A Talk with Hosam Aboul-Ela

RSVP Required

Name(Required)

First Last

Email(Required)

Enter Email Confirm Email

Affiliation(Required)

UCLA Comparative Literature grad studentUCLA grad student elsewhereUCLA facultyUCLA staff

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Kaplan Hall Room #348 (third floor)

4:00-6:00pm Talk

6:00pm Reception

This year’s ECT Seminar, “Whither Marxism and Psychoanalysis?”, is led by Professor Nouri Gana in the Spring Quarter of 2025. Guest talks are generously co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Political Science, the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, the Department of Art, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

ABOUT THE TALK

In this lecture, South to North reading is proposed as a critical strategy for rethinking the problem of interpretation with a capacious embrace of the global in mind. South to North reading not only embraces the tradition of employing theoretically-informed approaches to the study of literature; it also directly confronts the rise of nativist, supremacist, and traditionalist thinking that is currently in ascent in the public sphere. This lecture will suggest several case studies for this approach and focus in particular on one that employs South Asian subaltern studies in a new reading of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Hosam About-Ela is Professor of English and AAEF/Burhan and Misako Ajouz Professor of Arab Studies at the University of Houston. He is the translator of four Arabic novels and author of numerous articles in the areas of comparative literature, literature of the Americas, and Arab cultural studies. In addition to Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, he is author of Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens. For Seagull Books, he curates the Arab list and co-edits with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak the *Elsewhere Texts* series.