Prof. Nasser Mufti’s Book Honored with CGS Arlt Award
Professor Nasser Mufti has been awarded the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities for 2019 for his book, Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern UP, 2017). The Council of Graduate Studies gives the award, which carries a $1000 honorarium and travel to the national meeting where the award is given, this year in Nashville, TN.
According to Dr. Suzanne Ortega, the president of CGS, Prof. Mufti's book is "an important contribution to understanding the complexities of imperialism and the inherent incivility of civil war."
The press release also summarizes Civilizing War: "Mufti situates the place of civil war within the politics of empire by examining the 'historical transformation of civil war from a civil affair into an uncivil crisis.' Through comparative readings of Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Friedrich Engels, Nadine Gordimer, and others, Mufti demonstrates how these authors and intellectuals articulated a 'poetics of national rupture' that came to signify the metropolitan nation and its colonial 'others.' Through Civilizing War, Mufti 'shifts the terms of Edward Said’s influential Orientalism to suggest that imperialism was not only organized around the norms of civility but also around narratives of civil war.'"
Update, 12/16: UIC Today also reported on Prof. Mufti's award.