UH Calendar

“Narrating Humanity” 2024 AAEF Ajouz Lecture in Literature

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Please join the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies on Wednesday, February 28, from 5:00 - 7:00 pm for the 2024 AAEF Dr. Burhan and Mrs. Misako Ajouz Distinguished Lecture in Literature “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea” featuring Professor Cynthia G. Franklin (University of Hawai’i).

Date: Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Time: Reception: 5:00 pm, Lecture: 5:30 pm
Location: Honors College Commons (M.D. Anderson Library, 2nd floor)
Parking: Parking is available at the Welcome Center Garage

Contestations over the status of the human are at the center of those supporting and resisting Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinian people. Taking up this context, Professor Cynthia Franklin explores the powerful role life narratives and movement politics play in struggles over who counts as human. Expanding on her 2023 publication Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea, she considers the urgent need to practice decolonial ways to be human. As she does so, Franklin attends to narratives of human being and belonging that have emerged as part of movement building in Hawai‘i for a deoccupied Hawai‘i and Palestine.

Cynthia G. Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i. She coedits the journal Biography and is author of Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (2009), as well as Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Multi Genre Anthologies (1994).

Signed copies of Narrating Humanity will be available for purchase at the event.