Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist and comparative literature scholar, who writes on contemporary political subjectivation, sexuality, gender, psychoanalysis and aesthetics in modernist, anti/post/decolonial and contemporary forms with reference to the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the USA. She is the author of On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant (University of California Press, 2010), which investigates a foundational fantasy of modernity: speaking in one’s own voice. Working between Arabic, English, and French, Al-Kassim has published in many journals and essay collections. Her work on Indigenous poetry, water and endangered ecologies in Mahmoud Darwish, Lee Maracle and Rita Wong appears in Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai (WLU Press 2023); she presented this work in October at the Dar al-Kalima University Conference, “Land, People and Culture” in Bethlehem, Palestine. For a decade a professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine, Al-Kassim now teaches at UBC. Al-Kassim has been a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, a Senior Seminar Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, and a Sawyer Seminar, Residency Fellow at the University of California, Humanities Research Institute. Recipient of a 2019 SSHRC grant for the 2020 conference Critical Nationalisms, Counterpublics, Al-Kassim’s work today centres paradoxes of exposure in the political and aesthetic practices of those who inherit resistance and protest as inescapable realities.
