Partition and Reconciliation: Hospitality and Familiar Strangers in Northern Irish, Pakistani, and Arab-Israeli Fiction Mindi McMann
While we often consider reconciliation to be a political project, this seminar will focus on how literature can provide us with the space for examining how three geopolitical spaces, Northern Ireland, India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine, have failed to make space for an ethics of hospitality in their larger political systems and negotiations. The seminar will be comparative, focusing on one novel from each locale: Anna Burns’s Northern Irish novel, Milkman (2018), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Pakistani novel Cracking India (1991), and Sayed Kashua’s Arab-Israeli novel Let it be Morning (2004).
Respondent: Nasser Mufti, University of Illinois at Chicago