The Arab Upheaval: a talk by Gilbert Achcar

The Arab Upheaval: What has it achieved? Where is it going?

A talk by Gilbert Achcar followed by a discussion with Samah Selim

Saturday, April 14th, 2012 from 11.30 – 2 pm

Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor

co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the South Asia Solidarity Initiative

 

The Arab upheaval ignited in Tunisia in December 2010 is now well into its
second year. It has overthrown three Arab rulers, in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya,
and forced another to hand over power in Yemen. However, uprisings in Bahrain
and Syria have been violently repressed, the latter at the cost of ten thousand
lives already. This is while the future of the revolutionary process is
uncertain in the four countries where initial victories have been achieved, with
electoral processes proving unable to quench the upheaval’s fundamentally social
dynamics.

About the Speakers

Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon,
and is currently Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
of the University of London. His books include The Clash of Barbarisms: The
Making of the New World Disorder, published in 13 languages, Perilous Power: The
Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, and most
recently The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of
Narratives.

Samah Selim was born in Egypt and has lived in the UK, Libya,
France and Germany. She received her BA in English Literature from Barnard
College in 1986 and her PhD from the Department of Middle East and Asian
Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 1997. She has previously taught
at Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of
Aix-en-Provence, and she directs the literature module of the Berlin-based
postdoctoral research program, Europe in the Middle East; the Middle East in
Europe. Her book, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, explores the
relationship between the rise of the novel genre, the politics of nationalist
representation and the peasant question over the course of the 20th century in
Egypt. Dr. Selim, who is also a practicing literary translator, is currently at
work on a book about translation, modernity and popular fiction in early 20th
century Egypt.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *