Postarabic Poetics: Accent, Affect, and Language Politics in Recent Israeli Culture

This talk presents "postarabic" as an aesthetic mode of Mizrahi Hebrew culture that engages Arabic affectively. Drawing on three recent works, I examine postarabic poetics through the lenses of affect, temporality, and language politics, lingering on the accent as a site of creative possibility and ideological resistance.

Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teachers comparative literature and theory, Hebrew literature, Arabic literature, and Jewish studies. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2014) and numerous articles on literature, history, and cultural studies. She is currently completing an intellectual history of Arab Jews and modernity.

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