Academics
Arab Migrations and Cultural Representation:
An Intercultural Dialogue
FSS 191
(Fulfills 3 credits of the General Education Requirements in People and Society)
Professor Christina E. Civantos, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30-1:45; Section Q
This course will engage students in an exciting, hands-on interdisciplinary inquiry into migration studies and cross-cultural representation with a focus on the Arab and Muslim world and the Americas. Students will discuss and analyze a wide range of “texts”—writings, music, films, etc. —that arise from or impact this pressing contemporary issue. Additionally, through the Soliya Connect Program (www.soliya.net), students will participate in cross-cultural dialogue and the production of media representations through teleconference sessions and collaborative projects with their peers in universities in the Middle East/North Africa.
The seminar’s introductory segments (Orientalism and post-coloniality, immigration and the global economy, and migration as a security issue) will give students a context in which to understand the segments on the representation of immigrants in US, Arab, and Arab immigrant literature, film, and news media. Our case studies—drawn from migration between the Arab world, Latin America, the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe—will include a novel, oral narratives, spoken-word poetry , legal cases and media coverage related to the war on terror and immigrant communities, films, visual art, and music . Through the study of these materials, as well as relevant scholarly essays, students will ask questions, develop arguments, and formulate conclusions about "East"/"West" representations and the relationship between immigration and individual, national, religious, racial, and cultural identities.
Christina Civantos (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1999) researches and teaches in the fields of 19th and 20th-century Latin American and Arabic studies. She is particularly interested in migration and diaspora; nationalisms; Orientalism and cross-cultural representation, primarily in the context of South-South relations; and the politics of literacy. She is the author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (2006) as well as articles on Arab American women’s writings and Orientalism in media representations, and the self-representations, of former Argentine president Carlos Menem. Her essay on Arab migration and diaspora is forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture.
