Samah Selim - Modern Arabic Literature, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University

"Feminist Internationalism in Translation: Inji Aflatoun and the Women's International Democratic Federation"

In November 1945, 850 women from around the world travelled to Paris across war-ravaged lands to attend the founding congress of the Women's International Democratic Federation. One of these women was Inji Aflatoun (1924-1989), a young communist and women's rights activist who would soon become one of Egypt's most important surrealist painters. Delegates to the congress representing organizations from forty countries met in the Palais de la Mutualité for five days in the last week of November to denounce fascism and discuss the struggle of women around the world for equality and freedom.

Aflatoun’s report on the congress, Eighty Million Women Stand with Us--initially banned by the Egyptian authorities--translated postwar European anti-fascist feminism into anticolonial liberation politics. Defining fascism as "the lowest form of imperialism" allowed Aflatoun to clear space for an ‘unthinkable’ local feminism while creating the conditions for a new language of feminist internationalism that embraced the colonized world. My talk will explore the broader Cold War history in which Aflatoun's forgotten report is embedded and consider it as an example of how translation enables and preserves radical solidarities across time and space despite state repression and cultural erasure

Professor Selim’s research fields are in modern Arabic literature and literary/intellectual history, and translation studies. She is interested in comparative histories of the novel, and the politics of translation practice in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She is also an award-winning literary translator. She is the recipient of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (2009), the University of Arkansas Translation of Arabic Literature Award (2012) and the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant (2018). Her most recent book, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nadha in Egypt explores the cultural and literary politics surrounding the translation of the novel into Arabic at the beginning of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book about the early twentieth century Lebanese author Niqula Haddad (1878-1954), and a translation of the collected works of Egyptian feminist and Surrealist painter Inji Aflatoun (1924-1989). Professor Selim has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Aix-en-Provence and the American University in Cairo. She co-directs the literature module of the Berlin-based postdoctoral research program, Europe in the Middle East; the Middle East in Europe. She is a founding member of the Cairo-based Turjoman Translators Collective and a member of the Executive Committee of the Rutgers Translation Studies Initiative.

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2026-2027 | Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life