The Scientific Research Council at AOU-Bahrain is delighted to announce that Prof. Ghada Abdel Hafeez, the FLS local dean, delivered a virtual presentation on Thursday 6 January 2022 titled “Decolonizing the Theatre: Indigenous Theory Initiatives from the Arab Countries” in The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) 2022 Convention. Scholars from Bahrain, the United States of America, Egypt, and India participated in one of the conference’s panels titled “Multilingual Critical Theories: Decolonizing the Hegemony of European Critical Theories.”
In her presentation, Prof. Ghada shed light on some of the initiatives for decolonizing the theater, which took place in the Arab World, particularly in Egypt and Morocco. She examined how Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987), Yusuf Idris (1927-1991), and Jameel Hamdawi (1993) have proposed new original conceptualization of the Arab theater by adding elements from their local cultures to create new forms of theatre that assert their identities against the hegemonizing West.