Seminars

Reading and discussion with Jay Prosser about Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, A Legacy, A Son Returns – a diasporic journey of inherited and chosen Jewishness from the UK to Iraq, India, China and Singapore. Our conversation will focus on the writing of family memoirs, intermarriage, the place of the stranger, and the transmission of memory objects across generations. Jay Prosser is Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds, and the author of Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality and Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss.

Historian Rachel Nolan and journalist Jonathan Blitzer will discuss two new books on Central America's close and fraught relations with the US., past and present. Two forms of different but related migrations have linked the regions: asylum-seeking and international adoption. Connecting the historical realities of political violence in Central America to our present immigration impasses helps us see this mass movement of people in a new way.

As many of you may know, Shibli's novel--which was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize--was recently awarded a German literary prize, and the author was to be honored at the Frankfurt Book Fair. On 10/13, the prize ceremony was cancelled and postponed to a later date, suppressing Shibli's voice in favor of Israeli voices at the Book Fair instead. Shibli's novel is about the politics of cultural memory and the limits of the archive as a resource for reconstructing and repairing the history of violence. Her work speaks directly to the preoccupations of this seminar and it has emerged as a cultural flashpoint in the current human and political catastrophe unfolding in Palestine and Israel. We invite members of this seminar to read this short novel, if you have not already, and come together to discuss what it teaches us about memory, and what we do with this insight in the present.