linguistic, and/or religious mappings of “the Middle East”? In the context of our preliminary work on literature and politics in the era of “the Arab Spring,” what does it mean to bring Arabic literatures into dialogue with other zones of resistance and revolt?

This seminar welcomes papers that engage with either or both of these topics in modern Arabic literatures using comparative or transnational perspectives. Possible themes include but are not limited to:

•  Transnationalism in/of literature; publication networks; translation
•  Transgressing borders: refugees, migrant workers, activists, drones
•  Global networks: leftist politics, revolution, occupation, the new media

Deadline: November 1st

http://www.acla.org/acla2013/mapping-the-politics-of-arabic-literature/

— 

Amir Moosavi

PhD Candidate / Fall 2012 NYU Berlin Global Research Fellow 

Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

New York University