Library of Congress Symposium

On Tuesday, March 29, 2011, the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress and the Ameen Rihani Institute hosted a one-day symposium to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first Arab-American novel, Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid. Leading scholars of Arab-American literature and history analyzed the significance of the novel and of Rihani’s overall contribution. The forum consisted of three panels administered by Library experts.

The 100th Anniversary of the First Arab-American Novel: Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid

Schedule of Library of Congress Symposium, Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Room LJ-119, Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street, S.E., Washington, D.C.
8:30am-4:00pm

8:30-9:00: Breakfast
9:05: Remarks by Antoine Chedid, Ambassador of Lebanon
9:10-9:20: Remarks by Todd Fine, Director of Project Khalid

9:30-11:00: Panel One: Ameen Rihani and American Literature
Mary-Jane Deeb, Chief, African and Middle Eastern Division, Moderator

o Suheil Bushrui: The Book of Khalid and the Spiritual Foundation of Ameen Rihani’s Thought
o Nathan Funk: Ameen Rihani: A Thinker Whose Time Has Come?
o Geoffrey Nash: Envisioning New Worlds: The Book of Khalid and the Global Future

11:00-11:15: Break and Coffee

11:15-12:45: Panel Two: A Century of The Book of Khalid
Christopher Murphy, Head, Near East Section, Moderator

o Hani Bawardi: Reading The Book of Khalid, writing Arab American narratives: Rihani as a historian
o Todd Fine: Khalid’s Adventures in New York: The Book of Khalid and the American Ethnic Novel
o Waïl S. Hassan: Ameen Rihani’s Contribution to Arab-American Letters

12:45-1:30: Lunch

1:30-3:00: Panel Three: Ameen Rihani and The Book of Khalid within Arab-American Literary and Cultural History

Muhannad Salhi, Arab World Specialist, Near East Section, Moderator
o Roger Allen: The Nahdah and its Problematics: Ameen Rihani and the Mahjar
o Mary Ann DiNapoli: Little Syria: The Gateway to America
o Stephen Sheehi: “On the borderline of the Orient and the Occident”: Ameen Rihani’s Arab-American Worldview

3:00-3:15: Break with Food

3:15-3:20: Introduction of Saad Albazei, Majlis as-Shura of Saudi Arabia
3:20-3:40: Concluding Remarks by Saad Albazei

Biographies

Saad Albazei is a leading scholar of literature, who, until recently, was professor of English and Comparative Literature at King Saud University in Riyadh. He is currently a member of the Shura Council of Saudi Arabia and the president of the Riyadh Literary Club. He is a former editor-in-chief of The Global Arabic Encyclopedia and the past editor-in-chief of the Riyadh Daily, an English-speaking newspaper. He earned his B.A. in English language and literature from the University of Riyadh (now King Saud University) in 1974, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Purdue University in the United States.

Roger Allen is the Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, and since 2005 has been Chair of the Department. In 2009-2010, he was the President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). He obtained his doctoral degree in modern Arabic literature from Oxford University in 1968, the first student to obtain a doctoral degree in that field at Oxford, under the supervision of Dr. M.M. Badawi.

Hani Bawardi is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences and the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Dr. Bawardi has established a sizable archival collection on the political activities of early Arab-American immigrants spanning from 1915 to 1967, parts of which are housed in the Genesee Special Collections at the University of Michigan, Flint. His current research includes translating two volumes by Arab immigrant pioneers, and finalizing a book for publication on the early immigrants’ political organizations from 1912 to 1951.

Suheil Bushrui is a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Maryland and the foremost authority on the works of Kahlil Gibran. From 1982 to 1988, Professor Bushrui was Cultural Advisor and official interpreter to the President of the Republic of Lebanon. In 1983, he headed a presidential committee in Lebanon which organized the international celebrations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kahlil Gibran. These activities focused on the theme of “Unity in Diversity” and were held in Beirut, Oxford, London, and Washington, D.C.

Mary Ann Haick DiNapoli is a local historian and professional genealogist in New York City. She served on the project team for the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibit, A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City. Mrs. DiNapoli received her B.A. from St. Joseph’s College and completed a master’s thesis at Long Island University on the history of the Arab American community surrounding Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. She is also a co-founder of the “Friends of the Lower West Side,” a group which seek to preserve the rich immigrant history of downtown Manhattan’s Lower West Side, the first center of Arab immigration to the United States.

Todd Fine, the director of The Book of Khalid’s anniversary campaign called Project Khalid (www.projectkhalid.org), is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the editor of a new critical edition of The Book of Khalid under advance contract with Syracuse University Press. At Harvard, Mr. Fine worked for Samuel P. Huntington as a research assistant for two years on his book on American identity and immigration, entitled Who Are We? (Simon and Schuster, 2004). He also organized and developed the Global Zero campaign on nuclear weapons, which launched in Paris, France in December 2008.

Nathan Funk is an international relations scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo’s Conrad Grebel University College. He earned his Ph.D. in International Relations in 2000 from American University’s School of International Service in Washington, D.C. He has authored or co-authored a number of writings on international conflict resolution and Islamic-Western relations, and in 2004 he edited Ameen Rihani: Bridging East and West (University Press of America, 2004), which included chapters from a collection of scholars about Ameen Rihani’s views on cultural interaction and dialogue.

Waïl S. Hassan is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse, 2003) and Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab-American and Arab-British Literature (forthcoming from Oxford UP, 2011), in addition to forty academic articles and reviews. He is also the translator from Arabic of Abdelfattah Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (Syracuse, 2008), and the co-editor of five collections, including most recently the current issue of Comparative Literature Studies on the theme of “Arabic Literature Now: Between Area Studies and the New Comparatism,” and the book teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, a volume in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series (forthcoming in 2012). His new book project, Arabs and the New World, focuses on Arab literary relations with the Americas, including the work of Arab minority writers throughout the American hemisphere.

Geoffrey Nash is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sunderland, United Kingdom. He specializes in orientalism, travel writing (travellers to the Middle East), Arab Anglophone writing, and Muslim themes in contemporary fiction. He is the author of The Arab Writer in English: Arab Themes in a Metropolitan Language, 1908–1958 (Sussex, 1998) and The Anglo-Arab Encounter: Fiction and Autobiography by Arab Writers in English (Peter Lang, 2007).

Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and Director of the Arabic Program at the University of South Carolina. He is also core faculty in the Comparative Literature Program and the Islamic World Cultures Program. In addition to Arabic, he teaches courses on the intellectual, literary, cultural, artistic, photographic and food heritage of the modern Arabo-Islamic world. He is the author of Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (University Press of Florida, 2004), which examines the foundational writing of intellectuals of the 19th century Arab Renaissance or al-nahdah al-`arabiyah. His work is informed by and finds theoretical inspiration in post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory.