Upcoming Programs

The play between word and image in the work of the Palestinian polymath Kamal Boullata (1942–2019) is suffused with a humanistic sensibility. Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU, will consider the nature of Boullata's humanism and its implications for understanding the entanglements between aesthetics, ethics, and history in his painting and writing. RSVP required.

This event is now cancelled. Frantz Fanon is best known as a leading theorist of decolonization, but he was also profoundly interested in questions of culture. For Fanon, the creation of a decolonized art was one of the principal means by which once-subjugated peoples would realize their independence and freedom, and come to terms with the traumas suffered in colonial warfare. In this talk, Adam Shatz, writer and contributing editor, London Review of Books, will discuss how Fanon’s writings might illuminate the traumatic modernism of postcolonial North Africa.

This event is now cancelled. Beirut was the artistic and intellectual hub of the Arab world in the 1950s and ’60s. In this talk, Robyn Creswell, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University, will situate Beiruti modernism within a wider landscape of Cold War politics, aesthetic abstraction, and Arab intellectual history.