The Peace and Conflict Studies Department is pleased to be a co-sponsor of this talk, featuring Iraqi Novelist and Poet Sinan Antoon, taking place at Swarthmore College.
Title: Iraq Afterwar(d)s: Epistemic Violence and Collateral Damage
Speaker: Sinan Antoon, Iraqi novelist and poet.
Date & Time : April 25th, Tuesday, 4:30 – 6:30 pm
Location: Kohlberg Scheuer Room
*This event is open to the public.
This talk will address the genealogy of the destruction of Iraq and its ongoing effects. While most accounts begin in 2003, the talk will trace it back to the first Gulf War of 1991 and throughout the economic sanctions (1990-2003). In addition to material destruction, the talk will discuss the epistemic violence of U.S wars and its effects on knowledge production in and about Iraq.
Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, translator, and scholar. He was born and raised in Baghdad where he finished a B.A in English at Baghdad University in 1990. He left for the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. He earned a doctorate in Arabic literature from Harvard in 2006. He has published two collections of poetry and five novels. His most recent wok is The Book of Collateral Damage. Sinan returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 to co-produce and co-direct a documentary film about Iraq under occupation entitled About Baghdad. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, al-Jazeera and various Arabic-language outlets. His scholarly works include a book on the pre-modern poet, Ibn al-Hajjaj, and articles on Sa`di Youssef, Sargon Boulus, and Mahmoud Darwish. He is an Associate Professor at New York University and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Sponsored by: the Arabic Section of MLL, the Islamic Studies Program, the Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility, the Department of Peace & Conflict Studies, and the Department of Sociology & Anthropology.
Sinan Antoon, associate professor at the Gallatin School of New York University and fellow of the university’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, has authored The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf and many essays on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book, In the Presence of Absence, was published by Archipelago Books in 2011 and won the 2012 National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators Association. Antoon is also a poet and a novelist. He has published two collections of poetry in Arabic and one collection in English titled The Baghdad Blues. His novels include I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody and The Corpse Washer, nominated for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His essays and creative writing have appeared in major Arab and international journals and publications, including The Nation, Middle East Report, Banipal, Journal of Palestine Studies, World Literature Today, Ploughshares, Washington Square Journal, and the New York Times. He is co-founder/co-editor of Jadaliyya.