The aftermath of disasters casts new light on the dialectics of bearing witness and writing; theory and practice. It points to the limits of the word – the very core of intellectual self-fashioning – in conveying the magnitude of loss. If word is praxis, what becomes of speech in the aftermath of incapacitating defeats and setbacks? How do we read the suspension of the word when a thinking subject is no longer an agent of history, but merely its casualty? As intellectuals keep silent in the wake of tragedies, questions persist about what intellectual silence unfolds, upholds, and performs. Halabi builds on the vast critical corpus pertaining to the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous by making sense, not of his words, but rather of his silence in the aftermath of disasters that blur the boundaries between personal and political loss.
Mi 05 Jun 2019 | 17:00–18:30
Disasters and the Silence of Intellectuals
Zeina G. Halabi (American University of Beirut / EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2018-20), Chair: Diana Abbani (EUME Fellow 2018/19)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
Zeina G. Halabi is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut. She specializes in modern Arabic literature with particular interest in questions of loss, mourning, and dissidence in contemporary literature and visual culture. She was a 2012-13 EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, where she began working on her first book, The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), in which she examines the depiction of Arab intellectuals in post-1990s fiction and film. She has authored articles on the shifting notion of political commitment in the writings of canonical and emerging Arab writers. She is currently working on her second book project provisionally entitled Excavating the Present: History, Power, and the Arab Archive, which explores archival practices in contemporary literature. She is currently a EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
