Sinan Antoon: Rescuing the Dead

This webinar is the first of three on “Rethinking the Human, ” part of the HumanitarianismsSawyer Seminar series.

Material and discursive resources and energies are dedicated (insufficiently and unequally) to rescue the living from harm, and to tend to their wounds. But what of the dead? What can we, the living, learn from the rituals and traditions of tending to the dead and to their wounds? Beyond the corporeal, encounters with the ghosts and memories of the dead raise crucial political questions about the ways in which humans inhabit this world. Al-Ma’arri cautioned us a millennium ago to “tread gently, for the soil of this earth is made of these corpses.” This talk will summon al-Ma’arri’s ghost, among others, to address these questions.

Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and scholar. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His most recent work is The Book of Collateral Damage (Yale University Press, 2019). His prize-winning translations include In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago, 2011). Antoon’s scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave, 2014). His op-eds have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times and many pan-Arab newspapers. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and Associate Professor at New York University.

Selim S. Kuru (Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization) will join the webinar as Discussant. Kuru is a philologist and literary historian. His work on early modern Ottoman imperial literary culture focuses on poetics and poetry in the lives of the governing elite.

More information about the series at www.humanitarianisms.org

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by March 21, 2021 to Caitlin Palo, 206-685-5260, scevents@uw.edu.