Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Global Middle East and North Africa is a bi-annual symposium and lecture series thatfocuses on the study of literatures that have been shaped by histories of territorial and linguistic politics, colonialism, military domination and gross human rights violations. The initiative grapples with the constructed nature of history; reimagines American and global history from the position of suppressed voices; and examines how minoritized writers and scholars have historically innovated literary production and theory in the process of responding to systemic violence.
Come join us in English! Students interested in English as a first or second major are invited to attend one of our upcoming information sessions. Four of the sessions are specially geared to coordinate with other frequently paired fields of study: science, business or economics, psychology, and political science, while one is meant as a general English major information session.
Symptomaticity and Opacity in the Literature of Smog Sensing Jean-Thomas Tremblay
This talk identifies a cross-media aesthetics of “smog sensing” that measures the shifts in sensation, perception, and orientation occasioned by atmospheric urban pollution. Exemplifying this aesthetics is Renee Gladman’s corpus of writing and drawing, in particular a cycle of speculative novels set in the city-state of Ravicka, where a mysterious environmental cataclysm has made the air thick and yellow. In a context where different characters’ respiration indexes a socioecological crisis without revealing what it means to and for them, relations are organized by “symptomatic breathing,” an interpretive attitude that consists in learning the limits of what is graspable about embodiment and experience. In Ravicka, breathing is deceptively transparent; it mediates what, within a critical tradition anchored by Édouard Glissant, we may label a politics of racial and sexual opacity. Gladman’s works enable us to rethink the politics of breathing at a historical moment when oppression and inequality reproduce themselves through the weaponization of the air. Breathing together, our visit to Ravicka reveals, is no great equalizer; it instead constitutes a coalitional tactic or strategy for showing up and staying in relation without presuming shared experience.…
Négar Djavadi was born in Iran in 1969 to a family of intellectuals opposed to the regimes both of the Shah, then of Khomeini. She arrived in France at the age of eleven, having crossed the mountains of Kurdistan on horseback with her mother and sister. She is a screenwriter and lives in Paris. Disoriental…
Location: Webinar in partnership with the Museum of Literature Ireland
Joining Barry McCrea in his monthly conversations about Ireland's Generation X? will be actor and writer Mark O'Halloran.
As an actor he has worked with all the major theatre companies in Ireland. On screen he has appeared in numerous films, most notably as one of the eponymous heroes in Adam & Paul for which he also wrote the screenplay. He has also appears in The Guard…
Location: Webinar format, partnership with the Museum of Literature Ireland
The series Ireland's Generation X? continues, with this month's conversation one between Professor Barry McCrea, Keough Family Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and the writer Claire Kilroy, who won the Rooney Prize for Literature in 2004 with her debut novel All Summer…
