Tadamon?: Questions of Solidarity and Political Commitment in Arab Women's Fiction

Please join us for this upcoming research associate seminar at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute! Michelle Hartman, professor of Arabic Literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, will present "Tadamon?: Questions of Solidarity and Political Commitment in Arab Women’s Fiction."

All are welcome! We will serve refreshments!

Abstract

This presentation will read fiction by Arab women writers from Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian contexts through how they engage questions of solidarity (tadamon) and political engagement (iltizam) explicitly and implicitly. More specifically, the texts discussed here all deal with situations of war, occupation, and life in refugee camps and call into question the ways in which different people are situated and situate themselves differently.

By placing a diverse series of texts in conversation with each other, Hartman will bring out some of the complex ways that Arab women authors navigate their own positions of solidarity and political commitment with the subjects of their novels, as well as how their plots, themes and characterizations problematize such common figures as non-governmental workers, refugee camp volunteers, journalists, oral historians and others.

About Michelle Hartman

Michelle Hartman is a professor of Arabic Literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and a research associate at Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute. She is a literary translator of Arabic into English, in addition to a researcher. She will publish her newest book, Breaking Broken English: Black-Arab Solidarity and the Politics of Language (Syracuse University Press), this spring.

Hartman has also recently edited a volume on the politics of teaching Arabic literature at university, Teaching Modern Arabic Literature in Translation (Modern Language Association), and two new translations, Radwa Ashour’s The Journey and Shahla Ujayli’s A Sky So Close to Us.

This presentation is part of Hartman’s larger Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project with Malek Abisaab, associate professor of History at McGill, entitled "Women’s War Stories: Building an Archive of Women and the Lebanese Civil War.”