Hardt-Nickachos Lectures in Peace Studies

Islam, the West, and the Quest for Understanding

It is often assumed, by both sides of the divide, that the West and Islam rest on radically different cultural foundations and that the two are destined to be at odds forever. But what happens if we are willing to accept that our rock-solid identities and beliefs are not acts of nature, but the residual artifacts of poorly understood events over time? 

Anouar Majid (University of New England) explores this question by looking at early relations between Islam and Christian Europe, encouraging a rigorous rethinking of Muslim and Western identities and a critical approach to our own cultural assumptions.

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Anouar Majid is professor of English at the University of New England. He is also the Vice President for Global Affairs, the founding director of the Center for Global Humanities (Maine, USA) and the Tangier Global Forum (Morocco), and the founding chair of the Department of English, which he headed from 2000 to 2009.

He conceived and established UNE's campus in Tangier and is the managing director of UNE's operations in Morocco. Majid has published widely on relations between Islam and the West. He is the author of Islam and America: Building a Future Without Prejudice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012; paperback edition, with new preface, 2015); We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age (Stanford University Press, 2004), Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Duke University Press, 2000), and the novel Si Yussef (Quartet, 1992; Interlink, 2005). Majid published articles in Cultural Critique, Signs, Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington Post, and other publications. His life and work were featured on Al Jazeera television and the Bill Moyers Journal. He was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the print magazine Tingis, a Moroccan-American magazine of ideas and culture, which he edits online at Tingismagazine.com.

Surviving Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak

Caught in the violence of war in the mid 1990s, Bosnian Muslims became the victims of a brutal and bloodthirsty purge at the hands of Serbian forces. Murder, rape, plundering, and forced relocation on a massive scale ravaged the region, and the small town of Srebrenica became the site of the first genocide in Europe since World War II.

Years later, despite a signed peace agreement, the war continues in the minds of the survivors. The aftermath of the conflict shows us how “war” and “peace” are not mutually exclusive phenomena in history, but are intimately related. The Srebrenica women who remain are overwhelmed with grief, mourning more than the dead, as their connections to the wider world and their own communities have been severed.

In her talk, Selma Leydesdorff, professor of oral history and culture at the University of Amsterdam, will give voice to the women of Srebrenica. Why is it important that their stories are told, believed, and recognized? Trauma has broken social bonds and human connections, and shattered a sense of self, and the denial and distortion of the survivors’ voices is partly the result of their stories not being recognized. Leydesdorff will explore how using oral history to tell these stories does more than just trace the historical narrative of one individual or incident; it also shows us how we interpret past experiences and tells us about our expectations for our lives in the future.

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Selma Leydesdorff is professor of oral history and culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her research has contributed to the transformation of oral history from mostly a fact-finding method-adding to criticizing traditional historical narratives to research on the ways memory is framed and modified over time. Influenced by an interest in women's history, Leydesdorff moved from gender studies to her present position. She promoted oral history by extensive teaching and with the help of the National Research School of Cultural History she formalized the national network in oral history.

Leydesdorff is author of Surviving Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak and has worked as an editor since 2001, making her co-responsible for the publication of many volumes, and more are in preparation. Her research interests include themes totalitarianism, subjectivity, trauma, the transmission of stories.

Global Citizenship in an Age of Anger

How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American ‘shooters’ and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media?

Join us as Pankaj Mishra addresses public bewilderment by casting a gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present, speaking to the historical root of the world’s major nationalisms. In a time of heightened, hardened nationalisms, it becomes imparitive to retrieve some inclusive visions, emphasizing the common humanity that transcends local affiliations and identities. But is this recovery possible in the present global economic regime, one that benefits a transnational elite and provokes many of the left-behind into hardline nationalism? Mishra will explore some of the tensions that went into the making of Asian nationalisms, offering his perspective on how to rescue cosmopolitanism from the transnational.

Pankaj Mishra is a novelist, essayist, literary critic, lecturer, and reporter who travels the world writing on a wide range of topics, including globalization, the Dalai Lama, Bollywood, and the “Talibanization” of South Asia. He regularly contributes to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Statesman, and has written for too many international magazines and newspapers to list. In his latest book, The Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), Mishra casts his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present to explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world: from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, to a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world, to racism and misogyny on social media. Mishra was born in North India and completed his MA in English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

His first book was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India(1995), a travelogue which described the social and cultural changes in India in the new context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000) an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, won the Los Angles Times’ Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004), mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha’s relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond, describes Mishra’s travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia. Like his previous books, it was featured in the New York Times‘ 100 Best Books of the Year. Published in 2012, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber prize in Canada, the Orwell Prize in the U.K, and the Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award in the United States. It won the Crossword Award for Best Nonfiction in 2013. In 2014, it became the first book by a non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. In 2013, he published A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and its Neighbours. Mishra was a visiting professor at Wellesley College in 2001, 2004, and 2006. In 2004-2005 he received a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. For 2007-08, he was the Visiting Fellow at the Department of English, University College, London. In 2009, he was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2014, he received Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.