“All Representation is Local: Haykal, Laroui, Said, Himmich”. Lecture by Hosam Aboul‐Ela, Houston University

The talk will explore the politics of literary representation across the divide between Orientalist discourse and Anglo-American theory on the one hand, and Arabic intellectuals' challenges to the colonial representation of the region over several generations in Egypt and Morocco on the other.
Hosam Aboul‐Ela is Associate Professor at the University of Houston, Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Hosam Aboul-Ela is an associate professor, who teaches courses in postcolonial literature, literary theory, and world literature. His research takes a radically comparative approach, combining exploration of the various fields of globalization theory, postcolonial studies, literature of the Americas, translation studies, and Arab cultural studies. His work examines the point of connection between the literary and the social through the historicization of critical theory. He is the author of Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition (U of Pittsburgh P, 2007) as well as critical articles appearing in American Literature, Arab Studies Journal, Edebiyaat, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, and Rethinking Marxism. He has also translated Voices by Soleiman Fayyad (Marion Boyars, 1993) and Distant Train by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid (Syracuse UP, 2007). His current projects include a new book examining the link between literary culture and empire in the United States from World War II to the present and a translation of the novel talassus by Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim. He is also co-editor with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of "Theory Around the World", a new publication series translating critical theory from outside Europe and North America.