2023-2024 Dubai Humanities
Dubai Humanities is a nine-month festival that celebrates the work of Khaleeji scholars and scholars based in the Gulf, supports scholars at all stages of their careers in developing their skills, creates opportunities for members of the public to engage with new scholarship and ideas, and helps build community among scholars. We aim to make scholarship accessible to a diverse group of people, including people outside of academia, parents with young children, and people who cannot travel to participate in international conferences in Europe and the United States.
PAST LECTURES
Enslaved Bodies and Bodies of Texts: Slavery and Textual Production in Oman and East Africa
Date: September 10, 2023
Speaker: Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi
The intellectual labor of enslaved individuals in textual production across Arabia and around the Indian Ocean has been overlooked in historical narratives and literary scholarship. To rectify this omission, Ahmed AlMaazmi delves into the intricate connections between slavery and the history of the book during the transformative 19th and early 20th centuries.
AlMaazmi sheds light on the agency and contributions of enslaved individuals as authors and transmitters of written Arabic texts, encompassing a diverse array of subjects ranging from the occult sciences to Islamic jurisprudence.
Furthermore, he seeks to uncover the intellectual capabilities of the enslaved and challenge prevailing narratives about their historical experiences within the Omani Empire. By building on the scholarship that predominantly focused on oral expressions of identity and community-building practices among the enslaved, he argues for acknowledging the substantive and multidimensional intellectual roles played by enslaved literati. In doing so, he interrogates the dynamics of power that governed both the authorship and ownership of enslaved bodies and bodies of texts.
Concomitantly, he analyzes how the written record was both shaped by the complex realties of slavery and how that, in turn, reflected the history of knowledge production and dissemination. By drawing from a wide range of East African and Omani manuscript collections, he unearths and amplifies the various contexts in which enslaved writers actively participated in a flourishing transoceanic literary circuit.
Their roles were multifaceted, involving not only authors, but also manuscript copyists, booksellers, and patrons of intellectual activities. Through their engagement with a transoceanic knowledge economy, these individuals leveraged their intellectual capital, despite the confines of slavery, thereby forging an indelible imprint on the intellectual fabric of the Indian Ocean world.
Born and raised in Sharjah, Ahmed AlMaazmi graduated from Zayed University with a B.A. (Hons) in international studies. After interning with the United Nations World Food Programme and studying cultural anthropology at Rutgers University as a Fulbright fellow, he enrolled at Princeton University to pursue a doctorate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. His dissertation research focuses on the intersection of the occult sciences and the environment in the Indian Ocean world.
Reading and Adapting Othello in Contemporary Muslim Worlds and Diasporas
Date: September 16, 2023
Speakers: Dr. Zainab Cheema and Dr. Amjad Alshalan
Diasporic Shakespeares: Adapting Othello in post-9/11 multicultural England
Recent stagings of Othello increasingly highlight the question of Muslim, South Asian and African diasporic identity in the contemporary US and UK. While early 20th century productions often played up Othello’s otherness, recent productions helmed by BIPOC directors and starring BIPOC actors are revisiting the play to explore the far more complex dynamics of assimilation and diasporic minority identity in post-9/11 Anglo-American culture. Following its 2015 debut, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Othello has become one of the most highly profile adaptations of Shakespeare’s quintessential “race play.” This production is notable for being helmed by British Pakistani director Iqbal Khan and for featuring the star turn of Lucian Msamati, who played an African Iago alongside a diverse, multiracial cast. In this talk, I will analyze how Iqbal Khan appropriates Othello to explore debates about immigration, assimilation and the post-9/11 state of exception in 21st century multicultural Britain.
Zainab Cheema is an Assistant Professor of Early World Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. She has published in journals such as Shakespeare Survey, English Language Notes, Feminist Studies, and the Bulletin of the Comediantes. Her research centers on representations of race and religion in Renaissance England and Spain; contact zones between English, Spanish and Islamic worlds; and how translation between Arabic, Spanish and English literatures fueled early modern globalizations. She is currently completing a monograph on early modern travel literature. Zainab’s language specializations include English, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese, and her work has been supported by grants from the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Fulbright Scholarship Program
Shakespeare’s Othello through the Eyes of Saudi Readers
This brief discussion aims to introduce insights of my experience teaching English literature to Saudi students by focusing on the way they perceive racial cues in literary texts. The engagement of Saudi students with English literature seems to reflect initially their disorientation of approaching a text written in a different language; however, a closer look would illustrate the complexity of perceiving race among Saudi readers. Shakespeare’s Othello allowed a closer look at the way Saudi students rely on religion (not race) to create an affinity with the characters that are not white.
Amjad Alshalan is an assistant professor at King Saud University. She specializes in Samuel Beckett, and her research interests cover the Saudi reader, archival studies, visual analysis within literary criticism, modern and contemporary theatre among others.
Why It Is Important to Question Some of What You Were Taught about the Qur’an: Re-Defining How to Study the Humanities
Date: November 5, 2023
Speaker: Abdulla Galadari
True or False?
- According to the Qur’an, Ishmael was the intended son whom Abraham was supposed to sacrifice... False!
- The Chapter of the Elephant (Surah al-Fil) in the Qur’an is about an Abyssinian king who intended to destroy the Ka’bah... False!
- The Qiblah passages in the Qur’an are about Jerusalem vs Makkah... False!
Abdulla Galadari is an Associate Professor at Khalifa University. His field is in Qur’anic hermeneutics and the Qur’an’s possible engagement with Near Eastern traditions in Late Antiquity, such as biblical and rabbinic traditions. He uses a multidisciplinary approach to the Qur’an, such as using cognitive science of religion and philology. He is the author of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: Between Science, History, and the Bible (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Metaphors of Death and Resurrection in the Qur’an: An Intertextual Approach with Biblical and Rabbinic Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and Spiritual Meanings of the Ḥajj Rituals: A Philological Approach (Fons Vitae, 2021).
A Glimpse into The Endangered Modern South Arabian Languages
Date: January 28, 2024
Speaker: Fabio Gasparini
The Modern South Arabian languages are a group of Semitic languages spoken in the Southern part of the Arabian peninsula. This talk will provide a general introduction to this endangered language group by discussing its history and current sociolinguistic situation. A brief overview of its linguistic peculiarities, especially in comparison to Arabic.
Fabio Gasparini received his PhD in African, Asian and Mediterranean Studies from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, Italy. He currently holds a DFG-funded postdoc position at the Department of Semitic and Arabic Studies of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on the Modern South Arabian languages and Semitic in general from a comparative and typological perspective.