'Mapping Home'

The Laura C. Harris Series welcomes author Randa Jarrar presenting a lecture, “Mapping Home.” Co-sponsored by the Laura C. Harris Series and the Beck Series. Randa Jarrar is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Randa grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the US after the first Gulf War. Her 2008 novel, A Map of Home, chronicles the coming-of-age of Nidali- whose name is a feminization of the word ‘struggle’- a rebellious girl born in 1970’s Boston who then moves with her family to a very different life in Kuwait. Feminism has had much to say about mothers and motherhood; but how can feminist analysis and activism be applied to the idea of childhood or to children’s lives in local and transnational contexts?