Date: Monday 10th February 2020

Time: 16:00 - 19.00 
Room: 2.2051 (Holzlaube, Second Floor)
Freie Universität Berlin

Fabeckstraße 23/25, 14195 Berlin

Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “Speech of the ‘Red Indian’” has become a hallmark of Palestinian poetics of solidarity and identification with Native American and Indigenous histories. Departing from the ethical and political premises of this poem and going beyond it, this workshop aims to put Palestinian literature in conversation with Indigenous Studies and Indigenous literatures in the Americas.

Through engagement with various theoretical and critical texts from Palestine and Mexico, and North and Latin America more broadly, and dialogue with guest speakers, we will collectively address the following topics:

• Decolonial approaches to writing literary history of stateless, subalternized and minoritized literatures
• Indigenous epistemologies of reading
• The Maya category ts’íib
• Orality and literary ethnography, comparative trajectories and possible/impossible translations

Ultimately, our goal is to establish links between the distinct notions of literary productions and their contributions to global indigenous literature.

The workshop is hosted by the ERC project PalREAD-Country of Words, and will be led by Dr. Amal Eqeiq (Williams College, USA) and PalREAD PI Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh, with guest speakers (via Skype) Dr. Paul M. Worley (Western Carolina University, USA), Dr. Rita M. Palacios (Conestoga College, Canada) and Eman Ghanayem (University of Illinois, USA)..

Participants are required to register by Wednesday 5^th February 2020 via email. 

Reading materials in Arabic, English and Spanish will be sent to registered participants in advance. Knowledge of all three languages is not required.

Dr. Amal Eqeiq is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She is currently working on her manuscript, Indigenous Affinities: Comparative Study in Mayan and Palestinian Narratives. Her interdisciplinary research includes modern Arab literature, popular culture, Palestine Studies, feminism(s), performance studies, translation, indigenous studies in the Americas, the Global South, literary history, hip-­hop, critical border studies, and decoloniality. She contributed to the Contemporary Levant Journal, The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, Journal of Palestine Studies, Transmotion: An Online Journal of Postmodern Indigenous Studies, MadaMasr and Jadaliyya, among others. She has received several awards, including a writing residency at Hedgebrook, the Dean’s Medal in Humanities from the University of Washington, and PARC NEH/FPIRI research fellowship. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington (2013). She also keeps a Facebook blog called “Diaries of a Hedgehog Feminist.” During 2019/2020, she will be an affiliated EUME Fellow associated with the Lateinamerika-­‐Institut of Freie Universität Berlin.