(Un)Doing Resistance: Authoritarianism and Attacks on the Arts in Sudan’s 30 Years of Islamist Rule

Book launch

In this seminar the authors will discuss their latest book about Sudan political and cultural landscape.

Authors

Ruba El Melik is an independent researcher with a sociocultural anthropology degree from UCLA, interested in progressing solutions to social issues through research, ethnography and collaborations with local community organizers. Her research interests include arts education, indigenous languages and the paradigms of gender and race that shape the lived experiences of women. Her non-academic work has included production and editorial work for the literary journal, Mizna: SWANA Lit + Art, as well as literary programming, musical festival curation and grassroots open access initiatives. She is invested in shaping futures for cultural expression by creating possibilities for African scholarship on the continent that exist outside of institutions.

Reem Abbas is a freelance Sudanese journalist, writer, researcher and communications expert. She has been working in the field of communications and advocacy for Sudanese civil society groups and international organizations for more than ten years. Her writings on press freedoms have appeared in the Index on Censorship and the Doha Center for Media Freedom, and her socio-political commentary was published in the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the Nation, IRIN news, Al-Monitor, the Guardian, Open Democracy, African Arguments, Medium, Nuba Reports, Women’s E-News, Africa Review, the East African newspaper among other media outlets. She also spent years working with Sudanese refugees in Egypt and published a profile on a young refugee musician in the book “Voices in Refuge” published by the American University in Cairo Press. Her latest writing, an essay titled “Smuggling Books into Sudan: a Brief History from 2012 to 2016” was published in Art and Solidarity Reader: Radical Actions, Politics and Friendships, a reader published by Valiz and supported by the Office of Contemporary Art (Norway).

Chair: Paul Asquith, (CAS-SOAS/Shabaka)

The Book Launch is organised in collaboration with Shabaka and Andariya

Event recording

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