The Mediterranean Institute is pleased to invite you to the final Mediterranean Institute Seminar session for this academic year. The Seminar will take place at the Mediterranean Institute, Ħursun Farmhouse on Thursday, 12 May at 18:30. Our guest speaker for the Seminar is Dr Rita Sakr from Maynooth University Ireland, who bill be discussing ‘Radical (dis)locations of the fragment-shard in Hassan Blasim’s work’.
The work of Iraqi-born writer Hassan Blasim formally renders the (dis)continuities of Iraq’s recent history and its dispersive geographies through the aesthetics of the fragment-shard and experimental methods of conceptual and formal assemblage. Blasim’s writing exemplifies a triadic poetics of radical dislocation, associative rhythm and paradoxically life-affirming haunted enclosure. Recognising the ways in which this poetics is intertwined with Blasim’s imaginative immersion in various media, arts and bodies of thought, I address in this seminar some of the key philosophical, cinematic, literary and musical resources that explain, fuel, and/or are translated into his creative practice.
RITA SAKR is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Maynooth University, Ireland. Among various other publications, she is the author of ‘Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Stud’y and of ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies’; co-editor of ‘James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel’ and ‘The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut’; and co-director/co-producer of the RCUK-funded documentary on Beirut, ‘White Flags’. Her various recent and forthcoming publications, including a new monograph project, focus on (im)mobilities and literary experimentation, especially in relation to ‘necropolitics’ across contemporary Arab literature.
Entry to the Mediterranean Institute Seminar is free and open to the general public. Students and postgraduate researchers are particularly encouraged to attend. A Q&A session will follow on from the Seminar. Attendees are cordially invited to a drinks and networking reception at the Farmhouse after the event.
Kindly email the event convenor, Prof. Norbert Bugeja at this email address for further information about the session, and Ms Isabelle Abela at this email in order to reserve a seat.
