Book Launch: The Book of Collateral Damage w/ Sinan Antoon
Featuring Sinan Antoon, Ella Shohat, Sara Pursley, and Patrick Deer
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Please join us for the book launch of Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage (Yale University Press, 2019). Joining the author in conversation will be Ela Shohat, Patrick Deer, and Sara D. Pursley. Antoon’s fourth novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.
Praise for The Book of Collateral Damage:
“Sinan Antoon is a master storyteller and The Book of Collateral Damage reaffirms his place amongst some of our very best writers. Vividly imagined and sensitively told, this is a tale of one man's exile and return, and all the distances traveled to find a semblance of home.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze
“A hallucinatory investigation into the territories of memory and tragedies of Iraq. A deep reflection on exile and the power of books.” —Mathias Enard, author of Compass
“An accounting of what Baghdad lost.” —NPR
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Sinan Antoon is an Associate Professor at NYU. His teaching and research interests lie in pre-modern and modern Arabic literature and contemporary Arab culture and politics.His essays and creative writings in Arabic have appeared in major journals and publications in the Arab world and on Aljazeera.net and in The New York Times, The Nation, Middle East Report, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, The Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, Ploughshares, and Washington Square Journal.
Professor Ella Shohat teaches at the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at New York University. She has lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with post/colonial and transnational approaches to Cultural studies.She is a recipient of such fellowships as Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright Lectureship / Research, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University
Sara D. Pursley is a Professor at NYU her work on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the modern Arab Middle East, mainly Iraq. The thread that runs through her work is an interest in how imaginaries and experiences of time, space, and selfhood were reordered in the region during the 20th century, especially at the dawn of the global “age of development” around World War II. She has explored questions related to economic development and modernization theory, histories of psychology and pedagogy, gender and sexuality, childhood and youth, revolution and decolonization, Islamic and secular family law, land settlement projects, and the transition from British to American empire.
Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where he focuses on war culture and war literature, modernism, and contemporary British and American literature and culture, and Anglophone literature and human rights. He was Director of College Honors Programs for NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences from 2011-2014. His first book, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern british Literature, explores the emergence of modern war culture in the first half of the 20th century.
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Initiative and The Gallatin School at NYU