Yousef Abu Amrieh is professor of contemporary Arab diasporic literature and founder of CADLS, an international research group on contemporary Arab diasporic literature. He has published several studies that explore a wide range of themes in the works of Arab writers in diaspora and has written on Arab adaptations and appropriation of Shakespeare. His talks in Malta also deal with Maltese literary texts and film adaptation.

On Monday 11 November at 08:30 (LC116), in collaboration with the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, Prof. Abu Amrieh will be giving a lecture on “The Translator as a Fictional Character in Contemporary Arab Diasporic Novels.” The figure of the translator has become an increasingly important character in the works of Arab writers in diaspora over the past few years. As a figure who lives between cultures, the translator has attracted the attention of critics who usually point out the great position that he or she occupies in mediating between cultures and fostering intercultural dialogues. The lecture offers an overview of how Arab writers in the diaspora have represented the figure of the translator in their novels and briefly shows how in his novel Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006), the Algerian-Italian novelist Amara Lakhous represents the daily experiences of his protagonist as an interpreter and translator. Amedeo crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries and his identity consequently becomes a site in which divergent tempo-spatial and ethno-racial forces converge.

On Tuesday 12 October at 10:00 (GW214), Prof. Abu Amrieh will be giving a talk entitled, “Birds of Feathers may not Flock Together: Avian Imageries in Walid Nabhan’s Exodus of the Storks” to students of Maltese and all those who would like to attend. The lecture focuses on how birds and avian metaphors are used by Palestinian Maltese novelist Walid Nabhan to reflect themes of exile, displacement and dispersion. In his novel Exodus of the Storks (2021), translated into English by Albert Gatt, birds and avian images are thematically and aesthetically significant motifs. The cover of the English edition of the novel features a scene from the novel in which birds are of great importance to some characters and play a part in key events and the sociopolitical, historical and cultural contexts of the text. Prof. Abu Amrieh draws on the tripartite division of the notion of translation by Roman Jakobson (1959), particularly his notion of the intersemiotic translation, to highlight the links between a novel’s cover design and the themes that it depicts.