In 1910, after returning to Cairo from a three year sojourn in New York, Niqula al-Haddad published an Arabic translation of an 1890 speculative fiction novel by American author and politician Ignatius Donnelly. Caesar’s Column tells the story of a workers' revolution that begins in New York City and sets off a global apocalypse of death and destruction. This talk will use the novel and its translation as a starting point to explore different ways of thinking about the objects and ends of comparative method in relation to the literary archive. Selim is especially interested in how scalar inquiry allows the reader to gather the seemingly incommensurable geographies and temporalities generated by postcolonial historiography into flexible and productive relationships between people, texts and social movements that unsettle dominant liberal/national paradigms of history-making.
Samah Selim is a scholar and translator of modern Arabic literature. Her research focuses on the Arabic novel in Egypt from a comparative and translational perspective. She is the author of Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her most recent translation is Arwa Salih's The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student Movement Generation (Seagull Books, 2018). She is currently working on a translation of Ghalib Halasa’s 1976 novel Al-Khamasin. Selim is a founding member of the Turjoman translators collective in Cairo. She teaches in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University.
Georges Khalil works for the Forum Transregionale Studien since 2009, and has been the academic coordinator of Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME) since 2006. He has been working in the field of academic administration and exchange since 1998. Khalil studied History, Islamic, and European Studies in Hamburg and Cairo, and co-edited Di/Visions: Kultur und Politik des Nahen Ostens (2009), Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century (2012) and Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s (2015).
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
