Contribution to Panel I - East/West Literary Encounters
Video in English
Format: mp4Length: 00:12:54
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/what-makes-a-man/
Rights: © ICI Berlin
Part of the Workshop
What Makes a Man?: Sexuality and Representation in Europe-Middle East Encounters
Back in 2003, the Berlin-based ‘West-East Divan’, a project of the Working Group ‘Modernity and Islam’ (today EUME), initiated an author exchange between Rashid al-Daif from Beirut and Joachim Helfer from Berlin. Two books resulted from the encounter: al-Daif’s Awdat al-almani ila rushdih (The German’s Return to His Senses, 2005) and Helfer’s response Die Verschwulung der Welt (The Queering of the World, 2006). Both texts caused a heated debate at the time of their publication: al-Daif’s apparent homophobia seemed to have found a match in Helfer’s orientalism. Their exchange certainly complicated the assumption that an encounter between two intellectuals, two literary writers from different cultures would ultimately have to be able to dispel all intervening prejudices. A decade later, their remarkably candid debate crossed the Atlantic: in 2015, the English translation of the exchange was published with additional critical essays under the title What Makes A Man? Sex Talk between Beirut and Berlin.
The workshop reassembles the original partners of the encounter – Helfer and al-Daif – and a larger group of critics from both sides of the Atlantic to explore the issues at stake. It will test the assumption that al-Daif and Helfer’s publications can help us carve out the cultural, literary, and media conditions in which narratives of gender and sexuality across cultural and religious differences and their critiques are developed.
Venue
ICI Berlin(Click for further documentation)
With
Rashid al-DaifJoachim Helfer
Robert Tobin
Zeina Halabi
Michael Allan
Dieter Haller
Gary Schmidt
Paula-Irene Villa
Sam Williams
Mohamed Amjahid
Friederike Pannewick
Organized by
Peter RehbergTarek El-Ariss
John Borneman