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Verschlagwortet: literature

When Writing Stutters: Adania Shibli and Zeina Halabi in Conversation

Listening to Adania Shibli, one feels herself in the presence of a storyteller like no other. The writer begins by diving into an idea and supplements it with a story in which she summons thinkers and turns them into fictional characters, then casts a light on marginal figures that places them at the core of the historical event. Shibli effortlessly moves between the written and the aural, between abstraction and narration, and she does it ever so playfully, ultimately distilling narrative into theory. A Conversation with Zeina G. Halabi.

Friendship in Dark Times: Fragments on Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Literatures

By Zahiye Kundos. “Now, as a group of people who are obsessed with the idea that history matters, we can agree that in the last few months, the aforementioned big hopes have been receiving a series of electric shocks. Thereafter, the word ‘return’ and the question mark disappeared, leaving ‘exile’ standing alone, naked on an empty stage. By then, and while becoming perplexed about the title’s orientation and the exact concepts to tackle, our hosts first suggested talking about “Rethinking Jewish Politics: Between Exile and Sovereignty” and then changed it to “Between State and Exile: Rethinking Jewish Politics.”

Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentic Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities

By C. Ceyhun Arslan. This blog essay examines the relationship between medicine and modernity in three Middle Eastern narrative sources. The author argues that these texts depicted medicine as something that not only heals bodies but also reforms entire societies and brings modernity to their communities. They also emphasized that medical doctors should not only keep up with the Western science; they should also have a good understanding of the local customs.

“The urgency to tell the Palestinian story to the world and to keep reminding Palestinians of their own story is crystallizing at this moment” – 5in10 with Sanabel Abdelrahman

Sanabel Abdelrahman holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Studies, focusing on magical realism in Palestinian literature, from Philipps-Universität Marburg. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien 2023/2024 in Berlin. Sanabel co-founded the Berlin-based Nidalat initiative for teaching about Palestine and is co-editor of the FUNNY POLITICS publication. She is a bilingual writer of essays critiquing art and literature as well as fiction. She is interested in contemporary art and film.

Woman, Femininity, Body, & Medicine in Nawal El Saadawi’s novella Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1960)

By Dalia Said Mostafa. Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) was a renowned Egyptian feminist activist, physician, writer, and novelist. But she was also a controversial figure who caused much disturbance to authorities in Egypt. This article focuses on her first short fictional work Memoirs of a Woman Doctor.

The Politics and Poetics of the New Man’s Body Image in the Modernist Novel: A Sufi Comparative Study – 5in10 with Cyrine Kortas

Cyrine Kortas is a Tunisian postdoctoral fellow at MECAM centre, majored in English literature. She is an associate professor at the Higher Institute of Languages, Gabes, Tunisia and a researcher at the LAD lab unit at the faculty of arts and humanities Sfax. Her research interests include: comparative literature, feminist and gender studies, as well as teaching literature in EFL classrooms.

The Self-in-Crisis in the Contemporary Turkish Novel: A Case for the Relevance of Medical Humanities

By Burcu Alkan. This article examines the self-in-crisis in the Turkish novel, more specifically the origins and functions of “the psychiatric turn” in representations of madness in contemporary Turkish novels. It examines how the novelists engage with psychiatric medicine and discusses why such an engagement has become prominent in exploring existential crises in the novelistic imagination in recent years.

The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature – an Interview with Nahrain Al-Mousawi

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.

The Wondrous World of Omar El-Zeenni

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.