The Individual After the Collective: Making Use of History

Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, April 25 at 7pm for an evening with Yasmin El-Rifae and Dina Ramadan, organized on the occasion of the recent publication of El-Rifae's book Radius (Verso, 2022).

Yasmin El-Rifae's Radius is a work of literary non-fiction about the Egyptian feminist group Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment and Assault (Opantish), which fought mass sexual assaults in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian revolution. In less than a year, the group intervened in hundreds of cases, developed a sophisticated operational structure, and insisted that its work was central to the wider revolutionary effort at the time—despite the initial denial of the violence by many other activists. Based on over twenty interviews and El-Rifae’s own experience, Radius is a record of the messy work of the Opantish collective, and its aftermath as lived by some of its individual members. The book attempts to open up the history of Opantish and connect it with broader discourses about gender, power, selfhood, and self-making through historical ruptures.

El-Rifae and Ramadan will be in conversation about Radius and some of the questions it raises about political organizing, collective memory, and self-reckoning, and creating work about the past through drastically changed senses of the future.

The event is co-organized by the Middle Eastern Studies program and the Center for Ethics and Writing at Bard College.

Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer, editor, and a coproducer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Her work has appeared in Mada Masr, the New York Times, Lux magazine, and other outlets. Radius is her first book.

Dina Ramadan is Continuing Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College and Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility

–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.

–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.

–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.