Verschlagwortet: literature
Nahrain Al-Mousawi is a scholar of Arabic and Anglophone literature of the Middle East and North Africa, primarily dealing with postcolonial, migration, and Mediterranean literature. She is the author of The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature (Gorgias Press, 2021). A conversation with Alex Favalli.
By Sana Tannoury-Karam, with translations by Fatima Kassem Moussa. In 1918, Omar el-Zeenni looked around him and declared “The world is madness”. Indeed, by the end of the First World War, el-Zeenni’s world was turning upside down. Born in Beirut in 1895, Omar el-Zeenni belonged to the “last Ottoman generation” that had come of age in the last few years of the Ottoman empire’s existence and whose politicization occurred during the First World War.
Annamaria Bianco’s contribution aims to show how Arab migration writings and future writings have increasingly ended up overlapping, in the wake of the “speculative turn” taken by contemporary fiction. Through a review of a few novels published after the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 and drawing on different studies as well as on the notion of “refugeedom”, the author will show how this literary genre juxtaposes the documentary function of prose with narrative strategies of estrangement and defamiliarization that aim to generate in the reader a desire to act on the present, to redeem the past and change the future of hospitality worldwide.
By Judith Sieber.
On February 16 and 17, 2023, the workshop “Small Literatures and Neighborhood” took place at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) as part of the project “Europäische Zeiten/European Times” (EUTIM). A review.
Serhij Zhadan is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, translator, social activist and Ska-Punk singer. His works have been translated into thirteen languages, making him one of the most famous contemporary Ukrainian writers. On December 5th, 2022, Zhadan was a guest in Frankfurt/Oder. A review by Ekaterina Grineva.
By Rana Issa. In this essay, Rana Issa proposes a look at the carnal as a libidial force that permeates Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s understanding of the literary. She argues that for al-Shidyaq the carnal is a method for a critical approach on literary history and literary composition.
By Samad Alavi. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness anthologizes poems that testify to some of the last century’s darkest political tragedies. In her introduction, Forché establishes her basic criteria for selection. First, she includes only poems, as she wishes to demonstrate that the old “arguments about poetry and politics ha[ve] been too narrowly defined” and that it is possible to understand poems as residing between the personal and the political.
By Svitlana Pidoprygora. In the autumn of 2013, Euromaidan started in Ukraine as a response to the authorities’ decision to end European integration processes and focus on the Customs Union with the Russian Federation. Thousands of people went to protests in Kyiv and the central squares of other Ukrainian cities, demonstrating society’s support for the European vector of development and protesting against the arbitrariness of the authorities.
From the 15th to the 17th of September 2022, the second EUTIM Annual Conference, “Time Out of Joint: Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe”, will take place at Potsdam University as a hybrid event. We spoke to the conveners, Bohdan Tokarskyi and Alexander Wöll, to learn more about the conference and how it connects to current political and cultural developments.
ربارة وينكلر (الدراسات العربية، جامعة مونستر، ألمانيا). إذا ما كان يُنظر إلى الإنسانيات عمومًا على أنّها أقلّ تهيّؤًا من العلوم الاجتماعية والطبيعية وعلوم الحياة لمواجهة تحدّيات راهنة أو إنتاج ’معرفة قابلة للاستخدام‘، فإنّ هذا يصحّ أكثر على الفروع التي تُعنى بالأعمال التخييلية والجماليات. ويميل الطلّاب في حقلنا – حقل الدراسات العربية أو الإسلامية أو الشرق أوسطية – إلى اختيار مواضيع متعلّقة بالإسلام السياسي أو الحركات الاجتماعية أو الشريعة الإسلامية، إذ يبدو أنّ هذه المواضيع توفّر فرصًا أفضل للعمل قياسًا بسواها. وكذلك يركّز الخطاب العامّ الأوسع على هذه الضروب من المواضيع بصورة أساسية.