English & Comparative Literary Studies News
Palestinian Literature & Culture event: “Reading Modernity in Suad Amiry’s Mother of Strangers (2022)” – in conversation with the novelist.
In conversation with the awards winning Palestinian novelist Suad Amiry, the department’s PLCRG convened a literary critical seminar to discuss registrations of modernity in the Kafkaesque, realist novel Mother of Strangers, which brilliantly restores urban modernity and hierarchical social relations in the Palestinian metropolitan coastal city of Jaffa before the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) as well as narrates the tragic loss, contradictions and travails experienced by Palestinians in Jaffa in the aftermath of colonial modernity and their massive dispossession and dispersal. The seminar started with an elaborate introduction by the convenor, Nadia Hajal-Backleh (PGR), followed with a seminal talk by Sam Naseem from Lancaster University, before the collective engaged in an open and convivial conversation with the novelist. The experience was meaningful.
Worth to mention that this event built on an equally engaging experience last April, wherein we actively discussed multiple readings of Minor Detail (2017 [2020] and had a lovely, insightful conversation with the awards winning novelist Adania Shibli.