Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zayed (Affiliated Postdoctoral Fellow)
Engaging with Paradigm(s) of Decoloniality/De-colonisability: Constructing a Dialogic Encounter between Frantz Fanon and Malek Bennabi
Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zayed is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Islamic Studies, and an Affiliated Postdoctoral researcher at BGSMCS, Freie Universität Berlin. Since September 2020, Al-Zayed has also been a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate on Afro-Asian Futures Past, American University of Beirut. His research is concerned with decoloniality and philosophies of liberation and broadly focuses on moments of crisis and resistance, in the Global South, and their mediations through literary, cinematic and theoretical frames. He is the author of a collection of poetry Cartographies of Absence (Adroit, 2018).
The focus of his Ph.D. thesis titled “From ‘History to Myth’ and ‘Myth to History’: Re/presenting ‘Resistance’ in Cross-Cultural Modes” has been to understand the legacy of resistance movements and associated literary genres that work in symbolic, mythic modes in the context of India and Kenya in comparative politico-economic, socio-historical, literary and cultural frames. A close study of the works of Mahasweta Devi and Ngugi wa Thiong’o opens up in comparative frames a certain rhythm of history that takes the role of memory and its circulation in oral modes as central for documenting lived lives.
Previously, Mahmoud Al-Zayed was an Indian Council for Cultural Relations scholarship recipient (2013-19), and an Indian Council of Social Science Research-funded Research Associate in the Department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi (2017-19).
Research project:
Engaging with Paradigm(s) of Decoloniality/De-colonisability: Constructing a Dialogic Encounter between Frantz Fanon and Malek Bennabi
Research areas:
De-colonisability, Decoloniality, Postcoloniality, Malek Bennabi, Frantz Fanon, Philosophies of Liberation from the Global South, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Islam, Arabic literature