“One Night in Beirut: When Said met Genet”

James Currie, Music Photographer: Douglas Levere

The great Palestinian literary critic and political activist Edward Said met the famous French homosexual novelist Jean Genet in Beirut in 1972. In his December 2nd talk, “One Night in Beirut: When Said met Genet,” musicologist James Currie will discuss how this encounter haunted Said’s thinking in his later years before his death in 2003, acting as a subterranean influence on the project Said started with the conductor Daniel Barenboim and claimed was the most important of his life: the famous Arab and Israeli youth orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan.