Arab Cleopatra: Conviviality and Queerness at Cleopatra’s Court, Mira Zoubeida ‘Assaf: 21st September
The Race and the Early Modern seminar is delighted to be welcoming Dr. Mira Zoubeida ‘Assaf on 21st September to discuss a paper titled: ‘Arab Cleopatra: Conviviality and Queerness at Cleopatra’s Court’. To participate, sign up via the link below. This is a work-in-progress session. The paper will be distributed in advance of the session.
Date and Time: Monday 21st September, 17:00 (BST)/12:oo (ET)
Sign up here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/centreforearlymodernstudies/2022021
Image Citation: ‘Bernhardt as Cleopatra’. c. 1890-1898. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Paper Abstract
This essay is a work of recovery of a people, their knowledge of the land, and other forms of sociality. Viewed through the lenses of multiracial conviviality and the improvisational assemblages that enact a form of queer worldmaking, Antony and Cleopatra, I argue, presents the diverse social constructions and value systems of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian South Mediterranean as existing beyond the imposed edicts of European powers. Attending to Cleopatra’s performance of queenship as a culturally specific and land-based mode of governance allows me to disrupt conventions of European injury versus local resistance, and in so doing, center a more nuanced and dynamic conception of the play’s ecological, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions. This Rome/Egypt dichotomy, while accurate as far as it goes, necessarily reinstates the power hierarchy in which the West defines the terms of its ‘Others’. Rather than submit to this compulsion, I argue that Cleopatra’s queenship animates an Arab and Muslim epistemology that is informed by multiracial conviviality, alternative temporalities, and human and non-human reciprocity.
