Middle Eastern Studies Program Presents

The Cultural Politics of Translation and the Nahda in Egypt

This talk explores the cultural geography of Cairo in the first decade of the 20th century in order to unpack and critique nahdawi representations of modernity as simulacrum. I offer a brief reading of Muhammad Al-Muwaylihi’s iconic text Hadith ʿIsa Ibn Hisham that shows how the nahda discourse on cultural authenticity masked a deep social conservatism that banished the “errant trajectories” of everyday translation practices emerging in and through the modern. Against this discourse, the talk will conclude with a discussion of adaptation as the motor of social change and cultural creativity.

Samah Selim teaches at Rutgers University. She is a scholar and translator of modern Arabic literature. Her most recent book, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. She is currently working on a translation of Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa’s final novel Sultana (1987) with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
       

This event is co-sponsored by the Division of Languages and Literatures, Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative, and Human Rights Project.
 

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For more information, call 845-758-7506, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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