Shownotes
Associate Professor of English Tariq Mehmood creates and teaches across a wide spectrum of original work, including poetry, novels for adolescents, films, documentaries, archival research, teaching and advising students, and analyzing, and now creating, video games. The new minor in video gaming at AUB aims to counter the gaming world’s prevalent global portrayal of people of color from the global South as terrorists to be killed. The common thread in his life and work, he explains, is the struggle to find justice and his (and the non-White Global South’s) place in this world, by breaking the norm of White supremacy and its legacy of imperialism. He says he wants to inspire young students to tell their own story, create their own heroes, “break the colonization of their minds” by the $200b gaming industry, and, ultimately, reclaim our own histories as a gift to future generations.