Black is Beautiful in Arabic: Radwa Ashour and Al-Aswad al-Jamil

Michelle Hartman, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, will introduce the feminist activist intellectual and novelist Radwa Ashour in the context of Egyptian Black-Arab solidarity in the 1970s, and the literary production that expresses it. It also develops an analytical framework to think through issues of race by using the insights of translation studies to explore one of Ashour’s works, her novel Al-Rihla and its translation into English as The Journey. By juxtaposing and thinking through a number of expressions and passages in which Ashour translates Black America into Arabic and how we might translate them “back” into English, this lecture offers suggestions about some of the ways in which concepts of race and racialization can and cannot be translated between languages and contexts.

Sponsored by Arabic Department, Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, Middle East Studies