This is a talk about a book that is still being written. It begins and ends with a funeral. In between, lies the story of the 60s generation in the Arab world. The funeral was that of Egyptian leader Gamal Abd al-Nasser. His 1970 death was just another reminder of the weighty collective defeat of “the first Arabs”: the eminent generation born after WW I, which had defined itself by its Arab ethnicity rather than religious faith and had fought to decolonize their society. Their dream was a dignified life but their lot ended up being a dehumanizing defeat. With the ultimate aim of offering a humanizing narrative of this generation struggle for life with dignity, in this talk I offer preliminary thoughts on one of the most complex and rich experiments in the modern history of the Middle East.

This event will be held on November 14th from 12:00pm-1:30pm and is presented by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Yoav Di-Capua is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches modern Arab intellectual history. He is the author of Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (University of California Press, 2009) and No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University Press of Chicago, 2018). Supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, he is currently at work on The First Arabs: An Intimate History of Their Struggle for Dignity and The Aftermath of Defeat.