Visiting Speaker Event with Dr Salam Darwazh Mir
A Journey of Discovery
Salam is an independent Scholar and retired Associate Professor of English in the Department of the Humanities, Lasell University, USA. Book Review Editor for Arab Studies Quarterly since 2016.
| An Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 15 October 2025 |
| Time | 16:00 to 18:00 |
| Place | IAIS Building/LT2 |
Event details
Abstract
Salam was born in Palestine and grew up in Jordan, when her family were expelled from their Jaffa home in 1948. She attended the American University of Beirut for both her BA and Masters degrees in English Literature, and she gained her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland, USA. Salam’s specialty is Postcolonial Studies, a specialty that was an eye-opener for her. To her graduate program and teaching, she added Palestinian and Arabic literature (in translation). Her teaching experience spans more than 20 years, in the Middle East (Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar) and the US (University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar, and Lasell University). In the fall of 2014, Salam was a Visiting Professor of English at Birzeit University, Palestine. To her love of literature and languages, Salam has added another layer that enriches her passion for the humanities. Her choice of postcolonial literature reflects her recognition of the imaginative impulse in the production of knowledge across the globe. She believes in the power of words and the significance of the humanities more broadly in shaping the human condition. Both Caribbean and Palestinian writers and intellectuals would synthesize concepts and ideologies from Western modernism to forge new concepts that fit their diverse needs and contexts and add new genres of fiction. Similarly to many postcolonial writers, Caribbean and Palestinian writers challenge racism and misperceptions about the “other,” assert their individual and collective identity, and participate in the making of their cultures.
Comparing the history and literature of two countries from the Global South, Guyana and Palestine, including the convergencies and divergencies, contests the provinciality of the Eurocentric focus of comparative literature, posits the protean nature of Empire, and exposes the underpinnings of various modes and practices of colonialism/settler colonialism. Not only did the colonial powers oppress the Indigenous, brutalize their humanity, and exploit the lands’ natural resources for their capitalist profits, colonial officials and western historians racialized the colonized, demeaned their language, erased their heritage, and wrote their histories, from the victors’ perspective. Literature of resistance in the selected countries voices the silenced, reclaims indigenous identity, and rehabilitates the erased history, from the people’s perspective. Discerning the correlation between the legacy of slavery and modern imperial policies and practices demonstrates the continuity of Empire in the present, notwithstanding their specificities and differences. Cultural resistance is part and parcel of resistance to oppression, hence the interdisciplinarity of the study (history and literature). By employing postcolonial practice, selected literary productions, and declassified historical documents brings to the fore the viability of resistance literature as a worthy field of study. Finally, literature of resistance underscores the intellectual and emotional bonds among the people in the periphery. Empire’s continued violence against minorities in the Global South in the 20th-and 21st-centuries demonstrates the impact of and connections between the past, present, and future. I call on the academe to integrate creative writing and resistance literature into the wider academic disciplines of the Core Program and Social Sciences, to educate future global citizens in the hope of creating a more equitable, just, peaceful, and collaborative future for humanity.
Location:
IAIS Building/LT2
