Verschlagwortet: Middle East
By Hannah El-Hitami. During the 1980s and ’90s, a group of political prisoners in Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison held oud lessons, concerts and soirees with theater and dance. Now, a group of former inmates has gathered in Germany to remember and sing together again.
Adam Mestyan is associate professor in the History Department at Duke University. He is the author of Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking The Ottoman Political Order in The Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023). A conversation with Alex Favalli.
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.
In this piece, Nurçin Ileri interviewed Sanaz Sohrabi, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Montréal. Her doctoral project looks at how visual representations of oil have changed postcolonial sovereignty and resource nationalism in Iran over time. She is also an artist and filmmaker. In relation to her project, she prepares a trilogy of essay films
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.
Sanabel Abdelrahman wonders why the 1001 Nights hero Sindibād is constantly evoked in Arabic trap music, and how? What is the connection between the post-2011 Sindibād of the trap and rap scene to the one of bygone decades?
By Rasha Chatta. In a region where authoritarian and patriarchal regimes have held the monopoly on what circulates publicly and where spaces of contestation are under scrutiny, graphic narratives or qisas musawwara as they are referred to in the Arabic language—alongside other popular arts such as graffiti or street art—have carved out a new arena of dissent that was made possible by the hopes for social and political changes instigated in the wave of the so-called Arab Spring.
Georges Khalil in conversation with Rana Issa on her new book “The Modern Arabic Bible. Translation, Dissemination and Literary Impact”. Rana Issa works at the balancing point between public humanities, activist engagements, and academic curiosity.
By Elise Daniaud.
On February 6, the world started to witness some of the consequences of the tragic earthquake which hit the southeast of the Anatolian peninsula, close to the Syrian-Turkish border. Four weeks after the events, the death toll is estimated above 51.000. This article investigates the diplomatic action the Syrian government has taken since, in an attempt to secure its international recognition.
By Shamoon Zamir. Following the recently published collection of Yasser Alwan’s photography, the author shows and interprets a selection of Alwan’s work surrounding Cairo’s working class.