Session 200: States of In/Security: Global Palestine in Literature, Culture, Art, and Activism
Friday, 6 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 104B, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Program arranged by the Global Arab and Arab American Forum
Presiding: Karim Mattar, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Speakers: Salah Hassan, Michigan State University; Helga Tawil-Souri, NYU Steinhardt; Dana Olwan, Syracuse University; Olivia Harrison, University of Southern California
Session Description: This roundtable gathers scholars, writers, artists, and activists to discuss how the question of Palestine has shaped literary, artistic, and cultural representations of in/security in Israel/Palestine and around the world; the politics of global solidarity and activism in response to the security state; and the insecurity of lives subject to various technologies and discourses of state control.
Session 473. Beyond Bounds: The Refugee in Global Arab Literary Studies
Saturday, 7 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., 406, Philadelphia Marriott
Session arranged by the Global Arab and Arab American Forum
Session Description: This panel explores concepts of forced migration, exile, and globality as shaped by literary discussions of the Arab refugee across textual, epistemic, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries.
Presiding: Carol N. Fadda, Syracuse University
Presenters:
Charlotta Salmi, Univ. of Birmingham, “At the Border/In the Gutter: the Graphic Refugee
Narrative and the Limits of Global Anglophone Studies.”
Anna Ziajka Stanton, The University of Texas at Austin, “Precarious Bodies: Translating Iraq in America,”
Danielle Haque, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato, “Humans and Citizens: Resisting Humanism in Refugee Narratives”
Session 735. Writing Migrant Selves in Transnational Arab Contexts
Sunday, 8 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Franklin 6, Philadelphia Marriott
Collaborative Session arranged by the Global Arab and Arab American and Life Writing Forums
Presidential Theme panel. This panel has been approved by the MLA current president, Kwame Anthony Appiah for inclusion as one of the sessions that will be listed under the 2017 MLA presidential theme “Boundary Conditions.”
Session Description: This panel examines Arab constructions of selfhood in terms of nation, religion, sexuality, and migration. It aims to expand our thinking about both Arab migrant literatures and the genre of autobiography by exploring how narrative constructions of different kinds of Arab migrant selves—queer, feminist, religious, oppositional—intervene in both Arab and Euro-American traditions of life writing.
Presiding: Georgia Kathryn Johnston, Saint Louis University and Pauline Homsi Vinson, Diablo Valley College
Presenters:
Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Cosmopolitanism, Religion, and Violence in Contemporary Arab Women’s Diasporic Writing”
Mootacem Bellah Mhiri, Vassar College, “Transnational Constructions of Muslim Feminist Selfhood in Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West”
Carolyn Ownbey, McGill University, “(Non)Citizenship and Narration: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques”
