Join the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights for a conversation with Maurice Ebileeni and Joseph Slaughter in celebration of Ebileeni’s new work Being There, Being Here.
LOCATION
Knox Hall 208, 606 w 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027
ABOUT Being There, Being Here
Arabic is unconditionally the national language of Palestinians, but for many it is no longer their mother-tongue. More than a century after the early waves of immigration to the Americas, and more than seven decades after the Nakba of 48, generations of Palestinians have grown up in a variety of different contexts within Israel-Palestine and the world at large. This ongoing scattered state has led to the proliferation of Palestinian culture as it is simultaneously growing in multiple directions, depending on geographical, political, and lingual contextualization. The Palestinian story no longer exists exclusively in Arabic. A new generation of Palestinian and Palestinian-descended writers and artists from both Latin and North America, Scandinavia, and Europe at large, as well as Israel-Palestine are bringing stories of their heritage and the Palestinian nation into a variety of languages such Spanish, Italian, English, Danish, and Hebrew—among so many other languages.
Being There, Being Here is the product of an eight-year long journey in which Maurice Ebileeni explores how the Palestinian homeland is being imagined in multiple languages from a variety of positions both locally and globally. The book poses unsettling questions about this current situation and also looks to the future to speculate about how a Palestinian nation might still house the notion of home for an increasingly diverse Palestinian population.
SPEAKERS
Maurice Ebileeni is a member of the faculty in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa.
Joseph Slaughter is a member of the faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights.
Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
