Narrating Transformation and Transforming through Storytelling with Shalah Talebi
March 14, 2013 in Room 6496, 6 pm – 8 pm
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue
In Ghosts of Revolution (2011), Shalah Talebi’s haunting account of her years as a political prisoner in Iran, she engages two interrelated premises put forth by Walter Benjamin: that telling stories of lived experiences opens the possibility of a true human connection, the transmission of wisdom, and individual and social transformation; and, to paraphrase Benjamin, that death sanctions everything the storyteller can tell, for the storyteller borrows her authority from death.
Cosponsored by the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities; the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression; the Postcolonial Studies Group; the Committee on Globalization and Social Change; and the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.
