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“June’s Childhood” is an investigative journey into Arab children’s literature. It offers a certain perspective for reading the histories and positionalities of this literature as an arena into which many irresolvable conflicts were channeled. The journey explores the manners through which the Arab ‘grown ups’ exported/translated their own tragic sense of collective ‘defeats’ into a literary form directed to the Arab children as a reading public. Their aim was to ‘educate’ and to ‘equip’ the Arab children, the ‘grown ups’ of tomorrow, with the right skills, attitudes, sensibilities, and strategies that will enable them to overcome the conflicts, which their fathers could not cope with successfully. But these exportations and translations did not operate as a mirroring linear one-way, rather it seems that literary forms have their own manner of treating historical matter(s). By focusing on the publications of Dar el Fata al Araby (1974-1993) as a case study, “June’s Childhood” explores the specific literary apparatuses that were developed in order to conduct the exportations and translations in the context of the aftermath of the war of June 1967 and its tragic consequences.

Lecture with comments by Ayman El-Desouky (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies).
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