We’re very excited to announce that the Radical Distrust special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing on Egyptian literary culture and Egyptian modernity is available online now:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjpw20/47/4
The issue stems from our successful conference held in Cairo in April 2010, and contains articles that reflect upon the recent events in Egypt, Egyptian writing, visual arts and digital media, amongst others. The issue also features interviews with Ahdaf Soueif, and Rehab Bassam.
Happy reading!
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Preparations are now in full swing for the Siege of Beirut symposium which is being held at SOAS next Friday 16th and Saturday 17th July.
It’s shaping up to be a really exciting event, with some fascinating papers, screenings and readings. We’re delighted that H.E. the Ambassador Mrs Inaam Osseiran and the First Secretary Mr. Marwan Francis of Lebanon will be our Guests of Honour at the event.
In the mean time, this is the photograph that I chose for our posters and it’s so powerful that I’d like to draw proper attention to it. It’s beautiful, as well as a representation of devastation: the beauty’s in the resilience demonstrated in living with and through devastation, which you can see in the carpets that are hung up in some windows. It’s by Turkish photographer Coşkun Aral and I think it is a perfect visual representation of what the symposium hopes to explore:
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First and foremost, after a lot of hard work from the team at Kent Information Services, Web Support and ourselves, we’re very happy to announce that our website is up and running. It looks fantastic and I’d like to thank Dan, Jody, Anthony and all the other Web Team folks who worked on producing the site that I’d visualised (but better!).
The design of the site was inspired by a fantastic book, Street Art and the War on Terror, which I really recommend to anyone interested in youth culture, global protest movements and street art. I happened upon it after a meeting with Caroline at the Serpentine, when we were browsing in their brilliant bookshop. It was a most serendipitous find! I wanted a website that would be fresh, youthful and which embodied the positive and subversive political potential of culture, the basis of the project. Street art was the perfect medium, particularly Banksy and other artists’ work on the Wall on the West Bank.
In realising the visual character of the site, we’ve collaborated with photoartists who display and share their work on Flikr. I’ve been amazed and inspired by their generosity: in a world that’s ruled increasingly by patent law and intellectual property, Creative Commons is a breath of fresh air and it epitomises the spirit of collaboration and connectivity that is also an impetus of the Radical Distrust project. Please do check out their wonderful work on our Citations page.
But, although there’s plenty here for you to get your teeth into and to feast your eyes on, there’s much, much more to come. Stay tuned for a lot more media, including performances, papers and keynotes from our Global Youth Cultures and Egyptian Literary Culture events, more details about our forthcoming project Youth of the Middle East Visit Britain and a schedule of workshops that will take place over the next 18 months. In the mean time, register online for our upcoming event, The Siege of Beirut and the Ethics of Representation, which is going to be held at SOAS on 16-17 July.
We hope to see you there!
Naz
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