APPEAL FOR SUPPORT

The Literature of 9/11:

A Writer’s Report on the Global War on Terror

Speaker: Amitava Kumar

(Professor of English, Vassar College, author of Evidence of Suspicion and Husband of a Fanatic)

 15th January (Friday) / 3:00 pm / Mir Anis Hall (Near VC office)

Jamia Millia Islamia

Did the attacks of September 11 inaugurate a new literature? A contemporary archive can be constituted from novels, plays, and poems—but also from newspaper reports, official commission findings, trial transcripts and torture documents. It can be argued that this new canon which begins with two planes flying into tall buildings on a clear September morning ends with the image of an orange-suited figure kneeling behind a wall of barbed wire in the American gulag called Guantanamo. Writer and critic Amitava Kumar discussed his search—conducted as much in the courtroom as in the classroom, and as much in mofussil towns in India as in museums and art galleries in New York—for the human in the inhuman war on terror.