102/ On the Need to Shape the Arab Exile Body w/ Amro Ali

This is a conversation with Amro Ali, author of the essay "On the Need to Shape the Arab Exile Body in Berlin." He is also co-president of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities, research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, and lecturer in sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

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What we talked about:

• Moving from the centers to the peripheries
• Why Berlin? And not London, Paris, New York or Istanbul
• Berlin as an incomplete city and Germany's past
• Germany and the Arabs
• The Koblenz trial, accountability in Germany (but not in the Arab world)
• January 25 and the legacy of the Arab Spring for the exile body
• Home as the place where all attempts to escape cease
• Valuing public spaces
• Survivor's guilt and impostor's syndrome
• Challenges faced by Arabs and other non-white people in Berlin
• Meeting other Arabs for the first time in Europe
• The need for a connection between Berlin and other capitals, such as Beirut or Tunis
• Politics of language and the use of Arabic in the diaspora

Recommended Books:

• City of Exiles: Berlin from the outside in by Stuart Braun
• Representations of the Intellectual by Edward W. Said
• Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin by Seyla Benhabib

Resources Mentioned:

• The Der Spiegel article: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/witness-defendant-deserter-case-in-germany-raises-questions-about-how-to-try-assad-s-atrocities-a-43d2817e-d85b-4378-b158-0c5001c345eb
• Branch 251 Podcast

Previous episodes mentioned:

• My Father and Syria’s Forcibly Disappeared (With Wafa Mustafa)
• Space Travel, Nostalgia, and Retrofuturism (With Nat Muller)
• That Cairo Concert, Mental Health and Growing Up Queer in Lebanon (With Hamed Sinno)
• Why I stopped writing about Syria (With Asser Khattab)
• Queerness, Literature and Revolution (With Saleem Haddad)