MES Lecture Series: “Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation and the Postfrancophone Lyric”

Presenter: Yasser Elhariry, Dartmouth College

This talk tells the story of a unique literary and linguistic development: over the past one hundred years and at least since the second French colonial era beginning in 1830, Franco-Arab writers have been denaturing the monolingual fabric of French by drawing on the rich history of classical Arabic literature—the qasida, Sufi lyric, and the muwashshahat.

Countering the hegemony of the novel, and the market-driven desire to publish novels and migration stories in Paris, Yasser Elhariry  draws on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics in order to demonstrate how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in the poetry of Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan).