A lecture by Michael Pifer
National Endorsement for the Humanities Fellow
University of Michigan
The trope of the wandering stranger, the outcast with secret prestige, can be found in pre-modern literatures around the world. This lecture will shed light on an intersecting discourse about strangers across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian societies, with the intention of illuminating the peregrinations of the restless outcast known as the gharib in Middle Armenian poetry in particular. As it will argue, the mobile figure of the gharib, which performatively travels across multiple cultural systems, suggests an alternative manner of parsing what is ‘native’ and ‘foreign,’ indigenous and exogenous, in the societies through which it moves.
Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies