MESAAS | Events

Upcoming Events

Writing across Borders and Languages: A conversation with Italian-Algerian author Amara Lakhous

Thursday, January 22

6-7:30 p.m.

Location: East Gallery, Buell Hall

Author joined by Madeleine Dobie, Elizabeth Leake, and Pier Mattia Tommasino

Born in Algiers in 1970, Amara Lakhous departed for Italy during the violence that ravaged Algeria in the 1990s. His critically acclaimed novels in Arabic and Italian include Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2010), Divorce Islamic Style (2012) and Dispute over a Very Italian Piglet (2014). Using humor to explore the encounter of cultures, religions and languages, Lakhous's work explores the experience of exile and the dynamics of migration in the contemporary Mediterranean. His novels have won major literary prizes, including Premio Flaiano per la narrativa in 2006 and Algeria’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix des libraires algériens in 2008. Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio has been adopted by Cornell University as the New Student Reading Project text for 2014.

He will discuss his novels, the practice of bilingual writing and translation, literary culture in Algeria and Italy, and the social and political framework of contemporary migration, with Columbia Professors Madeleine Dobie (French and Comparative Literature), Elizabeth Leake (Italian) and Pier Mattia Tommasino (Italian).

Co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Institute of African Studies, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, European Institute, Middle East Institute and Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies

Recent Events

The Indian Elections: What Will Change?

Speakers: Professors Yogesh Chandrani, Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj

Panel Moderated By: Professor Mahmood Mamdani

Thursday, November 20th

12:00 – 2:00 p.m.

208 Knox Hall

No R.S.V.P. required

The Department of Middle Eastern Studies
University of Texas at Austin
Presents

IRAQ LECTURE SERIES

Friday, Oct 10, 2014
SAC 2.302 - Legislative Assembly Room

10:00 Breakfast

10:30 Opening Remarks, Assoc. Dean Richard Flores, COLA, UT Austin

10:45 Panel
Moderator: Prof. Barbara Harlow, UT Austin

-“Chronicle as Cascade: The Subaltern Sublime in Fadhil Al Azzawi’s The Last of the Angels,” Rachel Green, MES, UT Austin
-“Anfal: Sherko Bekes and the Poetry of Genocide,” Seerwan Hariry, MES, UT Austin

11:45 Break

12:00 Talk
Moderator: Prof. Yoav Di-Capua, UT Austin

Post-Occupation Iraqi Narrative:
ISIS Lexicon and its Counterculture

Muhsin al-Musawi
Columbia University

This talk explores ISIS lexicon, syntax, physique, and flowning black robes as part of a deliberately drawn medieval Asian site of hordes, not only to dismantle the last remnants of Arab nation state, and its core in the fertile crescent, but also to image Islam in a conservative orientalist light. The talk situates this within a broader accommodating historical context of conflict, coercion, fracturing of identities and ideologies, and the pilfering of privatized religion. It locates the movement within a strategy to initiate a new Middle East as a playground for global politics. A growing Iraqi narrative shows how the sordid and the macabre transmute into a normative practice that opens the gate for invading hordes.

Muhsin al-Musawi is Professor of classical and modern Arabic and comparative studies at Columbia University. Described by Chronicle for Higher Education as “the leading Arab critic,” he is the author of twenty-eight books and over sixty articles. He has been the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature since 2000. His books include: The Society of One Thousand and One Nights (2000); The Postcolonial Arabic Novel (2003); Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006); Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006); Islam on the Street (2009). His forthcoming book from Notre Dame UP is Politics of the Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters. He’s currently working on a book entitled, Arab Struggle with the Past.