The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University is pleased to announce its annual Graduate Student Conference to be held on April 18-19 2024. This conference is a space for graduate students to present their original work in a welcoming and stimulating environment.

Our conference this year aims to investigate the Extra/ordinary as a category and rhetoric of socio political, historical and cultural thought. What makes a particular event, invention, time, war, crisis, or phenomenon extraordinary? On the contrary, what is relegated to the realm of the ordinary? During a time of multiple compounding crises, where must we look, focus and thoughtfully respond? Is it helpful to highlight the multiplicity of crises or is our crisis-ridden world best understood through an overarching analytical framework?

We welcome a wide range of submissions that speak to our general theme and encourage (but do not seek to limit) interpretations of the Extra/Ordinary as mentioned in our Call for Papers. You can keep updated about the conference on our website: https://mesaasgraduateconference.wordpress.com. For any questions or inquiries, please contact mesaasgraduateconference@gmail.com.

“What Lies Between: A Celebration of Translation and Collaboration”

Upon the publication of Aftab Ahmad’s Urdu translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand).

Featuring Aftab Ahmad (MESAAS); and Daisy Rockwell and Geetanjali Shree, co-winners of 2022 International Booker Prize

Moderated by Isabel Huacuja Alonso (Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies)

Time:  4:15pm – 6:00pm

Location:   James Room, 4th floor, Barnard Hall, Barnard College entrance at 118th Street and Broadway

In person only.

REGISTER HERE

Co-sponsored by the Barnard College Translation Studies Program, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, the Literary Translation Program at the School of the Arts, the South Asia Institute, and the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Institute for the Humanities

Painting by Lapata.

Aftab Ahmad is a Senior Language Lecturer in Hindi and Urdu in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.  He earned his BA at Aligarh Muslim University and an MA and PhD at Jawaharlal University.  His publications include translations from Urdu (with Matt Reeck) of Mirages of the Mind  (Aab-e-gum) by Mushtaque Ahmad Yusufi (2015), and Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Mano (2012).

Daisy Rockwell is a painter and award-winning translator of Hindi and Urdu literature. She paints under the takhallus, or alias, Lapata (pronounced ‘laapataa’), which is Urdu for “missing,” or “absconded.”. She earned a PhD in South Asian literature at the University of Chicago. Rockwell has published numerous translations from Hindi and Urdu, including Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls (2015) and his Hats and Doctors (2013), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (2016), and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Krishna Sobti’s final novel, A Gujarat here, a Gujarat there (2019) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2019. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (2021) won the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Other works by Rockwell include Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography (2004); The Little Book of Terror, a volume of paintings and essays on the Global War on Terror (2012); and her novel Taste, published by Foxhead Books in 2014.

Geetanjali Shree is a novelist and short-story writer based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of several short stories and five novels. Her 2000 novel Mai was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2001. In 2022, her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi (2018), translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize. Her other novels include Hamara Shahar Us Baras (1998); Tirohit (2001) [published in English as The Roof Beneath Her Feet (2013)]; Khali Jagah (2006) [published asThe Empty Space (2011)]. Aside from fiction, she has written the critical biography Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand (1989).

This three-day conference will bring together activists, theorists, artists, and writers to explore the pasts, futures, and in-between times of transgender lives, narratives, and theories. The conference will allow an opportunity to meet, talk, learn, and disrupt the conventional narratives that circulate about bodies, economies, histories, pleasure, revolt, and science.

Registration for the following event can be found at this link.

Memory Wars and Memory Work: Relational Remembrance in Pınar Öğrenci’s Aşît [The Avalanche]

During the last few years, a series of acrimonious debates has taken place in Germany about Holocaust memory, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine. In one of the most visible of those disputes, an enormous scandal rocked the 2022 Documenta 15 international art exhibit in Kassel. Set against the backdrop of Documenta, this lecture will review the recent memory wars in Germany and then turn to a work that was displayed at Documenta but was not part of the controversy swirling around the exhibit: Pınar Öğrenci’s film Aşît [The Avalanche]. This film, which concerns the tangled histories of violence directed against Armenians and Kurds in a remote town in eastern Turkey, does not address the terms of the German debate directly. However, as Rothberg will argue, in weaving together multiple histories of exile, trauma, and catastrophe, Aşît offers a mode of relational remembrance that suggests alternative possibilities for coming to terms with the past in contemporary Germany—and beyond.

Following his lecture, Prof. Rothberg will be joined in conversation by Prof. Sonali Thakkar of NYU, whose work focuses on postcolonial literature and theory and anticolonial thought and politics. A reception will conclude the evening.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register to reserve your spot.

Upon the death of her father, a Jewish man originally from Oran, Algeria, who was naturalized as a French and then Israeli citizen, Ariella Azoulay discovers in a document that her grandmother’s name was Aïcha.  In this book she interweaves two genres– autobiography and political theory– rummaging through catalogues of jewels, found photographs, and collections of pillaged objects, and combines these fragments to tell her family’s history in parallel with the histories of French colonialism in Algeria and Zionist colonialism in Palestine.  She notes continuities, beginning with the obstinate efforts to destroy the secular entanglements of Jewish, Arab and Berber worlds, whose interlaced patterns she wishes to see restored.

For more information and to register, click here: https://maisonfrancaise.columbia.edu/events/resistance-jewels-against-colonial-geographies

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a writer, researcher, experimental filmmaker, and commissioner of anticolonial archives.  Born in 1962 in Israel, which she views as a Zionist colony in Palestine, Azoulay is a professor at Brown University where she teaches political theory, resistance to imperialism, and anticolonial imaginaries calling for return, restitution, and Tikkun Olam, repair of the world.  The author of 10 books which have appeared in multiple languages, she published among other works Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, and La Résistance des bijoux.

Jill Jarvis is Assistant Professor of French at Yale University. Jill Jarvis specializes in the aesthetics and politics of North Africa. Her forthcoming book, Decolonizing Memory : Algeria and the Politics of Testimony, brings together close readings of fiction with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of violence and the stakes of literary study in a time of unfinished decolonization.

Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of French and History and the Chair of the Department of French and the author of Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies.

A Roundtable discussion with Fabien Théofilakis, Stefanos Geroulanos, Gil Hochberg, Mark Mazower, and Andrew Port

This roundtable will explore the contemporary politics of anti-semitism in western Europe in historical perspective. Focusing on the cases of postwar France and Germany, discussants will ask how a set of debates that emerged out of consideration of the Holocaust have been transformed in recent years and affected most recently by events in the Middle East.

The discussants are Stefanos Geroulanos, Gil Hochberg, Andrew Port and Fabien Theofilakis. The discussion will be moderated by Mark Mazower.

for more information and to register, click here: https://maisonfrancaise.columbia.edu/events/politics-memory-anti-semitism-contemporary-western-europe

For more information, follow the link: https://sofheyman.org/events/visions-of-world-society

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Robbie Shilliam (Johns Hopkins University) and Prof. Ayse Zarakol (Cambridge University)

Introduction: Dr Marina Calculli (Columbia University & SciencesPo Paris)

Concluding Remarks: Prof. Hamid Dabashi (Columbia University)

Inaugural Nina Garsoïan Memorial Lecture:

The Return of the Kingdom:

The Armenian Capital of Ani, c. 1000

Christina Maranci

Book Launch

After The Ottomans: Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resilience

Featuring co-editors:

Hans-Lukas Kieser (Newcastle University, Australia)

Seyhan Bayraktar (University of Zurich, Switzerland)

Khatchig Mouradian (Columbia University, USA)

Time: Monday, Sept. 25 at 6pm

Place: CSSW, Room C03, Columbia University

Address: 1255 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY, New York, NY 10027

Cosponsors:

MESAAS

Institute for the Study of Human Rights,

Columbia University Armenian Center

Book description:

This book deals with the lasting impact and the formative legacy of removal, dispossession and the politics of genocide in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire. For understanding contemporary Turkey and the neighboring region, it is important to revisit the massive transformation of the late-Ottoman world caused by persistent warfare between 1912 and 1922.

This fourth volume of a series focusing on the “Ottoman Cataclysm” looks at the century-long consequences and persistent implications of the Armenian genocide. It deals with the actions and words of the Armenians as they grappled with total destruction and tried to emerge from under it. Eleven scholars of history, anthropology, literature and political science explore the Ottoman Armenians not only as the major victims of the First World War and the post-war treaties, but also as agents striving for survival, writing history, transmitting the memory and searching for justice.