Arab Jews are focus of Georgetown U event

I just heard about this. Tonight and tomorrow at Georgetown University, they’re holding a conference titled, “After Jews and Arabs: Reinventing the Levant…”  The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies is sponsoring the event; I believe non-Georgetown-affiliated can RSVP here to attend. (I wonder what the speakers will be saying about identity-formation and partition.) Some of the highlights:

November 1

Keynote Address (6:30 – 8:00 PM)

• Ammiel Alcalay: “The Cosmology of Finding Your Spot: Political Memory and the Poetics of Location”

 Reception (8:00 – 9:00 PM)

Friday November 2:

Coffee and light breakfast (8:30 – 9:00 AM)

Panel 1 (9:00 – 11:00 AM): Other Levants

• Susan Slyomovics: “Who and What is Native to Israel? On Marcel Janco’s Settler Art and Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s ‘Levantinism’”
• Orit Bashkin: “Globalizing the Mizrahi struggle: Sit-ins, Demonstrations, and Hunger Strikes in 1950s Israel”
• Ramon Stern: “Levantinism Disguised: The Invisible Mediterranean Map between Ibel Saqi and the São Paulo Interior in Raduan Nassar’s Lavoura arcaica”

Chair: Elliott Colla

Break (11:00 – 11:15 AM)

Panel 2 (11:15 – 12:45 PM): Other Poems

• Anne Waldman: “A Poetics and a Politics of the Possible”
• Sami Chetrit: “When Will Our Poems Be Heard in Hebrew? After Jews and Arabs and the Rebirth of the Hebrew Arab-Jew”

Chair: Mark McMorris

Lunch Break (12:45 – 2:00 PM)

Panel 3 (2:00 – 4:00 PM) Other Travels, Other Times

• Dalia Kandiyoti: “Traveling ‘through the Light of the Levantine Prism’: Alcalaian Readings of Contemporary Literature”
• Amila Buturovic: “Spaces of Death as Spaces of Cultural Exchange: One Glimpse into the Ottoman Bosnia”
• Janneke Stegeman: “The Text as Landscape and the Landscape in Text: Patterns of Identity Formation in Jeremiah 32”

Chair: Sylvia Önder

Break (4:00 – 4:15 PM)

Panel 4 (4:15 – 5:45 PM) Other Languages

• Ella Shohat: “Judeo-Arabic(s): Itineraries of Belonging”
• Sinan Antoon: “Diminishing Returns: On Samir Naqqash”

Chair: Joseph Sassoon