Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East
Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East

Author: Norbert Bugeja

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1136252843

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This book reconsiders the notion of liminality in postcolonial critical discourse today. By visiting Mashriqi writers of memoir, Bugeja offers a unique intervention in the understanding of 'in-between' and ‘threshold’ states in present-day postcolonialist thought. His analysis situates liminal space as a fraught form of consciousness that mediates between conditions of historical contingency and the memorializing present. Within the present Mashriqi memoir form, liminal spaces may be read as articulations of 'representational spaces' — narrative spaces that, based as they are within the histories of local communities, are nonetheless redolent with memorial and imaginary elements. Liminal consciousness today, Bugeja argues, is a direct consequence of the impact of volatile present-day memories on the re-conception of the open wounds of history. Incisive readings of life-writings by Mourid Barghouti, Amin Maalouf, Orhan Pamuk, Amos Oz, and Wadad Makdisi Cortas demonstrate the double-edged representational chasm that opens up when present acts of memorializing are brought to bear upon the elusive histories of the early-twentieth-century Mashriq. Sifting through the wide-ranging theoretical literature on liminality and challenging received views of the concept, this book proposes a nuanced, materialist, and original rethinking of the liminal as a more vigilant outlook onto the political, literary and historical predicaments of the contemporary Middle East.

Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East
Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

Author: Ball Anna Ball

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2018-11-14

Total Pages: 779

ISBN-13: 1474427715

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This Edinburgh Companion seeks to develop a postcolonial framework for addressing the Middle East. The first collection of essays on this subject, it assembles some of the world's foremost postcolonialists to explore the critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for postcolonial studies. Throughout its twenty-four chapters, its focus is on literary and cultural critique. It draws on texts and contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries as case studies, and deploys the concept of 'post/colonial modernity' to reveal the enduring impact of colonial and imperial power on the shaping of the region. And it covers a wide and significant range of political, social, and cultural issues in the Middle East during that period - including the heritage of Orientalism in the region; the roots and contemporary branches of the Israel-Palestine conflict; colonial history, state formation and cultures of resistance in Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb and the wider Arab world; the clash of tradition and modernity in regional and transnational expressions of Islam; the politics of gender and sexuality in the Arab world; the ongoing crises in Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria; the Arab Spring; and the Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe.

Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East
Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East

Author: Norbert Bugeja

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0415509130

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This book reconsiders liminality in postcolonial thought by visiting Mashriqi writers of memoir, offering a unique intervention in the understanding of threshold states within postcolonial literary studies. Challenging received perceptions of the concept, Bugeja's incisive readings situate liminal space today as a fraught form of consciousness that mediates between conditions of historical contingency and the volatile memorializing present.

Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa
Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa

Author: Walid El Hamamsy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0415509726

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This book explores the current historical moment through works of popular culture produced in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa region, Turkey, and Iran. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and other issues in film, cartoons, talk shows, music, dance, blogs, graphic novels, fiction, fashion, and advertisements.

Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations
Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations

Author: Lindsey Moore

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-30

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1317568761

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Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations significantly enhances the interface between postcolonial literary studies and the hitherto under-studied Arab world. Lindsey Moore brings together canonical and less familiar Arab novels and memoirs from the last half century to consider colonial continuities and consequences. Literary narratives are shown to oppose repressive versions of nationalism and to track desire lines toward more hospitable nations. The literatures discussed in this book enable a deeper historical understanding of twenty-first century Arab uprisings and their aftermaths. The book analyzes four rich sites of literary production: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Moore explores ways in which authors critique particular nation-state formations and decolonizing histories, engage the general problematic of ‘the nation’, and redefine, repurpose, and transcend national literary canons. Chapter One contrasts Egyptian literary representations of popular revolt with official revolutionary discourse. Chapter Two addresses the enduring legacy of anti-colonial violence in Algeria and the place of Albert Camus in its literature. Chapter Three uses narratives of gender violence on the Beirut front line to reveal the divisibility and intersectional identity politics of postcolonial nation-states. Chapter Four emphasizes ways in which Palestinian memoirs insist upon remembering towards a postcolonial future. The book provides detailed analysis of literary narratives by Etel Adnan, Rabih Alameddine, Alaa al-Aswany, Rachid Boudjedra, Albert Camus, Rashid al-Daïf, Assia Djebar, Ghada Karmi, Naguib Mahfouz, Jean Said Makdisi, Edward Said, Boualem Sansal, Raja Shehadeh, Miral al-Tahawy, and Latifa al-Zayyat. It is an indispensable volume for students and scholars of Postcolonial, Arab, and World literatures.

Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures
Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures

Author: Karima Laachir

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0415893372

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This study highlights the connections between power, cultural products, resistance, and the artistic strategies through which that resistance is voiced in the Middle East. Exploring cultural displays of dissent in the form of literary works, films, and music, the collection uses the concept of 'cultural resistance' to describe the way culture and cultural creations are used to resist or even change the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures either consciously or unconsciously. The contributors do not claim that these cultural products constitute organized resistance movements, but rather that they reflect instances of defiance that stem from their peculiar contexts. If culture can be used to consolidate and perpetuate power relations in societies, it can also be used as the site of resistance to oppression in its various forms: gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, subverting existing dominant social and political hegemonies in the Middle East.

Post-millennial Palestine
Post-millennial Palestine

Author: Rachel Gregory Fox

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1800348274

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Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, the critical essays in this collection show how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation.

When We Were Arabs
When We Were Arabs

Author: Massoud Hayoun

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1620974584

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WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.

Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature
Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature

Author: Laura Barberán Reinares

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-27

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1317667921

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At present, the bulk of the existing research on sex trafficking originates in the social sciences. Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature adds an original perspective on this issue by examining representations of sex trafficking in postcolonial literature. This book is a sustained interdisciplinary study bridging postcolonial literature, in English and Spanish, and sex trafficking, as analyzed through literary theory, anthropology, sociology, history, trauma theory, journalism, and globalization studies. It encompasses postcolonial theory and literature’s aesthetic analysis of sex trafficking together with research from social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and economics with the intention of offering a comprehensive analysis of the topic beyond the type of Orientalist discourse so prevalent in the media. This is an important and innovative resource for scholars in literature, postcolonial studies, gender studies, human rights and global justice.

Postcolonial Custodianship
Postcolonial Custodianship

Author: Filippo Menozzi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-05

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1317818083

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This book engages with current developments in postcolonial research, exploring notions of cultural transmission, tradition and modernity, authenticity, cross-cultural aesthetics and postcolonial ethics. The author considers the ethical responsibility of the postcolonial intellectual, enhancing our understanding of this topic through the concept of custodianship, which may be defined as a responsibility towards the other in forms of cultural and literary inheritance. The author introduces custodianship as a central theme and a vital question for the committed intellectual today, proposing original interpretations of major postcolonial texts by key figures including Anita Desai, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Through close reading and historical analysis, Postcolonial Custodianship reveals that a practice of custodianship has always been an essential element of these writers’ ethical engagement, yet in a way that has never been explored. The author contends that the question of custodianship should not be seen as a merely negative designation; it is by redefining the very meaning of custodianship that the ethical dimension of postcolonialism can be rediscovered.