Genre-bending; New Language, New Literature, and a New Arab World

Inspired by the long tradition of Egyptian colloquial poetry and its relation to social and political movements in Egypt, A Bit of Air creates a unique blend of visual art, poetry, and architecture. These darkly humorous poems and their accompanying images are snapshots of a state of mind and a space of fantasy that convey the absurd, the comical, the profound, and the idiosyncratic.

Anita Husen, the translator of the new bilingual edition, will discuss genre and the process of translating colloquial literature at a time of political and literary upheaval. An unprecedented number of Arab authors are producing new and noteworthy works by appropriating the language of blogs, poetry, comic strips, and film, to name a few. This mixing of media gives shape to new experiences emerging from and redefining a rapidly changing social and political reality. A new generation is ushering in a new language, a new literature, and a new Arab world.

About Anita Husen: Anita Husen teaches Modern Standard and Spoken Arabic at Georgia State University. She earned an MA degree in Arabic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on pedagogy. Anita started studying Arabic in 2002 at Emory and has studied and taught at various language programs such as Middlebury, Center for Arabic Study Abroad and Critical Language Scholarship. She lived in an Amazigh community in rural southern Morocco for two years as she worked as a health volunteer for the Peace Corps. Her interests include: sociolinguistics, dialectology and language pedagogy, specifically teaching dialects and teaching with social network technology.

She is also a translator with a particular interest in literature in spoken varieties and new genres of Arabic literature. She translated the bilingual edition of A Bit of Air, a compilation of cartoons and corresponding poems written in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. It was originally published by Dar Shorouk Press in 2005 and the bilingual translation was released last December by University of Texas Press.