Attempting to Break Binary Oppositions of East and West: Hanan Al-Shaykh’s I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops
Online via Webex
The Department of English and Creative Arts at the School of Arts and Sciences cordially invites you to attend the following presentation as part of its Departmental Brown Bag Lecture Series.
About the event
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Hanan Al-Shaykh’s I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops calls for cross-cultural dialogue between different cultures. The text explores the cultural tensions that shape an individual’s identity within the postcolonial context. This presentation will examine an encounter in the text between the Moroccan protagonist and her English boyfriend, his sister and his friends in London.
Engaging in a dialogue between multiple postcolonial theories, such as Frantz Fanon’s concept of “absolute depersonalization”, Edward Said’s Orientalism and “contrapuntal consciousness”, Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of transculturation and Homi Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity”, this talk will investigate how the processes of transculturation and hybridity can act to transcend cultural clashes and East-West divisions.
In the talk, Dr. Luma Balaa will resort to using colonial tropes or Orientalist stereotypes to eventually subvert these problems, given that the female protagonist follows a non-linear trajectory, experiencing various stages before she reaches a hybrid state. These stages involve a fascination with London, cultural clashes, self-assertion and integration, incorporating cultural crossing and hybridity. The female protagonist slips back and forth from one stage to another with all her experiences contributing towards the attainment of cultural dialogue.
About the people
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Luma Balaa
Associate Professor, Lebanese American University
Dr. Luma Balaa is an associate professor of English studies in the Department of English and Creative Arts whose research interests include fairytales, Anglophone Lebanese Australian writers, women’s writings, feminism and representations of women in Cinema. She is the author of several international refereed articles.