The World Languages & Digital Humanities Studio will host Bilingual Readings in Arabic and Persian Poetry and Prose from 12:30-2 p.m. Friday, April 21, in J.B. Hunt Center room 207.
Three summer novels share a surprising marketing hook: All are strongly influenced by the rambling style of the late Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard.
In early 2011, as she watched the removal of the graffiti that had been scrawled around Tahrir Square in the heady days of the popular uprising, followed by a “cleansing” of that space of revolt, Dina Heshmat realized she was witnessing the deliberate rewriting of history, a deletion of the people’s spontaneous discourse, to be replaced by a more elitist narrative.
Guided by this awareness, Heshmat sets out, in
Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) to re-examine the Egyptian revolution of the previous century, looking into the country’s archives to find unpublished novels and out-of-print articles that reflect the people’s mood during what she argues was the early 20th century’s equivalent of Egypt’s Arab Spring: a popular uprising against an oppressive regime by society’s poorest and most downtrodden classes, that was later claimed by the nationalist bourgeoisie.