Award-winning author to examine links between border regimes, literature during SVSU talk

An award-winning author will connect the politics of border regimes with contemporary world literature as part of a presentation at Saginaw Valley State University next week.

 

Angela Naimou, an associate professor of English at Clemson University, will make her presentation Tuesday, Feb. 11, at 4 p.m. in SVSU’s Rhea Miller Recital Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

 

The presentation, titled “Distressed Futures: Border Regimes and Global Forms of World Literature,” will explore the links between the use — and abuse — of time by border regimes and conceptions of time in literary texts from nations including the U.S. and Mexico. The literary texts explored during the talk will include Sara Uribe’s “Antígona González” from 2012 and Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” from 2014.

 

Naimou herself is an author. Her book from 2015, “Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures Amid the Debris of Legal Personhood,” won the 2016 Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present. The text also earned her a 2015 Honorable Mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Award from the Modern Language Association.

 

Naimou currently is writing a book on contemporary literature and international migration policies. She also is serving as co-editor of a critical journal, “Diaspora and Literary Studies,” for Cambridge University Press.

 

Naimou received a Ph.D. as well as a master’s degree in English from Cornell University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Michigan.

 

Naimou’s appearance is part of SVSU’s Dow Visiting Scholars and Artists Series.

 

The lecture also is part of SVSU's Barstow Excellence in Teaching Humanities Seminar, which was created to promote excellence in teaching and recognize scholarship in the humanities. The seminar was established through a gift from The Barstow Foundation, which supports education, health and human services agencies and humanitarian causes with emphasis on the greater Midland area.