Talk by Nadia Bou Ali at 98 Weeks

The 1860 wars of Mount Lebanon instituted sectarianism and civil war as the founding principles of nationalism in Lebanon. This talk will discuss the type of knowledge production or nationalist pedagogy that ensued from these events and the fantasy structure to which this knowledge production hails its subjects. It will specifically look at the emergence of language as an object of desire at the moment of crisis and social fragmentation.

Nadia Bou Ali is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Mellon Initiative at the American University of Beirut. She has a Doctoral degree from the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between modernity, nationalism, and language in her work on Arab intellectual history.