About this Event
BLOC Production Studio, Arts One, QMUL Mile End Campus
In his Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), Hegel defined art and culture as the ways that societies represent themselves to themselves and thereby construct their identities. While the social sciences tell us what is happening in the social world, great literature, in this case the novel, tells us how people think and feel about their worlds. In this seminar, Professor Regenia Gagnier will present a short paper (about 30 minutes) on Bothayna Al-Essa's Lost in Mecca (2015; English trans. 2024), a painful novel about faith, crime, and geopolitics, and then open it up to interdisciplinary discussion. In the story of a child kidnapped during the Hajj pilgrimage, Al-Essa presumes to represent the minds of members of an organ trafficking gang, the agonized parents of the child, an individual involved in sexual abuse, and the child victim himself, as well as members of repressive (police) and ideological (academic) interstate apparatuses. As a whole, it gives us not just a world (of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia) but the world of geopolitical crime under recent conditions of neoliberal globalization. It also presents victims as victims, even when they are bad, rather than as heroes rising above the conditions of their existence. And it raises the many faces of censorship: paternalistic, “politically correct,” and invisibility.
About the Speaker
Gagnier holds the Established Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Exeter and specializes in the geopolitics of language and literary migration. She is Fellow of the British Academy and Chair of the British Academy's Section Modern Languages, Literatures, and other Media from 1830.
Her monographs include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986); Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991); The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000); Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2018). In addition, she has served on the editorial boards of 23 international scholarly journals.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
BLOC, ArtsOne, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
