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This lecture reflects on the dynamics of cultural memories and their complex relation to past, present and future. It focuses on the various ways in which the life and writing of Arwa Saleh, a leader of the 1970s student movement, has been remembered in literary and cultural production.Across works by Ahdaf Soueif, Radwa Ashour, Mahmoud Al-Wardani and Youssef Rakha, her persona reappears, now as a passerby, then an aunt, or as a towering icon. The lecture argues that the continued, but transforming, engagement with the legacies of Saleh by different generations of Egyptian writers and artists tells us as much about the extraordinary figure of Saleh, as it does about society today.
Judith Naeff is Assistant Professor Cultures of the Middle East at Leiden University with a main interest in contemporary Arabic visual culture and literature. She has worked mainly on cities & urban imaginaries and memory & temporality. She received her PhD in 2016 at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her resulting monograph Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City's Suspended Now (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) explores a shared experience of time and space in contemporary Beirut (1990–2015) and the ways in which this experience has been given meaning in works of literature, arts and culture. Since 2020, she has been working on a project investigating cultural memories of the Arab political left. She is also the co-editor of the journal ZemZem.
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The lecture starts at 6 pm. We work on a first-come, first-served basis as the number of seats is limited. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier when the lecture room reaches its full capacity.
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Event venue
NVIC - Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
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