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Queer Trans/Nationalisms | Love & Rage in Times of Atrocity: Zeyn Joukhadar and Randa Jarrar in conversation with Mejdulene B. Shomali

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Location: Live on Zoom

 

Randa Jarrar is the author of the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country, the novel A Map of Home, and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She is also a performer who has appeared in independent films and in the TV show RAMY. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night, which won both the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. His work has appeared in the Kink anthology, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He guest edited Mizna’s 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue and is a mentor with the Periplus Collective.

Mejdulene B. Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and assistant professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she is also affiliate faculty in the department of Language, Literacy, and Culture and the program coordinator for Arab and Muslim American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and her M.A. in Women's Studies from the Ohio State University. Her academic prose can be read in Multi-ethnic Literatures of the US, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and several other journals and edited collections. Her poetry can be read in Copper Nickel, Tinderbox, Diode Press, Mizna, and multiple other venues. Her book, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

This event is co-sponsored by the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame, and presented in partnership with the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched Initiative on Race and Resilience, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. The series focuses on the study of literatures that have been shaped by territorial and linguistic politics, colonialism, military domination, and gross human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary resistance across national borders, nurture scholars and writers of color, and cultivate intersectional coalition building.

 

Originally published at litofexile.nd.edu.