The Genealogy of Arabic Modernism

This chapter attempts to re-create the “internal dialogue” about their pasts as militants that the Shi'r poets chose not to make public. This narrative is centered on the career of Yusuf al-Khal, who as editor in chief played a leading role in determining the principles of the Shi'r movement. But the real protagonists of the story are institutions: the political party, the university, the Cénacle, and the little magazine. These settings constitute the backstory to al-Khal's engagement with the institutions of late modernism itself—the global network of actors and discourses examined in Chapter 1. This focus on institutional history is intended, in part, as a corrective to the Shi'r poets' insistence that modernist literature is the work of heroic, deracinated individuals.