38: "Insufficiently Westernized"

We talk about a newly released collection of five compelling and highly quotable interviews with the great late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, titled Palestine as Metaphor, translated by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché. We also talk about recent protests in Lebanon and how th ...  Show more

In the first half of the episode, we paid tribute to Jordanian poet, activist, novelist, travel writer, and editor Amjad Nasser (1955-2019), who died at the end of October. In the second, we talked about the political space occupied by Moroccan-French writers Tahar Ben Jelloun an ...  Show more

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe talks to the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany about his latest novel which charts the country's social upheaval through the prism of Cairo's elite Automobile Club of Egypt. The foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson looks back at the Egyptian re ...

This episode is in Arabic. Head over to the Kalam Podcast YouTube page to watch the full conversation with English subtitles.In the wake of the killing of 23-year-old Gazan journalist Hossam Shabat in an Israeli airstrike, we want to publish our conversation with the Palestinian ...  Show more

Can we understand a culture and a region when we don’t read its authors? And what nuances do we miss when we read them in translation? How are authors and poets from the Middle East reaching new audiences? I speak to poet Zeina Hashem Beck, from Lebanon, living in California, abo ...  Show more

*Audio recording of a panel orgnized by friend of the show Frances Hasso. Video edition coming soon!*

Convened by Dr. Frances S. Hasso, Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, History, and Sociology, as part of ...