Join the Department of Performance Studies in conversation about Sadia Abbas's novel, The Empty Room. Abbas will be joined by poet, fiction writer, critic, and translator John Keene and artist Shahzia Sikander.
This conversation will be moderated by Professor Fred Moten.
Sadia Abbas is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University – Newark. She grew up in Singapore and Karachi, Pakistan, with brief stints in Lahore and Peshawar. Abbas specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, the culture and politics of Islam in modernity, early modern English literature—especially the literature of religious strife—and the history of 20th-century criticism. Her first book, At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (2014), won an MLA First Book Prize.
John Keene is Professor and Chair in the Department of African American and African Studies and Professor in the Department of English at Rugers University - Newark. A member of the Dark Room Collective and a graduate fellow of Cave Canem, Keene is the author of a novel, Annotations (1995), the short fiction collection Counternarratives (2015). In addition to his novels, he has published two collaborative volumes of poetry, Seismosis (2006) and GRIND (2016), a chapbook of poems, Playland (2016), and translated Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer, from Portuguese. He is a 2018 Macarthur Fellow.
Shahzia Sikander is an artist based in New York City best known for her Mughal miniature painting as well as her Persian miniature painting. Sikander is also a performance artist, a muralist, a mixed media artist, and an installation artist. Sikander has participated in many group exhibitions, including those held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005 and Museum Ludwig in Germany in 1999. Sikander is a recipient of the Shakir Ali Award/Kipling Award from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 1993, The Joan Mitchell Award in 1999, and the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006.