"Syrian Revolutionary Culture at Home and in Germany"
Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
- Date: Mar 19, 2019
- Time: 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Miriam Cooke (Duke University)
- miriam cooke is Braxton Craven Professor of Arab Cultures emerita at Duke University. She has been a visiting professor in Tunisia, Romania, Indonesia, Qatar and Istanbul. She serves on several national and international advisory boards, including academic journals and institutions. Her writings have focused on the intersection of gender and war in modern Arabic literature, Arab women writers’ constructions of Islamic feminism, contemporary Syrian and Khaliji cultures, and global Muslim net-works. In addition to co-editing five volumes, she is the author of several monographs that include The Anatomy of an Egyptian Intellectual: Yahya Haqqi (1984); War’s Other Voices (1987), Women and the War Story (1997); Women Claim Islam (2001); Dissident Syria (2007), Nazira Zeineddine: A Pioneer of Islamic Feminism (2010), Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014) and Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (2017). She has also published a novel, Hayati, My Life (2000). Several books and articles have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch and German.
- Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
- Room: Conference Room
For more details please contact vdvoffice(at)mmg.mpg.de.
Revolution, pure war, civil war, proxy wars, regional jihads and trans-regional interventions: this is how the media have represented the trajectory of violence in Syria over the past eight years. The country seems to be spinning in a vortex of sectarian hatred and destruction. However, the Syrian intellectuals and artists whose works I discuss refute this dismal assessment. How can we make sense of their insistence that despite the apocalypse engulfing the country their pluralist revolution is ongoing and that their works participate in its persistence? I will look at the work of several Syrian writers and artists, including Wissam al-Jazairi, Tammam al-Azzam and Sari Kiwan who have settled in Germany.