The Role of the Arts in Revolution: Stories from Syria and Iran

Tuesday, April 18, 2023 6:30PM
Segal Theater
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

The Role of the Arts in Revolution: Stories from Syria and Iran 

Please join us for a dialogue between Charif Kiwan, artist, writer and spokesperson for the Syrian film collective Abounaddara with Iran-born scholar and writer, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, about the role of the arts in revolutionary politics. We will discuss Syria, Iran, and much more! Moderated by Miriam Ticktin.

Register for the livestream here.

About the speakers:

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Director of Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of three books on different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath: Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush and the Religious Foundations of Political Reform, London, New York:  I. B. Tauris (Palgrave-Macmillan), 2008; Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016; and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution, New York, London: O/R Books (Counterpoint), 2016. Currently, he is working on a project on Mystical Modernity, a comparative study of philosophy of history and political theory of Walter Benjamin and Ali Shariati.

Charif Kiwan is a co-founder of Abounaddara, an anonymous collective of filmmakers who have been working since 2010 to create representations of Syrian society undergoing transformation in a new age of revolution. From Paris where he now lives, he is working on the next Abounaddara film, which is about the French colonial imaginary, in which Syrian society is still trapped.

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010). She is currently finishing a book on, and against, innocence.

Non-CUNY visitors must provide a government-issued photo ID upon entry. For more information, please see the Graduate Center Building Entry Policy.

This event is organized and sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. It is free and open to the public.