“Between Arabia, al-Andalus and its daughter Sicily, There Was Always the Maghrib!”: Readings from Of Lost Cities: The Maghribī Poetic Imagination

Event details

In this book talk, Nizar F. Hermes will present and read from Of Lost Cities: The Maghribī Poetic Imagination, which textually, theoretically, and comparatively explores the poetics and politics of elegiac constructions and nostalgic representations of the premodern and early modern Maghribī city. Focusing mainly on the significance of Sicily and the Mediterranean Sea in the book, the talk will center on the eleventh-century exilic Ifrīqiyyan (‘Tunisian’) poets Ibn ʿAbdūn (d. 1010), Ibn Rashīq (d. 1064), Ibn Sharaf (d. 1067), and the blind al-Ḥuṣrī al-Ḍarīr (d. 1095), bringing their exilic experiences and poetic productions in Sicily and al Andalus into comparative conversation with Ibn Ḥamdīs (d. 1133), the renowned Arabic-Sicilian poet who nostalgically and elegiacally commemorated Sicily in his Ṣiqilliyāt (Poems on Sicily) while living in exile in al-Andalus and especially in the Maghrib.

Professor Nizar F. Hermes is a scholar of medieval Arabic Literature at the University of Virginia. He has written on the European Other in Medieval Arabic Literature, and widely on the city and urban spaces. Professor Hermes is in York as part of a poetic project on ruins, medieval cities, and old quarters.