Description:

The Program in Comparative Literary Studies presents a lecture by
Maru Pabón,  Brown University

Third-Worldist Poetics: Cuba, Palestine, Algeria

Friday November 14, 2025
12:30pm Lunch - RSVP to CLS Manu Pabon lunch
1:00 Lecture     KRESGE 5546

During the early 60s, Cuba, Palestine, and Algeria became linked topoi of radical literature, and also connected literary communities. Through a focus on the shared poetics of several core figures --Mahmoud Darwish, Fayad Jamís and Jean Sénac, among others-- across these revolutionary sites, this talk lays out the stakes of a reconsideration of stylistically “simple” committed poetry, which tends to be an object of critical embarrassment for its excessive legibility, and for its claims to speak on behalf of the people. In particular, the talk will expound on three concepts whose recovery is essential to the possibility of a non-lyric comparative poetics: vanguardism, poetic realism, and epideictic rhetoric. 

Prof. Maru Pabón is a scholar of literary modernity in the Arab world and Latin America, with a particular focus on twentieth-century poetic movements across the Levant, Caribbean, and North Africa. Her research interests include the history of Arabic poetry and poetics, Marxism and Marxist aesthetics, literary dialects and creoles, Third-Worldist literature and thought, Arab diasporic literature from the Americas, and the theory and practice of translation. Her current book project examines efforts to construct the “voice of the people” across Palestinian, Cuban, and Algerian poetry throughout the long 60s. Along with Laure Guirguis, she is the co-editor of the volume Art and Politics Between the Arab World and Latin America (Brill, 2025).