Radical Arab Poetics - Incite at Columbia University

While conflict and upheaval have shaken the Arab world, a defiant artistic underground has emerged, weaving resistance through sound and poetry.

For over two decades, Shirine Saad, writer, DJ and cultural organizer, has reported on underground scenes and experimental artists from the Arab world and the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region. Their multimedia platform, Hiya/Hom, archives some of their interviews with revolutionary artists as well as virtual performances recorded from Tunis to Ramallah and Cairo; a global events series features artists remixing regional traditions through noise and radical forms.   

Utilizing support from the Left Field Fund, Saad will employ their ongoing research on radical feminist and queer Arab poetics to organize a community gathering bringing together poets, thinkers, musicians and artists for a grieving ceremony, a punk prayer, a sonic funeral for our people and lands.

The gathering will revolve around numerous questions regarding the positionality and power of radical artistry and community organizing. Such questions include:

• How can a radical feminist and queer poetics defy, resist, and dismantle systems of violence and oppression?
• Can we map certain aesthetic tools that inscribe marginalized art histories into feminist and queer revolutionary movements?
• How can we trace the networks of political and poetic protest?
• How can these questions help us define a new Arab poetics of resistance in solidarity with decolonial, abolitionist and liberation movements, locally and globally?

Participants in the gathering hope to share some ideas and actions together, grieve, and overcome.