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A nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the Egytian novelGender studies in Arabic literature have become equated with women's writing, leaving aside the possibility of a radical rethinking of the Arabic literary canon and Arab cultural history. While the 'woman question' in the Arabic novel has received considerable attention, the 'male question' has gone largely unnoticed. Now, Hoda Elsadda bucks that trend.Foregrounding voices that have been marginalised alongside canonical works, she engages with new directions in the novel tradition.Sheds new light on key debates, including: >The project of nation-building in the modern periodThe process of inclusion and exclusion in canon formationThe geopolitics of definitions of national or cultural identity in the global worldThe conceptual discourses on gender and nationThe meaning of national identity in a global context

Seymour-Jorn delves into the works of five female Egyptian writers: Radwa Ashour, Salwa Bakr, Nimat al-Bihiri, Etidal Osman, and Ibtihal Salem. Drawing on a combination of interviews and chronicles of their literary work, the author analyzes a range of female emotional, intellectual, family, and professional experience.

Power in the Portrayalunveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period. Employing the methods of the new historical literary study in looking at a range of texts, Ross Brann reveals the paradoxical relations between the Andalusi Muslim and Jewish elites in an era when long periods of tolerance and respect were punctuated by outbreaks of tension and hostility. The examined Arabic texts reveal a fragmented perception of the Jew in eleventh-century al-Andalus. They depict seemingly contradictory figures at whose poles are an intelligent, skilled, and noble Jew deserving of homage and a vile, stupid, and fiendish enemy of God and Islam. For their part, the Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts display a deep-seated reluctance to portray Muslims in any light at all. Brann cogently demonstrates that these representations of Jews and Muslims--each of which is concerned with issues of sovereignty and the exercise of power--reflect the shifting, fluctuating, and ambivalent relations between elite members of two of the ethno-religious communities of al-Andalus. Brann's accessible prose is enriched by his splendid translations; the original texts are also included. This book is the first to study the construction of social meaning in Andalusi Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew literary texts and historical chronicles. The novel approach illuminates nuances of respect, disinterest, contempt, and hatred reflected in the relationship between Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain.

Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics introduces and makes available, for the first time in English, an incandescent corpus of experimental leftist writing from North Africa. Founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laâbi and a small group of avant-garde Moroccan poets and artists and banned in 1972, Souffles-Anfas was one of the most influential literary, cultural, and political reviews to emerge in postcolonial North Africa. An early forum for tricontinental postcolonial thought and writing, the journal published texts ranging from experimental poems, literary manifestos, and abstract art to political tracts, open letters, and interviews by contributors from the Maghreb, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The essays, poems, and artwork included in this anthology—by the likes of Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Memmi, Etel Adnan, Sembene Ousmane, René Depestre, and Mohamed Melehi—offer a unique window into the political and artistic imaginaries of writers and intellectuals from the Global South, and resonate with particular acuity in the wake of the Arab Spring. A critical introduction and section headnotes make this collection the perfect companion for courses in postcolonial theory, world literature, and poetry in translation.

One of the Arab world's greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day). Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage. Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity. Sinan Antoon’s foreword, written expressly for this edition, sets Darwish’s work in the context of changes in the Middle East in the past thirty years.

Women's Writing and Muslim Societies looks at the rise in works concerning Muslim societies by both western and Muslim women - from pioneering female travellers like Freya Stark and Edith Wharton in the early twentieth century, whose accounts of the Orient were usually playful and humorous, to the present day and such works as Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, which present a radically different view of Muslim Societies marked by fear, hostility and even disgust. The author, Sharif Gemie, also considers a new range of female Muslim writers whose works suggest a variety of other perspectives that speak of difficult journeys, the problems of integration, identity crises and the changing nature of Muslim cultures; in the process, this volume examines varied journeys across cultural, political and religious borders, discussing the problems faced by female travellers, the problems of trans-cultural romances and the difficulties of constructing dialogue between enemy camps.

This article presents a microhistory of an early 20th-century Tunisian intellectual, Salih Suwaysi, within the context of cross-regional (Maghrib–Mashriq) literary and intellectual trends. Analyzing Suwaysi's use of the conventional literary genre of maqāmāt illustrates his deep understanding of the problems caused by France's occupation of Tunisia and highlights the significance of historical and contemporary urban space for the author. Revitalized during the nahḍa period, maqāmāt were employed by writers to address issues and problems facing contemporary society, in contrast to some of the earlier maqāmāt that focused on language and language structure more than on narrative content. Suwaysi followed his eastern Mediterranean, especially Egyptian, contemporaries in turning to this genre to convey his critical commentaries on social, religious, and political life under the French Protectorate in Tunisia.

\"9 The primacy of poetry over other genres, including novels, newspaper articles, speeches, and plays stemmed from more than this connection to an ancient form of Arab expressive life.10 Poetry became the medium for conveying the new Palestinian political theme of sumud (persistence). Afer the \"earthquake of 1967,\" as Arab intellectuals commonly referred to it, the withering of Arab nationalism, socialism, and communism, and the reemergence of Islamic politics in the public sphere, poets turned to a form that would free them from their previous modes of poetic production.