Litvin Interviewed in Blog For Transregional Research
Margaret Litvin, Director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program at theFrederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the research she has completed in Germany as well as the state of her field of study, modern Arabic literature and theater.
Litvin was interviewed for a July 29, 2016 post on the Blog for Transregional Research.
From the text of the interview:
As a child I was fascinated by the life stories of people I met, their ways of speaking, the different things they valued. But I also remember wondering about the various identities people can have (religious, ethnic, national, linguistic, cultural) and the way not all identities have the same shape or take up the same space in people’s lives. For instance, what did it mean to be a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union in Cold War America? How was I supposed to respond to the kid who chased me around the classroom in third grade, making machine-gun noises and shouting “The Russians are coming!”? For the same reason, I was curious about translation. I didn’t start studying Arabic until graduate school, but I was always learning languages.
These interests came full circle as I was researching my first book (on Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet). It turns out some of the most resonant texts for Egyptian and Syrian writers came from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was funny for me to see my Arab interlocutors mentioning some of the same plays and movies that had been important to my parents back in 1960s and 1970s Moscow.
You can read the entire interview here.
Margaret Litvin writes about modern Arabic drama and political culture. Her book, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011), examines the many reworkings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in postcolonial Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Learn more about her here.