In the Wilderness: Hoda Barakat, Abdelfattah Kilito, and the Limits of the Human

How does the Arab find his way in the desert at night? How does Joseph emerge from his well? How do we construct, lose, and recover our humanity? And when we emerge from erasure and alienation, what language do we speak? Bringing Hoda Barakat’s reading of the prophets into conversation with Abdelfattah Kilito’s reading of al-Jahiz, this talk explores wilderness and beastliness (tawahhush) as figures through which Arab subjectivity is imagined and analyzed. The talk will trace the genealogies of these figures from classical texts through the nahda to the contemporary moment, asking how changing encounters with wilderness articulate different possibilities of subjectivity.

Bio:
Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his memoir about growing in Lebanon during the Civil War, Water on Fire (Other Press, 2024). Trained in philosophy and comparative literature, his work deals with questions of modernity, subjectivity, and desire. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018).