Daughters of Ishmael flyer

Margaret Garner and the Daughters of Ishmael
with Toni Morrison, Assia Djebar, Angela Davis, Leila Ahmed
Sat., March 28, 2009 :: 8:00pm :: Miller Theatre, Columbia University (116th & Broadway)

Global Cultural Studies presents extracts from Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner and Assia Djebar’s The Daughters of Ishmael. The performance will be accompanied by a discussion with Morrison, Djebar, Leila Ahmed (Harvard Divinity School), Richard Danielpour (Manhattan School of Music), Angela Davis (University of California, Santa Cruz), Gina Dent (UCSC), Clarisse Zimra (Southern Illinois University), and the performers, opening questions of feminism, femininity, slavery, and Islam. The event will be moderated by University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.  

Toni Morrison's opera Margaret Garner is based on the historical record, revisiting the events that inspired her 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. We will couple extracts from Morrison’s opera with extracts from Assia Djebar’s The Daughters of Ishmael. Djebar has long been fascinated with the figure of Fatima, the Prophet Mohammed's daughter. In The Daughters, she relies on Arab chronicles to dramatize Fatima's role immediately after the Prophet's death. What would the future of Islam have been if this spirited daughter could have inherited the prophetship? Daring to imagine the past otherwise, these two ambitious compositions place the lives of women at the center stage of history.

The opera performance features: William Barto Jones (pianist, New York City Opera), Tracie Luck, Michael Mayes, Leonard Rowe, Maria Nadotti, Maria Grazia Mandruzzato, Silvia Gallerano, and DeAndre Simmons.  

The event is co-sponsored by the Sterling Currier Fund, the Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life, the Caliban Foundation, the Columbia University Arts Initiative, the Pinnacle Group, Columbia University’s School of the Arts, the French Consulate, and the Columbia University Institute for Comparative Literature & Society.

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