Writing Poetry and Writing Criticism are not at all Distinct Categories of Creation ‒ 5in10 with Ammar Kandeel
Ammar Kandeel is a literary and art critic whose work lies at the intersection of visual culture, decolonial studies, and literary/art theory. His main research area spans issues of Palestinian transnational creations and self-representations. He earned his PhD from the University of Montpellier 3 with a dissertation analyzing Edward Said’s writing of the critical discourse on orientalism. Recipient of postdoctoral mobilities (funded by the FMSH, ACSS, UNIMED, and Columbia Global Centers – Amman), Ammar’s research focuses on Palestinian testimonial strategies and agency across various mediums, including literary and historiographical texts, film, photography, comics, and new media content. His current project investigates Palestinian graphic narratives since the 1960s. In the academic year 2025/26, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

1. How would you explain your research to someone who is not an expert?
Texts travel. They cross borders, shift between languages, carry the voices of people who have been silenced or displaced, and arrive in places their authors never imagined. My research follows these journeys. I study how Palestinian literary and artistic creation circulates between the Arab world, France, and North America – through comics and graphic novels, films, stand-up comedy, photography, and historiography. What I am really asking is: how do people who have been stripped of a homeland, a cultural archive, and sometimes even a credible voice, find ways to make themselves heard? And what happens to their words once they enter a new cultural or linguistic space? Does the testimony become stronger, or does something get lost in translation (not just linguistically, but also politically and aesthetically)?
2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey?
The subversive power of texts: their ability to cross linguistic, temporal, and geographical borders without a passport. As a Palestinian refugee, I grew up in Jordan with Arabic as the language of my inner life and French as a sort of adopted intellectual home I had chosen before I had ever set foot in France. That condition – thinking and writing from within a language that is both yours and not quite yours – seemed to me one of the most honest descriptions of the exilic experience I had encountered. When I arrived in Montpellier as an M.A. student, I brought with me this personal background and a hunger for what words could do across languages. This taught me that the most interesting things happen at the borders between aesthetic and intellectual traditions, not at their centres. That conviction has stayed with me ever since. What I discovered quite quickly is that the most politically charged question in literary studies is not what a text says, but who gets to speak, in which language, for which audience, and who decides whether to listen.
3. What were formative encounters or challenges?
There were two, and they are connected. The first is something I understood very early, even before I had the theoretical vocabulary for it: that writing poetry and writing criticism are not at all distinct categories of creation. I had been writing literary texts (poems but some other forms, too) during my B.A. studies in foreign languages. When I entered academic literary studies, I noticed that the critics I found most compelling, such as Edward Saïd, were also writers in the deepest sense: their criticism was not a neutral commentary on texts but a form of expression in dialogue with them, a way of inhabiting another voice in order to hear your own more clearly. That intuition became a methodological conviction. The writers and artists I study – exiled, displaced, creating across languages – treat creative and critical language as a continuum. I came to believe that the boundary between them is a fiction that needs to be rewritten.
The second was working as a volunteer interpreter in 2016 for Sudanese refugees applying for asylum in France. Sitting with people whose entire future unfortunately depended on the quality of a translated testimony, I understood in a visceral, not merely theoretical way, what it means when a voice is not believed. The concept of “epistemic injustice” that I later encountered in Miranda Fricker’s work had already lived in those rooms before I had words for it. My research on how Palestinian testimonies are mediated and usually discredited in Western contexts grew somehow from that experience.
4. What do you consider to be the role of the humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval, fragmented publics, and authoritarian transgressions?
They can bring back to people’s lives a consciousness – or at least an awareness – of the humanistic potential of texts and arts in an era dominated by capitalist consumption and attention economies that are based on monetary profit. But I would also push further than that. Humanities and social sciences do something specific that other forms of knowledge production struggle with: they hold space for complexity without resolving it, or without answering it too quickly. In times of authoritarian transgression especially, this is not a minor service. Regimes of all kinds (political, epistemic, cultural, etc.) depend on the simplification of experience: the reduction of individuals and people to a narrative that can be managed. Literature, visual arts, oral history, and other productions of the human spirit can resist that reduction. My work on Palestinian graphic narratives, for instance, is about more than aesthetic appreciation. These creations are doing the work of an archive for a people whose archive has been repeatedly destroyed and controlled. Humanities are one of the few places that take that seriously as a form of emancipatory knowledge.
5. What book, article, film, exhibition or song would you recommend, and why?
I am fascinated by the music of the American saxophonist Sonny Stitt (1924–1982), specifically his recordings of Blue Monsoon and The World Is A Ghetto What strikes me in these pieces is the warmth Stitt generates from within what are inherently theatrical, almost melodramatic, musical situations. Both songs carry a kind of sorrow that could easily tip into sentimentality; and yet in his hands they never do. He elaborates this warmth by finding the exact register between feeling and form, between emotional exposure and technical precision. I think of that balance often when I am writing about testimony: the artistic challenge of bearing witness to something devastating without either aestheticizing the pain or flattening it into political argument. Stitt never lets the song overwhelm the note, or the note overwhelm the song. This seems to me like a lesson in how to treat a difficult story.
Citation: Writing Poetry and Writign Criticism are not at all Distinct Categories of Creation ‒ 5in10 with Ammar Kandeel, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 14.05.2026, https://trafo-hypotheses.org/65580
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (May 14, 2026). Writing Poetry and Writing Criticism are not at all Distinct Categories of Creation ‒ 5in10 with Ammar Kandeel. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 14, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/167wk


