Thursday, April 25, 2019
4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute
111 Thayer St.
Registration is at capacity. Please join waitlist if interested in attending.
Refreshments provided
An Islam and the Humanities seminar.
Audiences and interlocutors sometimes perceive an incongruity between writing both scholarly, critical works and fictional ones. People ask writers whether one prefers one to the other or whether one kind of writing is superior to the other, how the two are possible together, and whether there is some deep split which means both cannot be spoken of together. Questioners are rarely satisfied by the responses to such queries. In this talk, Professor Abbas will speak about both kinds of writing with reference to both her academic book At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (Fordham University Press 2014) and novel The Empty Room (Zubaan Books 2018). The larger stakes are connected to the status of form, writing and the status of theoretical thinking in our current moment.