PATH+: Suleiman Hodali: Crusading, Orientalism, and the Geographies of Modern Arabic Philology

Please join the upcoming PATH+ talk entitled, "Crusading, Orientalism, and the Geographies of Modern Arabic Philology" by Suleiman Hodali (Comparative Literature, Stanford University).

The contemporary Arabic neologism for ‘crusades’ (al-ḥurūb al-ṣalībiyya) was translated around the middle of the nineteenth century––as Anglophone works of fiction and history traveled through global circuits of transmission that were facilitated by a colonial and missionary network of colleges and printing presses. Across emergent forms of Arabic historiography, criticism, prose fiction, poetry, and drama that appeared in print cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the discourse of crusades was appropriated for apprehending contemporary encounters with imperialism and the racialized taxonomies that organized its administrative rule. Intellectuals of the Arab Nahda adopted symbolic and figural modes of narrativity to represent the history of crusading— actively challenging colonial and missionary epistemologies of sectarianism to advance a secular imagination of Arab ecumenism. 

This talk will survey the discursive advance of crusading. By tracing a genealogy of the concept’s emergences, travels, and translations across languages, formal traditions, temporalities, and geographies we can illuminate the formative entanglements and mutual developments of crusading with dominant knowledge systems and contemporary institutional forces—such as medievalism, secularism, nationalism, Orientalism, evangelicalism, and imperialism.

PATH+ is a DLCL focal group that is considering new directions for Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew languages, literatures, and cultures.

RSVP here.