Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.2029215
M. Ernst
ABSTRACT Challenging Fredric Jameson’s vision of Third-World literature as national allegory in the shadow of globalization, this article reads Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s 1990s Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭah (Granada Trilogy) as a late capitalist allegory of the global South. In the Trilogy, ʿĀshūr places the plight of Castilian Granada’s occupied Arab-Muslim population in dialogue with the experiences of enslaved Andalusians and Native American victims of settler colonial violence across the Atlantic. ʿĀshūr marks the orphan as a messianic figure of human liberation, whose experience of dispossession and uprooting provides them with the critical perspective to re-narrate and connect disparate struggles against colonial violence. Reading the Trilogy intertextually, I will argue that ʿĀshūr’s dramatization of allegorical reading in times of grand political upheaval reflects her own attempt to transcode histories of dispossession across time and space in the present.
{"title":"Orphanhood and allegoresis in Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s Granada Trilogy","authors":"M. Ernst","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2021.2029215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2021.2029215","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Challenging Fredric Jameson’s vision of Third-World literature as national allegory in the shadow of globalization, this article reads Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s 1990s Thulāthiyyat Gharnāṭah (Granada Trilogy) as a late capitalist allegory of the global South. In the Trilogy, ʿĀshūr places the plight of Castilian Granada’s occupied Arab-Muslim population in dialogue with the experiences of enslaved Andalusians and Native American victims of settler colonial violence across the Atlantic. ʿĀshūr marks the orphan as a messianic figure of human liberation, whose experience of dispossession and uprooting provides them with the critical perspective to re-narrate and connect disparate struggles against colonial violence. Reading the Trilogy intertextually, I will argue that ʿĀshūr’s dramatization of allegorical reading in times of grand political upheaval reflects her own attempt to transcode histories of dispossession across time and space in the present.","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"16 1","pages":"3 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78936183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1904678
Sleiman El Hajj
Ageing in the Arab world remains to date an occluded topic. Overshadowed in government policy, media, and public opinion by often more pressing issues—unemployment, militancy, sectarianism, civil w...
{"title":"Narratives of Older Age: A Review of Samira Aghacy’s Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel (2020)","authors":"Sleiman El Hajj","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2021.1904678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2021.1904678","url":null,"abstract":"Ageing in the Arab world remains to date an occluded topic. Overshadowed in government policy, media, and public opinion by often more pressing issues—unemployment, militancy, sectarianism, civil w...","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"36 1","pages":"78 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88445291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.2025744
D. Ula
ABSTRACT Murat Uyurkulak’s 2016 novel, Merhume, centers stories of queer, disabled and otherwise marginalized characters and embeds them within a real and imagined political history of Turkey. Through the narratives of Alper Kenan, a crime novelist with dwarfism, and Evren Tunga, a butch lesbian literary critic, Uyurkulak lays bare how national and familial belonging is predicated upon ableist, heterosexist and masculinist ideals of the Turkish nation state. In this article, I analyze how these characters’ lives are shaped by historical narratives of violence and masculinity, and argue that the ideals of masculinity and Turkish nationalism become inherited generational traumas that these disabled and queer characters must negotiate in order to survive. Drawing on scholars of queer and disability studies, I further argue how Uyurkulak himself replicates some of that sexist and ableist violence within the narrative and through his language, and dis-ables his characters by calling into question their narrative agency.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1921959
Wen-chin Ouyang
Nazarbayev University hosted the 5th International Symposium on Asian Languages and Literatures (ADES) between 20 and 22 June in 2019 (ades@erciyes.edu.tr) co-sponsored by Erciyes University and Ahmet Yesevi University. Located in Nur-Sultan, the capital of the young Kazakhstan, which declared independence from USSR on 21 December 1991, Nazarbayev University aspires to be the center of research in Central Asia. “Intersection of Cultures,” the main theme of the symposium, acquires additional significance in the post-USSR reconstitution of Central Asia in general and the new Republic of Kazakhstan in particular. The Symposium brought together international researchers of the various regions of Asia, including East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, West Asia and the Middle East, together for three days of keynotes, presentations and debates on language, literature and history. The new generation of Kazakh scholars had a strong presence and made significant contributions to the Symposium. Nation building is understandably high on their agenda. The addressed the questions of identity and the role of language and literature in fostering a sense of Kazakh belonging. Kazakh language was to be studied, standardized and elevated into a written, literary language. The distinctiveness of Kazakh literature was to be articulated, its root in oral and folklore traditions identified and its history delineated, for Kazakh literature had to be the heart and soul of the Kazakh nation. More importantly, it is to be taught in schools and universities so as to help shape the Kazakh subject. Five papers may be of interest to readers ofMiddle Eastern Literatures. Four of these are offered in synopses below. These showcase the role of literature in language study and education at large. The fifth, by Funda Guven and is published in its entirety, looks at the expressions of Transnational Turkic identity in Tatar fiction. Gultas Kurmanbay (Nazarbayev University) makes a case for the “The Importance of Teaching Chingiz Aitmatov’s Works as Part of the Literature Curriculum in Secondary Education.” One of the tasks of modern education presently, Kurmanbay argues, is to prepare students to think creatively and independently. Literature, which forms the inner world and valuable orientations of students, plays an important role in the education of the independent personality possessing esthetical taste. In this regard, the works of famous Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov (1928–2008) are indispensable. In his works, Aitmatov makes extensive reflections on realities, lifestyles, religions, cultures and history not only of the Kyrgyz, but also many peoples of Central Asia. The topics in Aitmatov’s works include war, kindness and anger, people and society, nature and homeland, shame, truth, conscience and carelessness, eternity, and slavery. His storytelling is
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1919413
Charis Olszok
Mansūr Būshnāf (b. 1954) is a Libyan novelist and playwright who began writing in the 1970s, after moving from his native Tarhuna to Tripoli. In the late 1970s, he was imprisoned along with numerous other intellectuals, perceived as a threat to the Gaddafi regime. This decade-long imprisonment, and the broader economic, intellectual, and political stagnation of the country during the same years, is the subject of his first novel, al-ʿIlka (2008; Chewing Gum, 2014), published in 2008. Al-ʿIlka features, at its heart, a young man, who remains motionless in a dilapidated public park for ten years, and a misplaced Italian-carved statue, evocative of longing, madness, and desire. “Chewing” as a leitmotif is a visceral representation of stasis, repetition (a central esthetics in Būshnāf’s writing), and the inability to speak openly and meaningfully. Al-Kalb al-dhahabī (2020) is Būshnāf’s second novel. After a further decade of silence and struggle, during which the author witnessed the fall of the Gaddafi regime, and Libya’s disintegration into bitter civil war, it was written in 2020, but yet to be published in its first Arabic edition (though Darf Publishers intend to bring it out this year). This struggle to write and to be heard, explored in equally spiritual and material terms, is a central theme of the novel, as it is of al-ʿIlka. Būshnāf’s authorial voice resonates from the margins, alluding to the real impediments to creativity within the country, and the difficulty of capturing its story on paper. He exults in a poetics of digression, repetition, and, baldly put, error and contradiction. His is a rough, local poetics, channeling the voice of the Libyan streets, with no time to edit, polish and redact, as he, and the country at large, move from prison to censorship to Civil War. Yet the novel also makes demands of its reader. Replete with intertextual references, it serves as what might be called a fictionally-framed comparative study of metamorphosis across literature and art, reflecting the author’s wide erudition, reportedly acquired through a fortuitous volume of art history snuck into his prison cell. As its title suggests, al-Kalb al-dhahabī draws on Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Asinus Aureus, c. 170), with Būshnāf emphasizing the Latin author’s North African origins, in the town of Madaurus. More broadly, the novel touches upon instances of literary transformation from Ovid to Kafka, and from the Sahara’s prehistoric rock art to the animal fables of Būshnāf’s Libyan forbear, al-S ādiq al-Nayhūm (1937–1994). Playing on the different Arabic terms for metamorphosis, tah awwul (transformation), and the Qurʾanic maskh
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1917175
A. Negri
ABSTRACT This article discusses the ways in which Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī rewrote François Coppée's Pour la Couronne (1895) in the shape of the novel, Fī sabīl al-tāj (1920). Al-Manfalūtī turns a French drama into an Egyptian epic rather than simply introducing a piece of foreign literature by means of translation, so as to spread his call against imperialism and anti-colonialism and his program for fashioning an Egyptian national in the frame of 1919 Revolution. Whereas the author preserves all of the main events and traits of the original story, through commentary and word selection in his translation he orientates a new interpretation of the text. The article suggests that translation in the Nahḍa cannot be seen only as acculturation but, in line with Venuti and Reynolds, should be considered as a new text that expresses the agency of the translators and their cultural environment.
本文探讨Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī如何将弗朗索瓦·科帕萨梅的小说《Pour la Couronne》(1895)改编为小说《fā sab l al-tāj》(1920)。Al-Manfalūtī将一部法国戏剧改编成一部埃及史诗，而不是简单地通过翻译的方式引进一部外国文学作品，以此来传播他反对帝国主义和反殖民主义的呼吁，以及他在1919年革命的框架下塑造埃及国民的纲领。作者在保留原著所有主要事件和特点的同时，又通过译作中的注释和选词，对文本进行了新的解读。本文认为，Nahḍa中的翻译不能仅仅被看作文化适应，而应被看作是一种新的文本，它表达了译者的代理和他们所处的文化环境。
{"title":"Colonialism, nationalism and modernity in al-Manfalūṭī’s novelization of a Coppée’s play: a comparative reading of Fī sabīl al-tāj and Pour La Couronne","authors":"A. Negri","doi":"10.1080/1475262X.2021.1917175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2021.1917175","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses the ways in which Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī rewrote François Coppée's Pour la Couronne (1895) in the shape of the novel, Fī sabīl al-tāj (1920). Al-Manfalūtī turns a French drama into an Egyptian epic rather than simply introducing a piece of foreign literature by means of translation, so as to spread his call against imperialism and anti-colonialism and his program for fashioning an Egyptian national in the frame of 1919 Revolution. Whereas the author preserves all of the main events and traits of the original story, through commentary and word selection in his translation he orientates a new interpretation of the text. The article suggests that translation in the Nahḍa cannot be seen only as acculturation but, in line with Venuti and Reynolds, should be considered as a new text that expresses the agency of the translators and their cultural environment.","PeriodicalId":53920,"journal":{"name":"Middle Eastern Literatures","volume":"90 1","pages":"160 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83207141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1890384
Çimen Günay-Erkol
ABSTRACT Burhan Sönmez’s İstanbul İstanbul (2016) is a powerful addition to contemporary prison novels in Turkey. The novel revolves around prisoners who experience systematic torture and are unable to escape the grim destruction that surrounds them. The discussions in the novel around Islamic faith, free will, solitude and captivity produce self-reflexive stories of memory and forgetting, in which gender also comes to the fore as an important center of gravity. In this grand scheme of brutality and torture, the only female prisoner, Zinê Sevda, is limited to sign language, and she facilitates men’s transformative recognition of their trauma through her ghostly presence. In this article, I explore how Zinê Sevda’s silent witnessing transforms men into overseers of themselves and comment on the implications of her sign language. I argue Sönmez’s play with traumatic memory and its resilience is an excellent metaphor for the recurrence of military tutelage in Turkey.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1883852
A. Almallah
ABSTRACT Modern scholarship on and translations of Bashshār ibn Burd (d. 784), especially into English, adopt his Persian origin as a method for, or at least as a key, to interpreting and understanding his work. Western rewritings of the poet try to use his Persian origin as a way of disassociating him from his Arabic context. While in the case of modern Arab intellectuals from the 19th century and onward, the search for a “pure Arab heritage” makes Bashshār ibn Burd, who showed “inappropriate” explicitness in his poetic handling of sexual desire, a perfect target for these intellectuals to defend themselves against the colonial and orientalist accusations against their “culture” or “lack of culture.” Thus, most Arab intellectuals argued that these practices, namely what they termed mujūn or al-adab al-mājin, are something foreign to Arab culture, and in the case of Bashshār, mainly related to the poet's Persian origin.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1885133
Feras Alkabani
ABSTRACT This article examines the dual and paradoxical conception of the Arabic literary canon in Orientalist and Nahḍa discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an era of great change and closer mutual cultural awareness between Europe and the Arab world. What Arabic literature had long signified to European scholars since Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century translation of The Arabian Nights (mysticism, Romanticism and a platform to explore sexual taboos) was very different from how the nationalist-minded Nahḍa intellectuals wanted to reconfigure it as the hallmark of the rational “Golden Age” of Arab civilization. Sexuality became a site of contestation between certain Orientalists who praised Arab literary “frankness” and an anxious class of Arab scholars who wanted to “cleanse” the Arabic literary canon and reconfigure it in line with modern, European standards of “respectability” and “politeness.”
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2021.1891714
Funda Guven
ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between space and transnational Turkic identity in Sevinc Çokum's novel, Hilal Görününce (1984; The Crimean Times, 2015), published in the early 1980s when a deep-rooted social change began in Turkey. This article draws attention to the role of the hinterland of the Ottoman Empire in how the author used distant Turkic communities to construct a Tatar national identity among ethnic Tatars in Turkey, utilizing geography and linguistic, historical, and blood ties. By imagining a community based in both tangible and intangible cultural spaces, the novel nurtures a cultural identity of the Turkic community and highlights the trauma that was created by mass migration from the periphery of the Ottoman Empire to Anatolia. The novel additionally integrates Turkish identity into a broader Turkic identity. I argue that the author makes the sites and spaces in Crimea familiar to a Turkish audience while mirroring transnational Turkish identity.
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