Category: Service to the field

“Gilgamesh and Postcolonial Pedagogy,” Approaches to Teaching Gilgamesh, edited by David Damrosch and Sophus Helle. New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming.

The long literary history of Gilgamesh is inextricable from the history of empire. The epic itself condemns its main character for the imperial nature of the quest that he launches against Humbaba, and the violence he wreaks on the territory that he conquers: as the gods pour scorn on his seemingly triumphant deeds, the reader is left to question the value of imperial expansion. The epic survives in a series of manuscripts kept at Nineveh, the capital of the mighty Neo-Assyrian empire, as King Assurbanipal used the war with Babylon to amass a centralized repository of knowledge. These manuscripts were excavated in the nineteenth century in another instance of imperial adventurism, in the form of British and French archaeologists making forays into the Middle East, leading to the dispersal of the manuscripts across primarily Western museums. The chapter discusses the many links between Gilgamesh and imperial conflict, suggesting concrete pedagogical exercises that can be used to introduce students to postcolonial criticism and its relation to world literature.

With Sarah Graff. “From Poetry to Pedagogy: Platforming Exilic Voices in the Museum.” Book chapter, Teaching About the Ancient World in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice, edited by Jen Thum, Carl Walsh, and Lisa Haney, Routledge, forthcoming. 

A crucial tool for pedagogy within museum contexts, particularly in relation to ancient artifacts and cultures, is an emphasis on the movement and migration of peoples and objects throughout the arc of human history. The displacement of museum objects across time and space adds to their value to the institutions and nations that house them, but the same attitude is not extended towards migrants, refugees, and diaspora communities who share with those objects not only a place of origin, but a story of exile and a journey across the world under the exigencies of war, colonialism, and precarity (Sergi 2021). This emphasis on movement (and the cultural hybridity it engenders) is not new to critical museology: “objects as migrants” has been advanced by Arjun Appadurai (2017) in direct relation to the story of refugees in Germany, and as a step towards the “post-ethnological” museum (Clifford 2016). Stefan Weber of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s Museum für Islamische Kunst has long deployed such an outlook to combat the othering of Islam and Muslims in Europe, as with his “Kulturgeschichten” project for German educators and “Objects of Transfer” and Multaka projects for the galleries (2018). Nevertheless, providing migrants themselves with a platform from which to tell their stories of movement in relation to ancient artifacts in exile is far more rare. Such a doubled move can serve as an inclusive pedagogical tool for the public, restoring their experience of ancient artifacts to one grounded in networks of human relation, rather than the more common framing in which these objects are universalized as “world heritage” (Scott 2012). The two primary case-studies this chapter contends with are: (1) the ongoing collaboration (which began in 2019) between the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near East and the Narratio Fellowship program, and (2) the “GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin” community event (2023), organized by Aya Labanieh and Dr. Sophus Helle at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany.

“Science Fiction, Rational Enchantment, and Arabic Literature.” MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, 4:2 (2021): Middle Eastern Science Fiction Special Issue. [Link]

“Traveling Underpants: On May Hawas’ Politicizing World Literature,” Politics/Letters, November 14, 2021. Link.

The humor the meme conveys is near universal in its pluralistic possibilities, while providing a local idiom for that universality to anchor itself: through the creative process of comedy (not so different from fiction-writing), Drake’s face, Sisi’s face, and stifled giggling over underwear humor alter the comedy canon, paving the way for Hussein to cite them as inner-text in future episodes, and for other comedians, Arab or otherwise, to access and drape them over the nether regions of their own respective demagogues. 

May Hawas’ book Politicising World Literature: Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public (Routledge, 2019) takes an interest in precisely this kind of global cultural exchange, this time on the level of the literary text. Hawas writes her book in defense of World Literature as a discipline that can encompass and transcend the postcolonial; that can surpass “the question of literary representation” that has stymied many an academic or political project and can venture to ask: what can these books achieve in their various “pedagogical locations in our present time?” (4).  In her view, World Literature goes beyond the binaries so integral to the postcolonial tradition without forgetting them—it absorbs the terms and contents of those binaries but asserts that the journey towards cobbling together one’s self (or one’s selves, as she insists) is not only more individually fulfilling, but more politically subversive.”