In this conversation, Hoda Barakat reflects on the role of literature in times of historical and political turmoil, engaging with the following questions: Where does writing come from? How can one write in an age of great uncertainty? What is the new landscape of writing? Moving beyond the dialectics of home and exile, and loss and estrangement that have characterized much of her work since the early 90s, Barakat engages with the concepts of "borderlands" as the new space and subject of writing, and of "anxiety" as both a somatic condition and a register of seismic transformations that unsettle and shape literary production in a new age.

Joining Barakat for this conversation are Dartmouth professors Tarek El-Ariss and Ezzedine C. Fishere.