The Eastern Mennonite University Common Read for the 2019-20 academic year is the widely acclaimed Man Booker Prize finalist and bestselling novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead, 2017).
“We are serious about equipping students to be leaders who build bridges in a complex world, and this means we are eager to talk about immigration policy and religious diversity, and to hear the human stories of those impacted by conflict,” said Kirsten Beachy, professor of English and chair of the Intellectual Life Committee, which selects the Common Read. “Exit West allows readers to connect in a deeply personal way to the displaced protagonists of the story, while using magical realism to give us some distance.”
The novel, Hamid’s fourth, shows the effects of geography on life through a love story based in reality but with a magical twist: doorways through which refugees can be transported to different places. “The result is a novel that is personal, not pedantic, an intimate human story about an experience shared by countless people of the world, one that most Americans just witness on television,” wrote Chris Schluep of The Amazon Book Review.
It is “at once a love story, a fable, and a chilling reflection on what it means to be displaced, unable to return home and unwelcome anywhere else,” wrote NPR’s Michael Schaub.
EMU’s Common Read establishes common ground for discussion in classrooms and other venues. This year, over 200 students in classes ranging from first-year writing to a graduate career counseling course will receive copies of the book, which Beachy said can be a starting point for complex discussions of trauma, border policy and international relations.
Hamid’s other writings have also been well received. Moth Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000) won a Betty Trask Award and was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harvest Books, 2008) was a Man Booker Prize finalist, and was made into a movie. And his How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel (Riverhead, 2013), written in second person, was described by TIME magazine as “marvelous and moving.”
He is also the author of a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London (Riverhead, 2016), where he has lived.
Additional campus events planned by the Intellectual Life Committee for the 2019-20 academic year focus on the experiences of Muslim Americans and on immigration:
- Amir Hussain, professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, will present a colloquium on October 23. A former editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, he serves on the board of directors of the American Academy of Religion, has authored or edited six books, and has published over 60 book chapters or scholarly articles about religion. During his visit will be a screening of the new film Blinded by the Light, for which he served as a consultant for its portrayal of the Muslim community. He also advises the television series The Story of God with Morgan Freeman.
- Saher Selod, professor of sociology at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts, will present a colloquium on March 18. She is the author of Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press, 2018), which examines how Muslim men and Muslim women experience gendered forms of racialization through their surveillance by the state and by private citizens. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Sociology Compass, The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
- Isabel Castillo ’07, MA ’17 will give the Academic and Creative Excellence festival keynote presentation on April 15. A “DACAmented” immigrant from Mexico, since 2009 Isabel has organized to change the conditions of living in the U.S. as undocumented immigrants. With the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, she has planned rallies, organized a march on Washington DC, and staged a non-violent sit-in at the then U.S. Senate Majority Leader’s office to demand passage of the DREAM Act. In May 2011, the University of San Francisco awarded an honorary doctorate degree to Isabel for her unwavering organizing and advocacy. In 2017 she was recognized as a “Movement Honoree” by Sojourners.
Previous Common Read selections at EMU have included Callings by Dave Isay with Maya Millett (Penguin, 2017), Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Random House, 2015), Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta (Teos, 2012), Searching for Zion: the Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau (Grove Press, 2013), The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (W. W. Norton, 2010), and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown, 2007).