The live event (27 September 2021) at Casa Arabe in Madrid was wonderful and engaging. Along with the institute’s Karim Hauser and Jordanian novelist Fadia Faqir, we discussed reimagining futures for the Arab world through literature and social contracts. I discussed the themes in my book chapter “Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract” in The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Ed. Youssef Cherif.
The seminar, which is hosted by the EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien, explores how the Egyptian city of Alexandria has long been subjected to utopian and dystopian tensions that permeate the arts, literature, architecture, history, and everyday language. One of the seeds of utopianism could be traced to Naguib Mahfouz’s novella Miramar (1967) that repositioned Alexandria as a welcoming safe haven and a cosmopolitan asylum that can bring back an Egyptian utopia and an alternative vision of the homeland, and made more vivid in films like Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Why? (1978) that aligned with the then growing trend that represented Alexandria as a utopian desire. The question of utopianism leaped into the political realm in the 1990s that saw Hosni Mubarak’s regime and the international community take an interest in Alexandria as a lost utopia that must somehow be restored through a Greco-Roman refashioning and an uncritical revival of cosmopolitan discourse. This was a useful guise for neoliberal economics with Alexandria being the laboratory for privatisation – later rejected through the 2011 revolution that led to, albeit temporary, forms of civic utopia emerging. Yet the road from utopia to dystopia was inevitable, and this seminar seeks to understand the growing dystopian impulses of recent years that are shaped by, and in turn shape, the coastal city’s thematic peculiarities: nihilism, mutant capitalism, climate change, nostalgia, among others, in illuminating the tendency towards dystopian motifs.
If you are a PhD student in Middle Eastern Studies and based at a university in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Iceland, then apply to this workshop. I will be giving the keynote lecture, “Thinking with metaphor in a literal era” on 19 August 2021.
Come join us for the virtual book launch of “Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century” on Friday 12 March, at 12pm Chicago time (8pm Cairo time) which will feature a discussion by the editors/authors Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, as well as a number of the book’s authors including Amro Ali, Ahmed Kanna, Khaled Fahmy, Hamid Dabashi, Ted Swedenburg, Laleh Khalili, Fatemeh Keshavarz, John Tofik Karam, Michael Frishkopf, Sami Zubaida, and Waleed Hazbun. The book is available through the University of California Press.
I’m giving my first human-to-human public lecture in over a year. As in no zoom or webinar, it’s an actual physical flesh and blood presenter and audience dynamic 🙂. This will be on 24th February at the French institute, in English, and entry is free. Social distancing and masking rules apply.
“If every city was to have a defining ethos, a running theme, a word that sums up (or a major part of) the DNA of the respective city, then Alexandria could arguably be the city of nostalgia. Loss, longing, melancholia, and a yearning for anything but the present, have long been entrenched in the city’s contemporary era. This lecture will explore the dynamics that constitute the makeup of nostalgia in Egypt’s second city. It examines the socio-linguistic framework, historical imaginaries, second city syndrome, sense of civic defeat, and the flourishing of an online archival culture, among other factors, that underpin the protracted relationship between Alexandria and nostalgia.”
“In this podcast episode, AGYA member Dr. Amro Ali from Egypt and AGYA alumnus Dr. Kalman Graffi from Germany discuss Coronavirus warning apps, delving into their advantages, disadvantages and effectiveness from both a technological and ethical point of view.”
The event on knowledge production took place at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on 18 January 2020. I argued that if we do not address the scourge of passport restrictions and visa regimes, then the pace and orientation of holistic, transnational, and interdisciplinary knowledge production in the Arab world will continue to be skewed.
AGYA blurb: “With its contribution, AGYA invites the visitors to a critical examination of established concepts and patterns of perception of the world, the other and the self from German and Arab perspectives. AGYA is proud to present a program ranging from a panel discussion on ‘Scientific Worlds: Critical Reflections on Knowledge Production’, over a book launch of ‘Insatiable Appetite. Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond’ edited by AGYA alumni and enriched by a tasting of different Hummus recipes, to a poetry slam and a photo exhibition on ‘Images of the Self and the Other in the Levant’”
AGYA workshop at the Department of Philosophy, Kuwait University.
On 1-2 December 2019, the international AGYA workshop aims to explore the meaning of cosmopolitanism in Western and Islamic traditions and will provide a forum to investigate the mutual influences in the intellectual history of the concept in different cultural and intellectual traditions.
The concept of cosmopolitanism has always played an important role in philosophical and theological texts of various cultures, including Arab, European, Indian or Persian cultures. In its core, the concept of cosmopolitanism defines all human beings as world citizens— ‘kosmopolites’ in Greek—who thus are all part of a single universal community. The concept of ‘universality’ or cosmopolitanism also roots in Islamic theology and philosophy: in the history of Islamic thought, universalism is based on the concept of a shared humanity and equality. The unity of world citizens transcends all cultural differences or political borders, based mostly on a shared notion of morality.
In the eighteenth century, a cosmopolitan was a person that was open-minded, led a sophisticated life-style, and liked to travel. In current language, these are still some characteristics we are referring to today, when naming someone a cosmopolitan. Nowadays, cosmopolitanism is receiving more scholarly attention again: in the context of globalization, new (communication) technologies, and increasing digitization, there is a need to reflect in philosophical terms on the new prospects for the individual to interact and communicate with his or her fellow world citizens.
The AGYA conference focuses on intercultural exchange and its influence on the construction of moral and cultural paradigms. This is a rather new approach, considering the history of the concept of cosmopolitanism and the many contemporary moral, socio-political, and economic definitions existing in parallel today.
