logo
episode-header-image
May 2022
56m 16s

LAILA LALAMI | The Other American & The ...

AFIKRA
About this episode
tail spinning
Up next
Jan 19
Founder of Mille World Sofia Guellaty | Fashion, Soft Power & the New Arab Identity
The unifying youth culture across the Arab region is characterized by a proud new Arab identity and the changing standards of beauty with the rise of "Arab beauty" (A beauty), which celebrates Arab features and aesthetics. The founder of Mille World and Mille Creative, Sofia Guel ... Show More
1h 5m
Jan 12
A History of Algeria & the Worlds of Islam | Professor James McDougall
The conversation covers the historical emergence of Algeria as a political and territorial unit, starting in the Ottoman period in the 16th century. Key pivotal moments in Algerian history are highlighted, including French colonialism beginning in 1830, which led to a settler col ... Show More
1h 6m
Dec 22
Textile Workers & the Syrian-American Working Class | Stacy D. Fahrenthold
Discover the interconnectedness of peddling and factory work, the surprising origins of the Aloha shirt, and the key role Syrian workers played in major labor actions like the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Associate Professor of History at the University ... Show More
51m 30s
Recommended Episodes
Jul 2023
Coming of Age in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn | Aisha Abdel Gawad
Writing Between Two Moons: An Arab-American coming of age story set in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn during the “War on Terror”. Author Aisha Abdel Gawad sheds light on her experience writing the novel while balancing her work as a high-school teacher, capturing Bay Ridge’s unique communit ... Show More
53m 19s
Aug 2022
Mama Ghannouj | Dima Adra
Dima Adra talked about her new cookbook "Mama Ghannouj" which includes recipes from the Lebanese cuisine.Dima Adra is the author of Mama Ghannouj, a self-published and crowdfunded Lebanese cookbook. She focused on gathering recipes from 10 moms who are excellent cooks in the comm ... Show More
46m 28s
Feb 2024
Decolonizing & Decentering Theater in the Arab World | Laila Soliman
A captivating conversation with theater director and playwright Laila Soliman about theater, cultural discourse and decolonization across the Arab world. Using three of her major works – Zigzag, La Grande Maison and her first opera Woman at Point Zero – as reference, we discuss w ... Show More
59m 39s
Apr 2024
Eyeliner: A Cultural History | Zahra Hankir
This episode was recorded on March 27th, 2024.Zahra Hankir is a Lebanese-British journalist, editor and author. She was awarded a Jack R. Howard Fellowship to attend the Columbia Journalism School and holds degrees in politics and Middle Eastern studies. Her first book "Our Women ... Show More
55m 19s
Oct 2022
Ep 5 - Narrating the Middle East
Can we understand a culture and a region when we don’t read its authors? And what nuances do we miss when we read them in translation? How are authors and poets from the Middle East reaching new audiences? I speak to poet Zeina Hashem Beck, from Lebanon, living in California, abo ... Show More
43m 13s
May 2023
Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha, "Arab and Muslim Science Fiction" (McFarland, 2022)
How is science fiction from the Arab and Muslim world different than mainstream science fiction from the West? What distinctive and original contributions can it make? Why is it so often neglected in critical considerations of the genre? While other books have explored these ques ... Show More
1 h
May 2024
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith grew up in north west London and studied English at Cambridge University. After a publisher’s bidding war when she was just 21, her debut novel White Teeth became a huge critical and commercial hit on publication in 2000 and won several awards including the Orange Pri ... Show More
43m 44s
Jan 2023
What Can Queer Arab American History Teach Us? with Dr. Charlotte Karem Albrecht
Starting in the late 1800s, a group of Syrian immigrants settled in America. Many of them took up peddling as a career. When American newspapers described these peddlers, it was often in derogatory ways—and through terms of queerness. This week, Dr. Charlotte Karem Albrecht joins ... Show More
57m 38s
Nov 2019
74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics
<p>An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical and cultural context, and drawing connections between art and its context ca ... Show More
1h 6m
Feb 2015
Alina Garcia-Lapuerta, “La Belle Creole” (Chicago Review Press, 2014)
One of the fundamental functions of biography is the preservation of stories. But it also acts to resurrect the stories that may have fallen from view, reinvigorating the tales of people who, with the passage of time, have become merely names on plaques. In La Belle Creole:The Cu ... Show More
38m 49s