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The Anis Makdisi Program in Literature, inaugurated in October 2002, currently under the direction of Professor Maher Jarrar, has been active this year in hosting lecturers specialized in the humanities. The program’s focus is interdisciplinary, offering critical, historical, and philosophical perspectives as related to literature as a cultural product and providing an intellectual space for dialogue and the exchange of ideas. Among the first speakers this year was Randa Abou Bakr, associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, whose lecture was entitled “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Prison Poetry in an African and Arab Context.” In examining prison as the platform for radical thinkers and writers, Abou Bakr revealed how the dissident voices and the poetry of both Ahmad Fouad Nigm (born in Egypt in 1929) and South African Denis Brutus (born in 1924) led them to imprisonment. The essential motif centered on the role of literature in sociopolitical change, as manifested in the experiences of these public intellectuals and opposition figures. Brutus engaged in anti-apartheid activities as a freedom fighter in the 1960s and was greatly influenced by Gandhi. He published his first collection of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles, and Boots, in 1962. Nigm promoted both folk and popular art in the 1950s, when he emerged on the colloquial literary scene, and later collaborated with Sheikh Imam Issa in producing militant songs after the 1967 Arab defeat. Both were persecuted and banned from public performances and cultural activities. Abou Bakr highlighted their courage and intellectual perseverance in transcending the physical limitations of imprisonment, and Nigm claimed that prison was only a “temporary condition that will soon give way to liberation of the individual and nation.” Other lectures during the past semester included George Tamer’s “The Influence of Medieval Islamic Philosophy on Leo Strauss,” which explored how Straussian political theory interpreted and misinterpreted the writings of Islamic philosophers (reviewed in AUBulletin Today, Vol.VI, No. 3); and Juliet Mitchell’s lecture, “Siblings: Sex and Violence in Psychoanalysis and Literature. ”Mitchell, professor of psychoanalysis and gender studies at the University of Cambridge, argued that no extensive research has been undertaken on sibling relationships in psychoanalytic literature, which is mostly confined to an Oedipal lens for analysis.
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