A panel conversation with Fatemeh Shams, Omid Tofighian and Behrouz Boochani.
There is a sense of separation and detachment to every experience of leaving the home to which one feels attached. To this end, forced migration and exile could be considered as a never-ending sense of detachment and separation from one’s homeland; a continual and unstoppable voyage. The traumatic experience of border-crossing, temporality in transient destinations, and a perpetual sense of alienation from the host country(s) are all elements shared by refugee and exiled authors. In this panel, the award-winning, exiled poet-scholar, Fatemeh Shams will be in conversation with the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author, Behrouz Boochani and the literary scholar and translator of Boochani’s work, Omid Tofighian to discuss such themes as one of the major consequences of the Iranian revolution.
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This event is cosponsored by:
The Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life; the Ehsan Yarshater Center for Iranian Studies; the Persian Heritage Foundation; the Middle East Institute; and the Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU.
Fatemeh Shams is a professor of modern Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her fields of expertise include social history of modern Persian literature, literary institutions and their role in the literary production under authoritarian states, ideology, censorship and official literature in Modern Iran. Her forthcoming book A Revolution in Rhyme: Official Poets of the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a study of the post-revolutionary literary scene with specific reference to the official poets of the Islamic Republic and the role played by the state in the field of literary production as well as the way in which it uses literature in identity construction. Beside her academic expertise, Fatemeh is also an award-winning poet with three published collections.
Omid Tofighian is a lecturer, researcher and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in rhetoric, religion, popular culture, transnationalism, displacement and discrimination. He is currently affiliated with the American University in Cairo; the University of New South Wales; the University of Sydney; and Iran Academia. He is campaign manager for Why Is My Curriculum White? - Australasia. He contributes to community arts and cultural projects and works with refugees, migrants and youth. He is author of Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave 2016), translator of Behrouz Boochani's multi-award winning book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018), and co-editor of 'Refugee Filmmaking', Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (Winter 2019).
Behrouz Boochani is an Iranian-Kurdish journalist, human rights defender, poet and film producer. He was born in western Iran. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre from 2013 until its closure in 2017, and has remained on the island since then. Boochani is the co-director, along with Iranian film maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, of the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, has published numerous articles in leading media internationally about the plight of refugees held by the Australian government on Manus Island, and has won several awards. His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. The book was tapped out on a mobile phone in a series of single messages over time and translated from Persian into English by Omid Tofighian.