Antoon, Sinan

Iraq: Di/Visions of War

Sinan Antoon is a poet, writer, filmmaker and academic. He was born in Iraq in 1967 and went into exile during the rule of Saddam Hussein in 1991. In 2004, Antoon returned to his home country with a film team to shoot About Baghdad, a documentary about the life of Iraqis in the period after the invasion. He teaches at New York University, does research on pre-modern Islamic and contemporary Arab culture and is a founding member of the online platform Jadaliyya. Antoon is the author of The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (New York, 2014) and a number of novels and collections of poetry, some of them translated into English as The Corpse Washer (Yale University Press, 2013), I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (City Lights Books, U.S., 2007) and The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007). In 2009, he was a fellow of the research program ‘Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe’.

Di/Visions critically examined ideologies and practices of divisions and borders in the Middle East. It was a joint project of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the research program Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe in the year 2008.

„Di/Visions. Culture and Poltics of the Middle East” was edited by Catherine David, Georges Khalil und Bernd Scherer and included a DVD with the conversations (Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2009). Since 2015 the edited volume has been available as an open access publication.

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