On the Need to Shape the Arab Exile Body w/ Amro Ali (E102)

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).What we talked about:Moving from the centers to the peripheriesWhy Berlin? And not London, Paris, New York or IstanbulBerlin as an incomplete city and Germany's pastGermany and the ArabsThe Koblenz trial, accountability in Germany (but not in the Arab world)January 25 and the legacy of the Arab Spring for the exile bodyHome as the place where all attempts to escape ceaseValuing public spacesSurvivor's guilt and impostor's syndromeChallenges faced by Arabs and other non-white people in BerlinMeeting other Arabs for the first time in EuropeThe need for a connection between Berlin and other capitals, such as Beirut or TunisPolitics of language and the use of Arabic in the diasporaRecommended Books:City of Exiles: Berlin from the outside in by Stuart BraunRepresentations of the Intellectual by Edward W. SaidExile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin by Seyla BenhabibResources 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-b158-0c5001c345ebBranch 251 PodcastPrevious 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)