Join us as we interview the professor and director at Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign John Karam on our afikra Conversations series.
Date: Thursday, March 23
Time: 12PM NYC | 5PM London | 6PM Beirut | 8PM Abu Dhabi
Hosted By: Mikey Muhanna (afikra)
Bio: John Tofik Karam was born and raised in upstate New York, hearing stories that his maternal grandmother recounted of her birthplace, a town she called “trinta e três,” literally thirty-three. The name derived from the town’s location at the thirty-third kilometer of a railroad that began in the city of Porto Velho and ran along Brazil’s border with Bolívia. Her parents (his great-grandparents) had departed Sarba and Jounieh in Ottoman Lebanon for Providence in the U.S., met and married there, and put down roots at the Brazil-Bolívia border. He heard fewer stories about his paternal grandparents who departed Kartaba in Ottoman Lebanon for Veracruz in Mexico and after a decade or so permanently moved to upstate New York. There, his paternal grandmother sang Mexican lullabies to his father and his paternal grandfather was affectionally called “el mexicani” (the Mexican, in colloquial Arabic), and his father, “ibn el-mexicani (the son of the Mexican, also in colloquial Arabic).
These entanglements between a hemispheric America and the Middle East inform his work connecting peoples and parts of the globe that many presume are worlds apart. Currently, he is the Director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His first book on Arab cultural politics in neoliberal Brazil (2007) won awards from the Arab American National Museum and the Brazilian Studies Association. It was respectively translated into Arabic and Portuguese by Centre for Arab Unity Studies and the Editora Martins Fontes. Supported by the NEH and Fulbright programs, his recent book is Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule, set at the border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina where Muslim Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians fold into a hemisphere overshadowed by U.S. power.
This event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast on the library website and other media. The audience is encouraged to offer comments and raise questions during the formal question and answer period, but please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the question and answer period you are consenting to the possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks.