New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Jennifer Wenzel

The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature
By: Jennifer Wenzel

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale.

Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.

Sarah M.A. Gualtieri presents a portion of her new book Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (Stanford University Press, 2019). Her talk draws on the discourse of mestizaje, or mixture and cultural hybridity, in order to revisit central themes in the history of Arab America. It uses the example of Hajj Ali, or “Hi Jolly,” an Ottoman camel-handler in the U.S. military expedition toward California in 1857, to discuss migration and mobility in the early Middle Eastern American diaspora. Rather than reproduce a reading of Hajj Ali as “an early Arab American,” a patriotic Muslim, and one of the “first” Syrians in the United States, Gualtieri explores his marriage to a Mexican American woman in Arizona as a way to rethink idealized notions of family and community in Arab American historiography. She proposes mestizaje as a useful interpretive framework for focusing on the overlooked histories of inter-ethnic contact and Latino/a-Arab interchanges in the US-Mexico borderlands.

In the frame of the recently published volume Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University
Press, 2019), editors and contributors will talk about their contribution to the book in
the Armenian/Turkish context. Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the
intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent
histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of
memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging
collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for
change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the
arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating
new visions for future generations?

This talk will be about ongoing transformations in the sacred musical repertoires practiced by ḥazzanim (synagogue cantors) and their synagogue congregations in Istanbul’s contemporary Jewish community. Dr. Alpar argues that clergy and laypeople alike negotiate their religious identities as Turkish Jews in the musical choices they make. While many try to maintain the community’s local music tradition, rooted in makam—the Ottoman Turkish melodic system—others attempt to broaden their repertoire with musics from Israel, the United States, and Ḥabad Hasidic Judaism. He will examine adjustments made to the musical components of ritual as responses to decades of Jewish religious life as experienced under the authority of the secular Turkish state and to the resurgence of religious observance within certain segments of the Jewish community. Newly religious and spiritually searching Jews now have a conflicted relationship with their community’s historic, sacred musical practices, appreciating their cultural significance but questioning their relevance and efficacy. He asserts that ḥazzanim and community members articulate ambivalent and changing attitudes about their Jewish identities, memory, and the value of local tradition in their diverse approaches to making sacred music. Based on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul’s Jewish community, Dr. Alpar’s talk investigates the tension between their loyalty to tradition and the freedom and fear of being liberated from it.

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher and playwright.
He is a professor emeritus at the Department of
Philosophy of the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris. His major works include the philosophical
trilogy Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The
Immanence of Truths. His philosophical oeuvre
connects continental and analytical philosophical
traditions along with his reflections on set theory
and contemporary mathematics.

Cheikh Ndiaye is an artist who divides his time
between New York, Dakar, and Lyon. His work
includes paintings, installations, and film. Ndiaye
has shown his works internationally, including
at Centre Pompidou; La Maréchalerie Centre
d’Art Contemporain; Dak’Art Biennale; the 56th
International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale
and the 2019 Havana Biennale. Recently, Ndiaye’s
work was included in Sanguine. Luc Tuymans on
Baroque at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy, and in
Domestic Horror at Gagosian Gallery, NYC. Ndiaye
is represented by Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, Abidjan
and Jason Haam Gallery, Seoul. He is one of the
founders of the publishing house Suture Press.

Once dominated by vast empires, the world is now divided into close to 200 independent countries with laws and constitutions proclaiming human rights—a transformation that suggests that nations and human rights inevitably developed together. But the reality is far more problematic, as Eric Weitz shows in this compelling global history of the fate of human rights in a world of nation-states.

Through vivid histories drawn from virtually every continent, A World Divideddescribes how, since the eighteenth century, nationalists have struggled to establish their own states that grant human rights to some people. At the same time, they have excluded others through forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide. From Greek rebels, American settlers, and Brazilian abolitionists in the nineteenth century to anticolonial Africans and Zionists in the twentieth, nationalists have confronted a crucial question: Who has the “right to have rights?” A World Divided tells these stories in colorful accounts focusing on people who were at the center of events. And it shows that rights are dynamic. Proclaimed originally for propertied white men, rights were quickly demanded by others, including women, American Indians, and black slaves.

A World Divided also explains the origins of many of today’s crises, from the existence of more than 65 million refugees and migrants worldwide to the growth of right-wing nationalism. The book argues that only the continual advance of international human rights will move us beyond the quandary of a world divided between those who have rights and those who don’t.

In this lecture, Alon Tam will explore the social history of the Jewish community in Egypt, with a special emphasis on the city of Cairo, in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. He will examine such issues as migration, modernity, social mobility, cultural capital, community building, and relations with the larger Muslim society in which those Jews lived. Looking at those themes from the special perspective of performing social identities in various public spaces around Cairo promises to shed new light on the very meaning of Jewishness in actual, everyday life.

Nimer Sultany, Reader in Public Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

In this talk Dr. Nimer Sultany will discuss his book Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring, which won the 2018 Book Prize awarded by the International Society of Public Law and the 2018 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship awarded by the Society of Legal Scholars. The book examines the role of law in the events that transpired in the Arab World since the ouster of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt. It critically discusses the role of law during revolutionary upheavals and critiques liberal constitutionalism from the vantage point of Arab legal and constitutional experiences.

Cosponsors: MEI, MESAAS, and the Columbia Law School