Date: 10/23/2018
Time: 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Location
Special Collections Seminar Room, E-2340
Description
Dr. Rita Shabnam Nezami will talk about how she fosters in her students a sense of global citizenship through world literature. It is central to her educational mission. She encourages university students in the United States to evolve their skills as readers and writers by formulating various kinds of responses to literary texts by writers from throughout the world. By not limiting the readings to texts by Western writers, students open themselves to the possibilities of responding to the problem of being human in ways other than those conditioned by assumptions formed by American and European culture, media, and politics. Dr. Nezami’s students read literary texts in English and English translation that often approach the world with life experiences and ways of valuing that call us out to rethink our assumptions about priorities, community, identity, suffering, humanity, and culture. These texts provoke students by challenging their culturally inculcated views about the universality of Western perspectives on ethics, economics, politics, freedom, power, and the human good. The acts of reading and writing inform each other. They write textual/literary analysis and study their subjective responses to these non-Western aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities and try to look deeply into their own culture. This often offers students a rewarding, intellectual and stimulating journey.
Dr. Nezami will discuss how several years ago, she developed a course called “Global Literacies.” An important textbook she uses is One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories (first and second book) with contributions by 42 writers who transcend national boundaries and shed light on prevailing aspects of the human condition worldwide. Students identify, discuss, and write about race, language, economics, gender, culture, identity, and ethnicity. This course offers students a personal journey across continents, cultures, landscapes, and other ways of being. These students are offered a combination of fiction, nonfiction and creative nonfiction. Students may also conduct research on some of the stories’ themes and identify one about which they can write a personal essay.
Other than global anthologies, Dr. Nezami introduces students to Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Moroccan, Algerian, Russian, African or Latin American writers. The core of the work involves reading, discussing, and writing about works, mainly short stories, by such important writers as Salman Rushdie, Mohsen Hamid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Anton Chekov, Jhumpa Lahiri and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Students encounter the perspectives of writers of different cultures and languages who raise universal issues. Most of the writers Dr. Nezami chooses draw much of their material from issues that include human-rights abuse, illegal immigration, human trafficking, civil and officially sanctioned violence and corruption, class and income disparity, social marginalization, and religious extremism and hypocrisy, cultural displacement, the aftermath of 9/11, or Syrian refugee crisis, or modern-day genocide. They write, too, about the classical human dilemmas of love, death, gender, sexuality, and suffering. Each story from different continents speaks with clarity and intensity of the human experience to evoke the complex texture of the world we live in. At both the narrative and sub-textual levels, students also listen for echoes of the writers’ and their cultures’ colonial pasts as many contemporary writers still write in the language of the former colonizer.
Registration
Bookings are closed for this event.
Kate Kasten-Mutkus
email: kathleen.kasten@stonybrook.edu
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