[Hum_Calendar_Events] CNES: Afghanistan in Ink (1/14)

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Afghanistan in Ink: Literatures of Nation, War, and Exile
A one-day conference focusing on the development of Afghanistan's
national literature over the past 50 years.


Thursday, January 14, 2010
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
314 Royce Hall
UCLA
>From the communist, nationalist and Islamist movements of the 1960s
through the years of war, exile and reconstruction that followed, the
turmoil of Afghan history in the past half century has been at every
step reflected in an extraordinary but little-known tradition of
literature. What began as a self-consciously national literature was
transformed with the mass exodus of refugees in the 1980s and 90s from a
tradition rooted in Afghanistan's geography and society to a literature
of diaspora written in French and English no less than Dari and Pashto.
>From oral story-telling through the literary journals of the 1960s to
the poetry websites of the present, the conference explores the whole
range of genres and media through which this literature has been
produced. By unraveling the tensions that are written through this
literature -- of diaspora and homeland, globalization and tradition,
community and nation, gender and expression -- the conference aims to
highlight the ways in which Afghans of many different backgrounds have
understood their own history from the Cold War to the Taliban and
beyond.

Introductions and Coffee
10:00 am

Introduction by Nushin Arbabzadah, UCLA

Panel I. Literature and the trauma of history
Chair: Nushin Arbabzadah

10:15 am - 12:00 pm

The Temporality of Selfhood: Azhdaha-i Khudi as an Allegory of History
Wali Ahmadi, UC Berkeley

Afghan Discourses of Occupation Today: Oral and Literary Proverbs and
Aphorisms in Uncertain Times
Margaret Mills, Ohio State University

Lunch Break 
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Panel II. Writing Exile: Afghanistan from abroad 
Chair: Aamir Mufti 

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Solitude, Diaspora, and Narration: Epic Memory in Afghan and
Afghan-American Literature 
Shafiq Shamel, Stanford University

Nation, War and Exile as Portrayed in Afghan Diasporic Fiction: The Case
of Muhammad Asef Soltanzadeh
Dr. Mir Hekmatullah Sadat

Coffee Break
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Panel III. Negotiating Iran: From Dari to Farsi and back
Chair: Nikki Keddie 

3:30 - 5:00 pm

Intimate Realism: Recording the Experience of Exile in 
Second-Generation Refugee Poetry in Iran
Zuzanna Olszewska, St. John's College, Oxford University

Paradoxes of a homeless literature: the short stories of Homira Qaderi 
Nushin Arbabzadah, UCLA

Closing Remarks
5:00 - 5:10 pm

Closing remarks by Nushin Arbabzadah, UCLA

Cost: Free and open to the public.

How to Park at UCLA <http://map.ais.ucla.edu/go/portal/1002187> 
For more information please contact
Amy Bruinooge, Center for Near Eastern Studies
Tel: (310) 825-1455
cnes at international.ucla.edu
www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events <
http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events> 

 

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