Palestine as Anti-narrative: Adania Shibli in conversation with Diya Abdo, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Mark Rifkin

Through this conversation, the writings of the award-winning novelist Adania Shibli will be contextualized within scholarship on Arab American, African American, and Indigenous literature.

Adania Shibli is a writer of many genres, including novels, plays, short stories, and narrative essays. She was awarded the Qattan Young Writer's Award-Palestine in 2001 for her novel Masas, translated as Touch (Clockroot), and in 2003 for her novel Kulluna ba’id bi-dhat al miqdar `an al-hubb, translated as We Are All Equally Far from Love (Clockroot). Her latest novel Tafsil thanawi, translated as Minor Detail (New Directions), was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2020 and awarded the LiBuraturpreis, also known as the Litprom prize, in Germany in 2023. Her nonfiction writings include the art book Dispositions (Qattan Publications) and the edited collection of essays A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialog with Edward Said, (Berlin: HKW). Shibli also engages in academic research and taught  in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural studies at Birzeit University from 2013 to 2018.

Diya Abdo is professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Guilford College. Her teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms. She has also published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her first book AMERICAN REFUGE: True Stories of the Refugee Experience was published in by Steerforth Press in 2022. In 2015, Dr. Abdo founded Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement.

Meta DuEwa Jones is associate professor of Literature, African American and African Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to the Spoken Word(University of Illinois, 2011) which was awarded honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Jones’ current manuscript, Black Alchemy, is a hybrid genre work of poetry, theory, and memoir that explores collaborations between writers and visual artists as they map memories of and travels within the African diaspora.

Mark Rifkin is professor in the Department of English at the UNC Greensboro. Dr. Rifkin’s research primarily focuses on Native American writing and politics from the eighteenth century onward, exploring how Indigenous peoples have negotiated U.S. racial and imperial formations. His work explores the roles of gender, sexuality, affect, and eroticism in those processes, addressing legal and administrative frameworks, textual representations, and forms of everyday experience. His book When Did Indians Become Straight (2011) was awarded the Best Subsequent Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies award and the John Hope Franklin Prize for best book in American Studies. His special issue of GLQ titled “Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity” was awarded the Best Special Issue Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Carolina Public Humanities, the Center for European Studies, the Departments of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, of Communication, and of Women and Gender Studies, and the Curriculums in Global Studies and in Peace, War, and Defense.

The audience is reminded that the views and/or comments of the panelists do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the sponsoring programs, departments, or the university.