Texts act like receptacles for an ever-present remembered past, or what the French philosopher Paul Ricœur calls “the present representation of an absent thing”. They might embody an efficient remedy to forgetting but could also become a vivid testimony for exorcised traumas. This volume focuses on Ricœur’s phenomenology of memory, epistemology of history, and hermeneutics of forgetting. A special emphasis is laid on the dissension between individual and collective institutional memory.
Natives, Aborigines, Indigenous populations, and First Nations are all appellations that assert the legitimacy of various antecessors despite the subordinate position granted to them by colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial theories. In a perpetual quest for agency, the native has been framed within a set of representational practices that claim for a redress of grievances. Cultural, mediatized and historical representations of the native tend to fall within the boundaries of either a bottom-up or a top-down view that fits within a structuralist paradigm that rarely questions the individual, let alone the marginalized. However, there is a need to examine the systems within which indigenous narratives operate from a post-structuralist stance in order to re-read indigenous discourses and to celebrate the multiplicity of meanings inherent in them. The need for an intercultural pragmatic reading of native discourse therefore reveals itself to be of utmost relevance. This volume discusses indigenous literary performances, native history and cultural representations of natives and aboriginal discourse from around the world. Topics pivot around historicizing the native, the role of testimony and primary sources, displacement and the denial of native legitimacy, and literary (mis)representations of natives, among other themes.
Pain and pleasure are at the heart of human experiences and literary journeys. This book takes the title of Roland Barthes’s text on the pleasure of writing as a starting point for the discussion of other different wor(l)ds and cartographies of pain and pleasure. Set against the Aristotelian delineation of pleasure as the major principle that should govern a literary endeavor, this volume investigates alternative reflections on the themes of pleasure and pain. Thinking about the ways through which expressions of pain and pleasure may affect the writer and the reader as experiences of other pursuits of the human imagination can place or displace, soothe or enrage, and inspire or discourage the individual search for meaning. By engaging with different theories and expressions, it is possible to understand what pain and pleasure have done in the history of humanity, rather than merely looking at them as representations of others’ distant experiences. This volume entails new reflections on the expressions of pain and pleasure to create new meanings for these words in a world vying for expressions of power with and without bliss.
Cultural Pearls from the East offers persuasive insights on Muslim-Arab culture and its evolving intellectual features and literary tests, from the dawn of Islam to modern times.
The contributors to this wide-ranging work of scholarship and analysis include mentors, colleagues, friends, and students of the late Magda al-Nowaihi, an outstanding scholar of Middle East studies whose diverse interests and energy inspired numerous colleagues. The book's first part is devoted to Arabic elegy, the subject of an unfinished work by al-Nowaihi from which this volume takes its title. Included here is a previously unpublished lecture on elegy delivered by al- Nowaihi herself. Other contributors examine this poetic form in both classical and modern contexts, from a number of angles, including the partial feminization of the genre, making this volume perhaps the most comprehensive resource on the Arabic elegy available in English. The book's second half features essays relating to al-Nowaihi's other research interests, especially the modern Arabic novel and its transgressive and marginalized status as literature. It deals with authors as varied as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Latifa al-Zayyat, Bensalem Himmich, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Broad in its scope and rigorous in its scholarship, this volume makes a fitting tribute to an inspiring scholar. Contributors: Roger Allen, Dina Amin, Michael Beard, Jonathan P. Decter, Alexander E. Elinson, Marlé Hammond, András Hámori, Mervat Hatem, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Richard Jacquemond, Lital Levy, Mara Naaman, Magda al-Nowaihi, Dana Sajdi, and Christopher Stone.
A PROFOUNDLY ORIGINAL DEBUT FROM HIGHLY ACCLAIMED EGYPTIAN WRITER Youssef Rakha’s extraordinary The Book of the Sultan’s Seal was published less than two weeks after then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, following mass protests, in February 2011. It’s hard to imagine a debut novel of greater urgency or more thrilling innovation. Modeled on a medieval Arabic manuscript in the form of a letter addressed to the writer’s friend, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal is made up of nine chapters, each centered on a drive our hero, Mustafa Çorbaci, takes around greater Cairo in the spring of 2007. Together these create a portrait of Cairo, city of post-9/11 Islam. In a series of dreams and visions, Mustafa Çorbaci encounters the spirit of the last Ottoman sultan and embarks on a mission the sultan assigns him. Çorbaci’s trials shed light on the contemporary Arab Muslim’s desperation for a sense of identity: Sultan’s Seal is both a suspenseful, erotic, riotous novel and an examination of accounts of Muslim demise. The way to a renaissance, Çorbaci’s journeys lead us to see, may have less to do with dogma and jihad than with love poetry, calligraphy, and the cultural diversity and richness within Islam. With his first novel, Rakha has created a language truly all his own—an achievement that has earned international acclaim. This profoundly original work both retells canonical Arabic classics and offers a new version of “middle Arabic,” in which the formal meets the vernacular. Now finally in English, in Paul Starkey’s masterful translation, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal will astonish new readers around the world.
Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain elaborates an interdiscursive picture of how Medieval Spain has been remembered by various Arab, Jewish, and Hispanic peoples from well before 1492 to the present. The collection breaks with traditional foci on the legacies of separate Iberian communities and their descendants, and on limited, largely textual sets of their related cultural practices. In distinct ways, this collection takes a multi-ethnic and multi-modal approach, departing from sociologist Maurice Halbwachs' premise that collective memories form not within individuals alone, but through the inner and inter-workings of actual and conceptual social milieux. The volume hereby foregrounds the constitutive roles of communities created through prayer, literary resonances, architecture, musical performance, and name giving, in shaping memories of medieval Spanish contexts as well as complex identities in the Balkans, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, Latin American, and the United States. The ten original essays in this collection, by international specialists in anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary criticism, folklore, and onomastics, are not arranged according to Arab, Jewish, and Hispanic cultural memories of medieval Spain. Instead, the collection's unique comparative emphasis illuminates ways in which various peoples have re-articulated memories relating to medieval Spain in and across physical, temporal, and social locations, with different types and degrees of impact.
This book offers an in-depth engagement with the growing body of Anglophone Arab fiction in the context of theoretical debates around memory and identity. Against the critical tendency to dismiss nostalgia as a sentimental trope of immigrant narratives, Qutait sheds light on the creative uses to which it is put in the works of Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Leila Aboulela, Randa Jarrar, Rawi Hage, and others. Arguing for the necessity of theorising cultural memory beyond Eurocentric frameworks, the book demonstrates how Arab novelists writing in English draw on nostalgia as a touchstone of Arabic literary tradition from pre-Islamic poetry to the present. Qutait situates Anglophone Arab fiction within contentious debates about the place of the past in the Arab world, tracing how writers have deployed nostalgia as an aesthetic strategy to deal with subject matter ranging from the Islamic golden age, the era of anti-colonial struggle, the failures of the postcolonial state and of pan-Arabism, and the perennial issue of the diaspora's relationship to the homeland. Making a contribution to the transnational turn in memory studies while focusing on a region underrepresented in this field, this book will be of interest for researchers interested in cultural memory, postcolonial studies and the literatures of the Middle East.
The present state of research in precarity demands meta-questions and hence we need to probe both philosophy and practice in light of precarity’s different manifestations. The plural perspectives by which this phenomenon can be addressed also suggest potential for further theorization alongside that of Butler and her critics. By inviting scholars and experts from different fields and disciplines, and by applying multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of our precarious world, while providing insights into the challenges of our possible futures.
