The SSF Virtual Works-in-Progress Series

Zoom sessions are held every third Tuesday of the month from 12:15pm-1:30pm (EST). Drafts (7K-12K words all footnotes and citations included) are pre-circulated two weeks prior to the session. If you work cross-regionally and are interested in workshopping your materials please reach out to Eman Morsi at: eman.s.morsi@dartmouth.edu.

18 February 2025Basil FarrajPractices of Violence, Practices of Resistance: Struggles of Palestinian and Colombian Political Prisoners 
“The paper – part of an ongoing research on the circulation of Israeli carceral practices, and Colombian and Palestinian prisoners’ confrontation practices – addresses the interconnectedness and unexpected communalities and circulations between Colombian and Palestinian political prisoners, aided by structures of violence and torture that have long been made mobile across both regions.”
To attend please Sign Up Here .
18 March 2025
15 April 2025
20 May 2025
17 June 2025
15 July 2025

Latin America/Middle East Schedule

Please note that each of the sessions of this workshop is a discussion of a pre-circulated work-in-progress. Attendees need to read the pre-circulated draft to participate in the discussion. To access the drafts and attend please email eman.s.morsi@dartmouth.edu.

All sessions will be held in Dartmouth Hall 104 EXCEPT for sessions III and IV which will be held in Haldeman 246.

Friday , Oct 25, 2024

Session I: 9:30 am – 10:30 am : Eman Morsi, “The Sahrawi Hispanosphere” (Moderator: Christina Civantos)

Coffee Break: 10:30 am-11:00 am

Session II: 11:00 am -12:00 pm: Kevin Funk, “A (Neoliberal) “New World Economic Geography”: Comparative Perspectives on the Domestic Consequences of Booming Latin American-Middle Eastern Trade” (Moderator Eman Morsi)

Lunch Break: 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Session III: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Christina Civantos, “Orientalist Solidarity: José Martí and Cuban Internationalism” (Moderator Marwan Kraidy)

Coffee Break: 3:00 pm- 3:30 pm

Session IV: 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm Marwan Kraidy, “Turkish Drama in Latin America: Coiled Temporalities & Narrative Decolonization” (Moderator John Karam)

Saturday Oct 26, 2024

Session V: 09:30 am – 10:30 am Jesús Muñoz, “Speaking in Glyphs: The Decolonial Poetics of Global Magical Realism” (Moderator Diogo Bercito)

Coffee Break: 10:30-11:00

Session VI: 11:00 am -12:00 pm Maru Pabón, “Word as Action, Immediacy as Style: Fayad Jamís’s Bridges of Communication” (Moderator Jesús Muñoz)

Lunch: 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Session VII: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Diogo Bercito, “A Brazilian Thawra: Arab Migrants in the Revolution of 1932″ (Moderator Angela Haddad)

Coffee Break: 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Session VIII: 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm John Karam, “Global South Prelude: Why Brazil Matters in the Arab Mediterranean” (Moderator Raffaele Mauriello)

Sunday Oct 27, 2024

Session IX: 9:30-10:30 Raffaele Mauriello, “Iran’s Connections with Latin America in the Long Global Sixties and 1979: Literal, Aspirational, Conspiratorial, and Commemorative” (Moderator Kevin Funk)

Coffee/Tea Break: 10:30- 11:00

Session X: 11:00-12:00 Angela Haddad, “Caribbean Indigenism and Arab Migration” (Moderator Maru Pabon)

Lunch: 12:00-2:00 (To Go lunch will be provided for those needing to get on the 12:40 bus)

Silvia Marsans-Sakly

Silvia Marsans-Sakly is an Associate Professor of the Practice in History and Islamic World at Fairfield University. She focuses on the modern history of the Maghreb, particularly Tunisia, with research interests in post-colonial memory, state-society relations, and East-West cartographies of power and memory.

A returned Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Tunisia, Dr. Marsans-Sakly earned her Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Modern European History from New York University. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and the forthcoming monograph History, Power, and Memory in Tunisia, 1864-2011 (IB Tauris). Her next project explores the intersections between Cuba, the Arab world, and the Maghreb. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) and Fulbright and received Fairfield University’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Rosa-Isabel Martínez Lillo 

Martínez Lillo is an Arabist and Literary Translator. She is a professor at the Universidad de Malaga and the Coordinator of the Area of ​​Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Greek Philology, Arabic Studies, General Linguistics, Documentation and Latin Philology.

Martinez Lillo has taught at a variety of academic centers and universities in Egypt, Italy, Chile, and Uzbekistan. She is a member of the Research Group HUM108: CONTEMPORARY ARAB STUDIES (EEAACC) at the Universidad de Granada.

She has written extensively on Arabic and Latin American literatures and has published several translations of Arabic prose and poetry in Spanish. For a list of her publications please click here.

Basil Farraj

Basil Farraj is the Director of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural studies, Birzeit University. Basil is currently working on a research project that explores the global circulation of carceral practices, funded by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). Basil’s research addresses the intersections of memory, resistance, and art by prisoners and others at the receiving end of violence. Basil has conducted research in several countries including Chile, Colombia, and Palestine.

Colonial Traumas and State Violence between Latin America and the Middle East

Please note that the morning sessions are discussions of pre-circulated works-in-progress. If interested in joining the discussion of the drafts please contact Eman.s.morsi@dartmouth.edu to get a copy.

The Teach-In sessions and film screening do not need preparation. Join if you can!

Program:

Saturday 9/21

Location for morning sessions: Reed Hall 102

10:00 am -11:00 am: Silvia Marsans-Sakly, “In the Time of Genocide: Reading Las Casas During the Nakba of 2023–24” 

11:00 am -11:30 am Coffee Break

11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Amal Eqeiq, “Ethnography as a Method: The Examination of the “I”/Eye in South-South Encounters

Afternoon Events will be held in Reed Hall 105

2:30-4:00 Teach-In: “Practices of Violence, Practices of Resistance” with Basil Farraj

5:00-6:30 Film Screening and Discussion: Cuatro colores (Four Colors) Documentary by Aldo Guerrero

Sunday 9/22

Reed Hall 102

10:00 am- 11:00 am: Rosa Isabel Martinez Lillo“Young Chilean Prose of Arab Origin: Farha Nasra and the Children of the Intifada” 

11:00 am-11:30 am Coffee break

11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Basil Farraj“On the Move: the Mobility of Israeli Carceral Practices”

Reed Hall 105

 2:00-3:30 pm Teach-In with Amal Eqeiq, “From La Calle to الشارع:  Latin American Solidarity with Palestine through Street Art”

4:00-5:30pm Teach-in with Silvia Marsans-Sakly, “Echoes of Empire: How Does Colonial Violence from the Indies Resonate in Gaza?”

Tania Libertad Balderas

Tania Libertad Balderas is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of New Mexico. Her fields of study are 20th Century Comparative Literature, centering on Chicanx, Latin American, and Native American Literature. She specializes in Marxism, feminism, theater studies, and decolonial theories. Her current book project, Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Insurgencies in 1960-70s US and Mexico, traces the interrelationship between the novels, autobiographies, theater plays, and oral histories that center the participation of women in the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Chicano/a Movement, and the “Dirty War” in Mexico. Her project emphasizes how these narratives articulate notions of decolonization, self-determination, women’s liberation, and the existence and significance of transnational solidarity networks established in their struggle for liberation.

Esen Kara

Esen Kara received her Ph.D in the American Studies department of Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey, in 2018, with a thesis titled “Claiming the Right to the City: Representation of Los Angeles in the Transnational American Literature.” She is an assistant professor at Yasar University, Department of English Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on postcolonial literature, contemporary American literature, and Turkish literature as world literature. For the 2023-2024 academic year, Esen Kara is appointed as a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College COLT, Spanish/Portugese with a TUBITAK international post-doctoral fellowship. Her current research focuses on ecological imagination as medium of counter-memory in Turkish and US-Latinx literatures, specifically the production of affective archives in testimonial narratives of wars and genocide.

Preeti Singh

Preeti Singh is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College where she is affiliated with the department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages.  She researches and teaches postcolonial studies and world literature with a focus on 20th and 21st century South Asian and South Asian diasporic literatures and cinema. Broadly, she is interested in literary expressions of political and social crises at the intersection of decolonization and the global cold war,  discourses of human rights, and the contemporary rhetoric and theories of populism. 

Preeti received her PhD in English from Ohio State University-Columbus in August 2022. Her book project is based on her dissertation titled, Postcolonial Exceptions: Cultural Lives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977)  which examined literary and cinematic representations of the widely memorialized national emergency declared by Indian prime-minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. Reading across a range of genres—  novels, theatre, cinema, and political cartoons, Postcolonial Exceptions, scripts a literary and cultural history of postindependence India through the prism of the ‘Emergency.’  Her second project tentatively titled The Comparative Poetics of Decolonization theorizes decolonization as a planetary phenomenon with specific attention to the aesthetics of alignment, solidarity and indigeneity. The project traces the relationship between indigeneity and refuge as it has shaped the intellectual history of Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies.  

Preeti completed her M.A. and M. Phil degrees at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India where she wrote an M.Phil. dissertation on urban form and postcolonial subjectivity in the emerging genre of the Indian graphic novel. At Dartmouth, Preeti is the co-convenor of the South Asian Studies Collective. She is also one of the principal investigators on the project Infrastructures of Race, Knowledge, and Aesthetics funded by the Leslie Center’s Venn Vision Grant. 

SSF 2019: Home Lost


WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

The roundtables are discussion based so participants need to have read the pre-circulated papers beforehand

To receive a copy of the papers please contact eman.s.morsi@dartmouth.edu

All roundtable sessions will take place in Haldeman 246

Monday August 12

6:00 pm-8:30pm: Opening reception and dinner at the Hanover Inn for participants and sponsors

Tuesday August 13

7:30 am-9:00 am: Breakfast

Day 1. Theorizing the Home/land

Roundtable I: 9:30 am-12:00pm

  • Ofure Aito, Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Literary Studies, Faculty of Arts, Federal University, Lokoja, Nigeria
    • Home and Exile: Belonging/’Unbelonging’ Identities in Nwosu’ A Gecko’s Farewell
  • Oluwole Coker, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
    • Tensions of (Be) longing:  Envisioning Home and the Homeland in the Twenty-first Century African Novel
  • Subhasree Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Calcutta, India
    • In Search of Home: Nostalgia and Trauma of Lost Homeland of the East Bengali Migrants

12:00 pm- 1:30pm Lunch

Roundtable II: 2:00 pm-4:30 pm

  • Alina De Luna, PhD Candidate, Center for Conflict Studies, Phillips University of Marburg, Germany
    • This Body We Call Home: Exploring the relation between body and home
  • Eman Morsi, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College, USA
    • Exile in the Sprachraum: Home and Language in the Works of Cristina Peri Rossi and Ghada al-Samman.
  • Shareah Taleghani, Assistant Professor, Queens College, the City University of New York, USA
    • Home, Exile, and Emotional Border Zones in Two Syrian Documentaries

5:00pm-7:00pm: Screening of Syrian filmHaunted. Followed by Q&A. Open to Public. (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl4KRwCqVlY

 *******

Wednesday August 14 

7:30am-9:00 am Breakfast

 Day 2. In-Between Spaces and Border Ecologies

Roundtable III: 9:30 am – 12:00pm

  • Silvia Soto, Visiting Assistant Professor, American Indian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
    • Localizing Mayanness: vivencias and the challenges of belongingness
  • Rituparna Mitra, Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing, Marlboro College, USA
    • Partitioned Border Ecologies in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Khoabnama
  • Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Professor and Chair of Migration and Refugee Studies, Department of Geography, University College London (UCL), UK
    • A rhizoanalysis of ‘more-than-camps’ in the Middle East: exploring the constitutive nature of overlapping processes of displacement and destruction

12:00-1:30pm Lunch

Roundtable IV: 2:00 pm-4:30pm

  • Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, DPhil Candidate in English Literature, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK.
    • Writing the Camp: Death, Dying and Dialects
  • Svati Shah, Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (additional appointment, Department of Anthropology), University of Massachusetts, Amherst. USA
    • Sexuality as Homeland: Queering Genealogies of Anti-Sodomy Law Activism in India
  • Sireesha Telugu, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India
    • Between Citizenships: Questions of “Home” among the Burmese-Indian Repatriates”

5:00pm -7:00 pm: Opening for artist Nobukho Nqaba,(http://artmeets.agency/nobukho-nqaba/). Installation at the Hood Museum with reception. Open to public.

7:30 Dinner for Workshop Participants

*******

ThursdayAugust15 

7:30am-9:00 am Breakfast

Day 3. Globalization and Transnational Identities

Roundtable V: 9:30 am-12:30pm

  • Lin Chen, PhD Student, Department of Political Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
    • Identity Reshaping and Maintaining of The African Student Migrants Through Social Networks Across the Digital Space Border Of The Great Fire Wall In China
  • Elmo Gonzaga, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
    • Emergent Imaginaries of South-South Circulation and Community in the Inter-Asian Migrant Labor Melodrama
  • Vivian Lu, Postdoctoral Associate, Council on African Studies, Affiliation with Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program. Yale University, USA.
    • Decolonial Capital: Economic Sovereignty and Diasporic Citizenship in Nigerian South-South Commerce
  • Khangelani Moyo, Associate Researcher, Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
    • “Beyond the allure of gold”: Zimbabwean migrants belonging, attachment and identity in Johannesburg

12:30-2:30 Lunch

Roundtable VI: 2:30pm – 4:00 pm  

  • Concluding session

6:00- 8:00: Nobukho Nqaba artist talk followed by Community Dinner